ALIEN 3
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Fury is a dreary, ugly prison colony planet, made up of "double-Y-chromosome" criminals who have rediscovered monastic life. To this planet comes Ripley and her alien. And Ripley's nightmare starts over. ALIEN 3 will probably kill the series. Director David Fincher's previous major credit is music videos for Madonna. Rating: -1 (-4 to +4).
In 1979 Ridley Scott directed ALIEN. Scott had previously directed the moody story THE DUELLISTS. The inspiration for ALIEN was the weird surrealist paintings of H. R. Giger. The world Giger creates has the feel of an alien culture, the feel of a mind incomprehensible to humans at work. In 1986 James Cameron directed ALIENS. Cameron had directed TERMINATOR. His inspiration was apparently to show how a company of marines reacts when faced with something like the alien threat of the first film. While many of the sequences are lifted from the previous film, Cameron brought complexity to the character of Ripley and had a reasonably complex plot. Now 20th Century Fox has made ALIEN 3. For a director they got David Fincher, who has had a successful career directing music videos and television commercials. The inspiration appears to have been an empty slot at the beginning of the 1992 summer release schedule.
I thought the first film was the best of the series and the second film was a step down. It borrowed whole sequences and ideas from the first film. Also it seemed to sidestep very lightly the moral issue of the earth people stealing and transforming a planet already colonized by an intelligent alien race. It is genuinely surprising and more than a little disturbing how many of the audience were rooting to see the aliens exterminated because they were hostile to humans and not cute and dewy-eyed. Unintentionally, ALIENS was an intriguing test of whether the audience would still buy into attitudes that had caused major foreign policy failures in the past. (And the answer was an undeniably "YES!" Audience cheered ideas as blatant as, "Let's withdraw and nuke 'em from orbit." Perhaps what it showed was that in the end we are just only to those we find appealing.) There were many who preferred the second film for its realistic treatment of marines in space.
The third film is easily the weakest of the three. On one of the ugliest planets ever portrayed in film, human criminals and an alien tear away at each other in the cinematic equivalent of a pit bull fight. The pit is Fury 161, an evacuated lead mine and prison colony. There the worst outcasts of the galaxy have been isolated and have formed a sort of monastic order living in the lead mining facilities. They have no weapons and, to make the place even uglier, they all have to shave their heads because the planet is infested with lice. On this delightful planet crashes Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver), the future equivalent of Typhoid Mary. When deaths start occurring on Fury 161, Ripley realizes what she has done but--for reasons never explained--still refers to tell the inhabitants even while people are being killed. Most of the rest of the film is running and screaming through the ugly lead mine.
Fincher has filmed ALIEN 3 with a lot of superficial attempts at style. The foundry seems like one big dark and ugly basement. One or two scenes with odd camera angles, shooting up or down on characters, would be welcome. Fincher, perhaps used to short music videos, does not seem to know that eventually this becomes very tiresome. The plot takes a long time to advance and in the first half is also short on action. Without sympathy for Ripley from previous films and some minor flashes of humanity from the prison doctor, the film is without sympathetic characters at all. The screenplay is by three people with two different conjunctions: it is by David Giller & Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson.
This is a film that I can recommend only to people into the "Alien" series as a series. (And since this is a third director with a third concept and a third style, this is much more loosely a series than it might be.) As a film it is no better than much of the low-budget productions that show up only on cable. I rate this one a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
[Minor spoiler]
The way the alien is killed ranks with one of the most absurd sequences I can think of in a major science fiction film, and is arguably inconsistent with previous entries in the series.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews