200 years after her death, Ellen Ripley is revived as a powerful human/Alien hybrid clone who must continue her war against the Aliens.
After the bombshell of “Alien³” a-lot of people were surprised to learn of another release being made, me included. With the film being set 200 years after the events of it’s predecessor it was intriguing to find out how the film would be and how it would play out, both would be interesting to say the least.
Originally, the film was to be an adaptation of the comic Aliens Vs. Predator, as we all know that wouldn’t happen till many years later but again we get to play my favourite game ‘what if?’, can you imagine if we’d have had Ripley in the middle of the Alien/Predator war? That would have been amazing. Another idea for the movie was for Newt (the child from Aliens) to be cloned, not Ripley, This was only changed when Sigourney Weaver agreed to reprise her role for a staggering fee of $11 million, incidentally the budget of the first “Alien” film.
Once again the film had problems behind the scenes, finding a Director would prove troublesome with many turning the job down. Danny Boyle was Fox’s first choice to direct but he turned it down for a different film, also David Cronenberg was an early choice but he also passed. The job eventually went to little known French film director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in my opinion it was a bad choice.
The job of writing the film was down to nerd God, Joss Whedon. Now this was long before he would direct and write “Avengers” but you can see early sparks of his now well known talent, unfortunately his script would end up being misunderstood and butchered. Whedon himself has been very vocal about how disappointed he was with the finished product: “It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong they could possibly do. That’s actually a fascinating lesson in film-making. Because everything they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from it. And people assume that if I hated it then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much they changed it, they executed it in such a ghastly fashion they rendered it un-watchable.”
The film isn’t as bad as Whedon states it is but it’s understandable how he felt about it, it does have the odd great scene such as the underwater scene which I’ve always loved and also the scene where the alien/human hybrid is revealed, that’s a scene we waited four films for. Unfortunately the problem here is the bad outweighs the good and that’s ultimately it’s downfall.
Unfortunately this film was a bad end to a franchise that had such a promising start, but ain’t that always the way. The films are what they are and if anything they are enjoyable and who doesn’t enjoy watching Ripley kick ass!
Miscellaneous facts about the film:
The character of Dr. Wren was originally written for Bill Murray, with the intent of reuniting him with Sigourney Weaver, his co-star from Ghostbusters.
The first draft of the script contained an action sequence that took place in a garden contained within the spaceship “Auriga,” with Ripley driving an electrically-powered jeep to avoid aliens attacking from all sides. This was to take place after the scene in the chapel but before the sequence where the Newborn is introduced. The sequence was cut due largely to budget constraints.
Nigel Phelps based the design of the spaceship “Betty” on a jackhammer. The “Auriga” was originally to be a vertical structure, but he abandoned this idea once he realized the difficulty of capturing the scope of such a ship design on film.
Sigourney Weaver made the behind-the-back half-court basketball shot successfully after two weeks of basketball practice, tutored by a basketball coach. Her conversion rate during that two weeks was about one shot in from every six. When the day came to shoot the scene, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to have the ball dropped in from above, rather than wait for Weaver to sink the shot herself, which “would probably take about 200 takes”. Weaver insisted that the she could get the shot in herself, which she was finally allowed to do. She sunk the shot on the very first take, even though she was six feet further past the three-point line. Ron Perlman was completely stunned (and thoroughly impressed), and turned directly at the camera and broke character, saying, “Oh my God!” The editors looked at the shot and decided that there was “enough room to get the scissors in”. Weaver was excited about making the shot, but Jeunet was concerned that audiences would believe the shot to be faked due to the ball leaving the frame. Upon Weaver’s insistence, he kept the shot as it was. Weaver described the miracle shot as “one of the best moments in her life”, after her wedding day and the birth of her daughter, of course.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first solo credit as a director.
The alien eggs were made to appear more vivid and pulsating at the request of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. After watching Alien, he thought the eggs were too static.
In the scene where Dominique Pinon appears out of an elevator, his line originally was “Who were you expecting? The Easter Bunny?” However, Pinon kept saying “Eastern Bunny”, to which his fellow actors would break out in laughter. The crew even started to print T-shirts with this line.
The opening shot of Ripley cloned, albeit as a young girl, was based on photographs that Sigourney Weaver had given the special effects crew of herself as a child.
