Being Emotional About Characters, Massive Issue It Is

Excellent topic!

I cannot find the name, but I would say the scared chestburster victim in AR: PURVIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxDfECfLlF8

u mean Purvis?

Daniels. :)

dude in the pic, he was a cool cat n sacrificed himself for mankind. cant wait to see daniels die

ali81 Indeed. Purvis. Thank you.

SCORPIOSTAR - Hicks! :)

Hudson and Kane......gone too soon..thanks for the memories

I'll hug who I think the best acting job in Alien Franchise is Charles Dutton in A3. He just bent that role to epicness with tone and emotion. Kudos to David Fincher for giving religion a respectful treatment, imo.

Capt Torgo A bit OT, but I have noticed little by little over time, nods are being given to Alien 3 around here. Nice!

Clemens. Sad end to a sad life :(

What about this little fella ^  :(

IRaptus That was horrible- it even sounded like it was screaming "Ripley!"

I'll tell you who I wouldn't choose. Bishop. You know why? Because Bishop is just fine, Alien 3 never happened and I refuse to believe otherwise.

However, if I were present following Bishop's tortured reactivation in Alien 3, I would not have said goodbye to him. I would have tried to help him regain his will to live.

Ripley's matter-of-fact, unsympathetic reaction to his plight made it impossible for me to feel anything more then a sense of karmic satisfaction, when she threw herself into the incinerator as Bishop's likeness looked on.

Bishop deserved to, AT LEAST ONCE IN HIS LIFE, have someone acknowledge his worth. He didn't deserve to be perpetually treated like a glorified toaster and then eventually come to accept the idea himself. In Aliens he'd had a sense of self preservation (to which no one else was sympathetic).

In Alien 3 he'd been catastrophically injured and his efforts to protect his human companions had been plenarily thwarted. Understandably he was in immense physical and psychological pain. But, his failure wasn't his fault and his pain could have been temporary. He could have been made useful and happy again. Regardless of not being top-of-the-line. 

You can't rather be nothing. If you're nothing you don't know you're nothing. There's no satisfaction or relief in being nothing. There is no experience of being nothing.

And Bishop was a great something.

Actually...he still is a great something. I refused to believe otherwise. BISHOP IS JUST FINE!

dk,  Lawrence of Arabia and I decided it was whispering to Starlogger" in another thread XD

ref: Best Xeno Death in the franchise

Well Elizabeth Shaw of course. We invested one entire movie on her and her search for answers, plus 5 long years of theorizing.

joylitt

I double you on that but I find even more insulting is the fact that I can't find the reason why she had to die. Because you had to mutilate her corpse to make it like a Giger painting? Or you didn't know what to do with the character? Lack of imagination is never something to admire. 

David. He has to go, although he will be sorely missed.

red0guy@gmail.com Shaw had to die because there was no way she could get the answers to her questions, same for Peter Weyland. She was not even a religious person, well not more than Oram was, if she was looking for the engineers to get the answers. She was totally confused and a big fan of ancient aliens theories. Not a viable character in my opinion.

No one, they all deserve to die. 

Maybe I will hug David before he head got chop off.

daliens

Weyland was demanding immortality, while Shaw was asking a morality question, how are these similar? She was confused how so?

And in the Alien universe there ancient alien realities not theories ... so sorry this solution it's just lack of creativity. 

red0guy@gmail.com Shaw, as Peter Weyland believed the engineers created us. If she was a Christian  (I presume because of the cross she carried with her) she was a messed up Christian. Did she believe Jesus Christ was an engineer?  That's even more messed up faith. Did she ask that last surviving engineer why did they want to destroy Earth? Really? Did you really expect an answer? Did Weyland expect to find immortality? 

What would you like to see of Shaw? What more could she have done? Trying to talk with another kind engineer? I doubt she could find one.

The ancient aliens theories are funny and entertaining (talking about the tv shows and von Daniken) but they have not proved anything yet. Just theories about other wordly beings. A new high tech religion.

IRAPTUS - Oh, gosh! I would certainly hug the Newborn and tell him it is going to be alright - provided he was not interested in tearing me to little bits. :)

The big chap before he got blasted out into space in Alien! :-) poor fella 

daliens

Do you realize that in 2000 that were more christianities (as in dogma evolved and many "heresy" arose)? I think that the cross is a stand in for faith in general, as in the believe that there is a higher power thus an objective meaning to the universe, view inherited from her father. So the ask those questions from a "alien" (in this case ancient humans) about how they see themselves in the vastness of space, living there for millennia is pretty reasonable. If they create were they also created? if they go for a hierarchy of flawed creation and time itself has a start then who was the first creator? The JC connection is pure bogus.

Of course there is also the problem of engineer's sacrifice. Why do they do it? The whole business indicates that have some sort or morality and the simple answer that they create life because they can is simple a cop out.

So yeah, it think Shaw could have found out some "stuff" and could have been a more interesting juxtaposition to David's pure logic.

And before Covenant, you must realize David was just a simple unit of the David 8 series (see the Prometheus novelization thread) coming online in 2089, not the first android built by Weyland ever. That was ret-conned in Covenant, as was Weyland's search for his creators, original his was just a megalomaniac who saw himself as a god because he creates AI and gods don't die. And the Satan stuff also happened.

Sorry for me this remains all crass lack of creativity and cynicism taken to extreme from which no good will emerge.

I guess Shaw lived only to fix David and the engineers were only a side dish. But that is my guess, you don't have to agree. 

To all those asking why Shaw had to die...

It's because it's HORROR! We're supposed to have a love/hate relationship with it. We're supposed to be HORRIFIED. It's supposed to be f***ed up.

If Walter dies in Awakening, I'm going to be horrified. HORRIFIED! But...I'll probably still go to the theater to see it four more times.

Horror isn't supposed to be a happy, everyone-gets-their-questions-answered kind of genre.

It's supposed to be a life-is-f***ed-up-and-then-everyone-dies-unceremoniously sort of genre.

I'll tell you, Alien 3 f***s me up, badly. It's just so gosh damn...UNFAIR! It's the exact sort of thing I'd write, lol.

That is the purpose of art. To elicit emotion. I both admire and despise Alien 3, passionately and in equal portions. It has definitely occupied more time in my mind than any other Alien movie, as Covenant undoubtedly will for you all, because a beloved character dies.

But you all probably know this already. To acknowledge it breaks the fourth wall and ruins the illusory escape art builds for us. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

(...I'll watch Alien 3 whenever I'm in the mood to be very deeply disturbed. Which does happen on occasion :)

Guys, awesome!

Purvis, Clemens, The Thing (whatever "he" was), Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) and, yes, Daniels, Hicks, Shaw, Janek (my favorite hugging pal), Hudson, Kane...

We cared so much about them, we sympathized with them, somehow. And they had to go.

Then, there comes @VivisectedEngineer - and I'll stick to it - "

To all those asking why Shaw had to die...

It's because it's HORROR! We're supposed to have a love/hate relationship with it. We're supposed to be HORRIFIED. It's supposed to be f***ed up."

And, then, just before I go back to "Apocalypse Now" and the famous Cel Kurts' saying: "The horror, the horror", I think...

"We need this horrifying mourning. Otherwise, we would be watching 'The Love Boat' or the kind."

VivisectedEngineer

Give me a break. I watched in the last week all the 4 original Alien movies. 3 was not that shocking. Newt and Hicks died painlessly in their sleep while Ripley had a heroes that. That was no where near as killing a main by having them vivisected (as is the case in the novelization) after doing the humane thing.  And we know better, it was more about the money...

From when horror life-is-f***ed-up-and-then-everyone-dies-unceremoniously genre. Maybe cheap millennial shit like Saw or Hostel or some zombie crap. Can't have something more original something more insightful? Only visceral crap for our lizard brain?

The only thing that this movie (AC) made me feel was disgust which I would have rather avoid. So yeah, don't count me in for another one.

Lol, ok red0guy@gmail.com , you're entitled to your opinion. Aliens 3 was shocking to me. Although, I really couldn't care less about Hicks, Newt or Ripley. They were not particularly sympathetic or compelling characters to me.

It's Bishop's gruesome demise that grips me.

I liked Shaw's death. Shaw was a complex and sympathetic character so I like that she was denied the answers she sought and that she was used as a tool to implement horrors she would never have condoned. 

To me that's chilling and that's what I like to see in a horror movie. 

VivisectedEngineer

It seems that I would fail a reverse Voigt-Kampff test.

@red0guy@gmail.com

"It seems that I would fail a reverse Voigt-Kampff test."

Well, I guess that's because you're a human being...and I'm a robot.

[My husband has speculated that David probably said this (a reversal of what Shaw said to him at the end of Prometheus) to Shaw while he was medically torturing her. :) ]