Each
movie in the original Alien tetrad is
such a reflection of who made it. Ridley
Scott’s Alien is a visually-stunning,
claustrophobic horror movie. James Cameron’s
Aliens is an impressive action-hero
horror movie. Alien: Resurrection is a
Joss Whedon space-opera horror movie with Jean-Pierre Jeunet production
design. And Alien3? In the
hands of David Fincher, it’s an unrelentingly-dark, dystopian-feeling horror
movie (some spoilers for this movie as well as Aliens.)
After the
events of Aliens, a catastrophic
failure on Ripley’s ship leads to her crashing on a prison planet, killing
Hicks and Newt in the process.
Surrounded by murderers and rapists in a filthy, dimly-lit, lice-infested
facility, Ripley fears that all that is the least of her problems; she’s
convinced that an alien somehow got onboard the ship and made planetfall with
her. It isn’t long before her fears
prove well-founded, and with the Company fast-approaching, hungry to bag their
prize at last, the only hope for humanity is for Ripley to get the prisoners to
band together and help her destroy the alien before the Company gets their
hands on it.
Okay, so
it’s not all bad. The prison creates an
eerie, gritty backdrop for our story, and some of the individual prisoners are
interesting. Pride of place,
unsurprisingly, goes to Ripley’s early ally Clemens (played by Charles Dance,
a.k.a. Tywin Lannister,) but I also like Charles S. Dutton’s morally-fluid
Dillon and former Doctor Paul McGann’s troubled Golic. Sigourney Weaver knocks it clean out of the
park with Ripley, who’s been battered and beaten almost to oblivion but sure as
hell isn’t going down without a fight.
But it’s
just so dark. I know it’s an Alien movie and everything, but let’s be real. The film almost seems to take a perverse
pleasure in stripping every good thing from Ripley’s life. Granted, Aliens
begins with Ripley waking up to learn that a malfunction kept her in cryosleep
half a century too long and her daughter died of old age waiting for her
return, and the film then proceeds to lay waste to nearly every character in
the movie with extreme prejudice, but even though victory there is very hard-won, there are shreds of hope,
too. There’s Hicks and Newt, and while
neither was them was ever going to have an easy time of it in another Alien movie, to kill them in the
prologue seems unnecessarily cruel.
Bishop, too, proves to be hopelessly beyond repair, and after Ripley
briefly gets him working in her quest to find out what went wrong on the ship,
he begs her to deactivate him. Even
Clemens, who’s positioned as the one possible bit of softness in the harsh
place where Ripley now finds herself, is killed in front of her before the big
action even really kicks off.
Just loss
piling on loss, building up to the scene in which Ripley realizes the most
horrible truth of all. I like a good
emotional gutpunch in my cinema as much as anyone, but this is just too
much. It’s a glut of darkness, emotional
torture porn under the guise of being “hard-hitting.” Ripley may have been through a lot – too much
to expect any one person to actually withstand – but this takes it way too far. You don’t do Ripley like that.
Warnings
Graphic violence,
sexual content (including attempted rape,) and language.
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