Sigourney Weaver was paid $11 million to come back as Ripley, which was the entire budget of Alien (not adjusted for inflation).
Jean-Pierre Jeunet originally wanted to cast a woman as the main villain but the studio refused, seeing as the film already had two female leads.
Although it appears that the cast spend most of the time wandering up and down endless spaceship corridors, in reality there were only two built for the film.
As the film progresses, the walls of the ship’s corridors become darker and more ominous.
Milk had to be added to the underwater set as the water was simply too transparent to be convincing.
The underwater scenes took three weeks to film.
The Newborn was specifically given eyes to answer some of the criticism that had been made earlier about how the alien could actually see, as it had no apparent eyes.
The genitals of the Newborn had to be digitally removed.
The underwater segment was shot on a specially constructed sound stage on the Fox lot, which was converted into a permanent water-tank. It took nearly a week to fill it with water.
The actors were subjected to about 15 underwater training sessions in swimming pools around the Los Angeles area before arriving at the underwater set where they underwent a further 2 weeks of training before anything was shot. Sigourney Weaver missed most of this because she had been appearing in a play on Broadway just prior to filming.
Actor Ron Perlman nearly drowned while filming the underwater sequence. At one point, when trying to surface, he hit his head on a sprinkler in the ceiling, knocking him out cold. He was rescued by nearby film crew members.
Joss Whedon went through five different versions of the final battle with the “Newborn” creature, the first four versions of which all took place on Earth in such settings as a hospital maternity ward, a giant junkyard, a snowy forest and cliffside, and a desert.
The Auriga interactive computer is named “Father.” In the original Alien, the computer’s name was “Mother.” There are even compatible scenes where people yell at Mother or Father for not responding to them.
Writer Joss Whedon wrote Christie’s character with Yun-Fat Chow in mind. Yun-Fat’s manager and producer Terence Chang turned down the role for him.
In the theatrical release, H.R. Giger is not credited for his part in the design of the Aliens. The video release has his name in the closing credits.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to have a scene where a mosquito stings Ripley, then vanishes into smoke because of her acid blood. Eventually, he dropped the idea after the SFX team told him how much it would cost.
Winona Ryder agreed to do this film even before reading the script. She stated that she “didn’t care if she died in the first scene”, she’d do it. Ryder claimed that then she could boast about being in an “Alien” movie to her younger brothers.
When pre-production was underway, the original ‘Alien Queen’ could not be located and the molds that were used to build the original were damaged beyond usefulness. Fortunately, the original life-size puppet was located… in the personal collection of an avid Alien fan.
The studio wanted to cut the scene preceding Ripley’s encounter with the alien queen that can be interpreted as a love scene, but decided to keep it only after Sigourney Weaver told them she would not promote the film if the scene was cut.
Ripley’s outfit was going to be a different one than the dark red uniform she is wearing for the most of the film. After Sigourney Weaver saw Kim Flowers (Hillard) on the set, she wanted to wear the same costume. Hillard can be seen in the exact same outfit in the underwater scene.
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet spoke almost no English at the time of shooting and had translators on set at all times.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to shoot additional action scenes using a fully digital Newborn creature. He wanted Ripley to be chased by the Newborn in the escape from the Betty scene, but could not realize it due to budget constraints. In the final film, a full-size Newborn creature can be seen in only one scene and almost all of the scenes involving the creature are animatronic.
The $50-60 million budget was significantly lower than the director and writers originally imagined. Therefore, sets were toned down in scale and a more claustrophobic shooting approach with a lot of close-ups to characters’ faces was taken.
The part where the two aliens kill the third to get out of their cell, the intestines and guts and blood ‘melting’ through the floor was actually a platform descending with the intestines over top of it to give the impression of it melting through the floor.
H.R. Giger was openly displeased that he wasn’t given a credit for his alien designs and fired off a letter of protest to 20th Century Fox.
The ricocheting bullet that takes out a soldier standing behind Gary Dourdan was an unused idea from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children.
Sigourney Weaver signed on to the film largely because of one scene in particular – when Ripley 8 encounters her previous 7 aborted genetic incarnations.
To play Ripley 7, Sigourney Weaver stuck her head up through a hole in the floor so it could be seamlessly grafted onto the grotesque body that the make-up department had created for her.
