ALIEN 3
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: The weakest and least engaging of the Alien movies, dragged down by an uninvolving story and no real tension.
ALIEN 3 (the "3" should be in superscript) is a sad and wan entry in what was shaping up as one of the best SF sagas ever put on screen. It continues the story of Ripley, the space-trucker-turned-impromptu-survivalist, but seems remarkably uninterested in her. In fact, the movie seems lucky to be interested in anything at all, it's so elegaic and limp. A little of this would have been nice for atmosphere, but the movie telegraphs its own tragedy from the beginning.
At the end of the last film (ALIENS), Ripley and two survivors were on their way home. Unfortunately, an alien pod had been deposited in their ship, and wound up triggering off their ejection in an escape pod. The pod crashes on Firorina 161, a prison planet designed to house the incurably criminally violent. Ripley lives through the crash; the others do not.
The prison is a grim place, even as prisons go -- it's been built around the remnants of an abandoned steelworks, which provides no end of techno-gothic backdrops for the actors to be backlit against. Lice are endemic, and so Ripley's head is shaved (another surreal touch). At first it looks like she just has to hold out as an unwelcome guest until a Company rescue ship can arrive, but it doesn't stay that way. One of the other eggs on board the wrecked escape pod hatches, and soon a newly-gestated alien is running amuck. Worse, it looks like Ripley herself has been impregnated.
What's weird is how little tension this generates, except near the end, when the pressure is being troweled on through every cheap cinematic form of cheating imaginable: loud music, shaky camerawork, etc. Sigourney Weaver has become comfortable with the role, and she does well with it, but this time the role has been underwritten and left slack. The supporting actors are also not given a lot to do: the doctor (Charles Dance) and another, rather religious inmate (Charles S. Dutton, very good), hiave presence, but they're not asked to do anything with it.
In light of the impending sequel, which apparently plays fast and loose with the ending of this movie, I will not talk about the ending -- except to say that they found a remarkably good ending for such a drab movie. It's strange that some of the desperate and improvisational thinking that they found to wind up this story couldn't have driven the rest of it.
One and a half out of four dog-bursters.
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