Alien3 (1992, R)

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.