For the luckless human victims which the renegades find, already having had the aliens burst out of their stomachs, the crew devised costumes which had stomach entrails stitched onto the outside. This was directly inspired by a T-shirt that was popular around the time of the release of Alien in which an alien fetus (and a lot of blood) was attached to the front.
Ron Perlman actually did his own stunt of hanging upside down off a ladder with his legs wrapped around the rung, firing two guns. The next day, when he took a shower, he discovered that he had severely lacerated the backs of his knees in doing so.
In her initial scenes with the Newborn, Sigourney Weaver makes a point of not looking in its eyes. This was a lesson learned from when she made Gorillas in the Mist in not making initial eye contact with a potentially dangerous animal.
Producer David Giler was initially opposed to the making of a fourth film.
In order to heighten contrasts, cinematographer Darius Khondji added silver to the printing process. This had the result of making the dark colours richer and giving everything else a metallic tinge. He also used an electric blue tint for the underwater sequence.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s long time partner, Marc Caro, with whom he had made Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, had no interest in taking part in the film. Caro did fly out to Los Angeles for several weeks to provide some costume and art direction designs.
This is the only Alien movie not to be shot in England. One of the reasons for this was that co-producer Sigourney Weaver didn’t want to travel.
The production had trouble finding enough studio space as major productions like Titanic, Starship Troopers and The Lost World: Jurassic Park were all taking up most of the available studio space in Hollywood.
The underwater sequence marked the first time that Winona Ryder had gone underwater since a near-drowning incident that happened to her when she was 12 years old. The actress suffered a complete anxiety attack on the first day of filming in the underwater set.
One of the concept designs of the Newborn involved the creature sporting a likeness of Sigourney Weaver’s face. This was abandoned as it bore too much of a similarity to Sil, the alien creature in Species.
The film’s model miniatures were shot at a former Howard Hughes aircraft plant in Los Angeles. Visual effects supervisor Erik Henry and visual effects director of photography Rick Fichter used an advanced motion control camera system that required constant vigilance and re-alignment as the area was prone to small earthquakes and tremors.
Director Pierre Jeunet was given license to change the script as much as he wanted, and the final film is substantially different than Joss Whedon’s original script. Characters and situations were merged, simplified or removed, and the overall tone was made more fanciful and less realistic. Things changed or removed include: An Asian assassin called St. Just (pronounced “San-Jhoost”) was original part of the Betty’s crew. Johner was described as being more of a crazy, psychopathic character. After the underwater sequence, the characters were then forced to climb up a 50 story lift-shaft, with aliens attacking them. After the Chapel scene, there was an action sequence in the ship’s “farm”, including a moment were the crew discovers the army has been growing cannabis. The Newborn alien was originally extremely deadly, the size of a Queen alien, and there was little emotional connection between it and Ripley. The final action sequence took place on Earth, ending with the surviving characters (including Ripley) deciding to stick together.
Paul W.S. Anderson was in talks to direct but was unable to take part due to scheduling conflicts. Anderson would still get his chance to direct an outer space opus the following year with Event Horizon. And of course he would visit the Alien franchise several years later with AVP: Alien vs. Predator.
The Newborns’ skull was made of plaster so that it could be sucked out of the window into space. Cast only at 1/8-1/4″ thick, it was scored into various pieces. Each piece was individually attached to a wire, so that when struck against the window and cracked, each fragment could be pulled out one by one.
The first draft of the script included a different climactic fight between Ripley, Call, and the Newborn. Originally, after the Betty crash-landed on Earth, Ripley and Call were to battle the Newborn on a snowy mountain, using a “Harvester”, a reaper-like farm machine which they had found during the garden chase sequence (which was also cut from the film due to budget limits).
To achieve the shot where the camera travels inside Leland Orser to see the alien fetus about to be birthed, Orser had a camera shoved down his throat and then pulled out. This was then reversed.
In the scene where Ripley discovers all of the other “failed” alien/hybrid clones of herself, she finds one still alive who begs Ripley to mercy-kill her, to which Ripley does so with a flame thrower. This idea was recycled from a deleted scene from Alien, where in the cut scene from that movie, Ripley finds Dallas and he asks her to mercy-kill him, which she does so with a flamethrower in a similar manner.
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