Interesting ... you seem to dislike Terminator 2 compared to Terminator. And I totally agree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say The Terminator is James Cameron's only endearing quality as a filmmaker. From here on his movies are formulaic shite designed to appeal to the greatest common denominator in order to make coin. Terminator 2 was a family movie compared to 1.
I loved Aliens as a kid. Quoted it like a mofo for freakin years. Still do in fact. The mech warrior v queen at the end ... awesome. Its a movie jam packed with awesome things. But its not an awesome movie. Its just marginally-better-than-current-form James Cameron. And that kid ... damn! Almost as annoying as teen John Connor.
Alien 3 went back to the core of the first film: one creature terrifying the shit out of people and everyone dies. An absolute clusterfuck behind the scenes apparently with David Fincher disowning it never to return, but you get a glimpse of what he was aiming for. It ain't great, but it ain't shit.
I look at where each director went from here and it almost reflects these two films. One went all gung-ho god-bless america we're awesome and I can re-hash any old story and it sells. The other stayed (mostly) dark, depressing, everything's going to shit. Guess I like those films more. I have a happy life goddammit ... can't have that shit creeping into my cinema.
I expect I'll convince exactly zero people with that.
A couple of reasonable points there so I'll lay off pronouncing any fatwa's just yet but you can't compare Newt to John Connor. Yes when she does have to do any acting other than screaming, it's pretty amateurish but John Connor was like the fucking template for Justin Bieber.
David Fincher's original vision for Alien 3 would have made for a great horror movie if it didn't fall after Aliens. Once James Cameron had shown that your average alien is no match for any wisecracking soldier with a shotgun (much less one of them pulse rifles or those crazy arse machine guns Vasquez and Drake carried), the fear factor of just one alien dropped to negligible. Put them in an overwhelming swarm however and it's shit your pants time. They stepped up to the same primal level of fear that people have about angry mobs and the like.
Also fuck killing off Hicks without giving him even a scene.
I'll admit Fincher's setting was great if it were in a movie independant of the 'Alien' storyline, the cinematography was great but the script was fucking awful and the special effects were a total let down. the running-dog alien was kinda cool when I first watched it on a copied VHS tape but as soon as i saw it on DVD and saw how out of place it looked compared to the rest of the scenery, it just completely ruined it for me.
As for T2. I don't dislike it. It was an awesome film, especially when I was 13! Linda Hamilton was definitely a lot hotter in angry MILF mode than she was with her daft 80's hair in Terminator and Guns'N'Roses' 'You Could Be Mine' turned out to be the soundtrack of my summer holidays that year. It's still no Terminator though.
