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| An accurate description of Alien 3 |
Blogger ate this post too, which makes me think that something in the formatting went fucked as I copied it in.
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Alien 3
(1992, dir. David Fincher)
Worth noting that, in what was probably the wrong move yet again, I watched the theatrical version, rather than the Assembly Cut. Guess I just kinda default to "director's cut is just a longer version of the movie with weaker scenes left in".
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Back to an orange nebula like in Alien, but with more distinct music this time.
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Leaving a facehugger on board makes this a direct continuation of the original outbreak from Alien, which I’m conceptually okay with… if this was the last movie. There was an incident, it escalated, and now it’s going to finish. I like that continuity, even if it doesn’t deliver on it later down the road.
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The facehugger bleeding itself to bore through the tube is way more intelligent than we’ve seen at any point thus far. They keep doing this, and it's slightly more annoying each time.
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Justice for Newt. She’s unceremoniously and rather grotesquely killed off, and I think that’s an enormous waste of a character with loads of potential for stories later on down the line. And I know there's always complications wrt child actors, but the benefit of dealing with space travel is that you can fuck around with time. If you need Newt to be older so she can be played by a different actress, all you need is an excuse for Ripley to stay in hypersleep while Newt is woken up.
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For the first time in this series, time has not been kind to these effects. The worse-looking shots in the last two films have acquired a goofy charm, but that charm isn’t as consistent here and it often just looks bad.
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It’s young Charles Dance! He’s like old Charles Dance except young.
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“It’s stencilled on the back of your shorts” is a good line, funny way of skipping introductions.
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This movie gives me the feeling that human interstellar civilization is straight-up dying. Fury 161 isn’t a particularly welcoming planet, but it’s still habitable enough to walk around outside with a jacket and ski goggles on, and yet it’s only got a colony of a couple dozen people there manufacturing lead barrels. That’s an outrageous cost with minimal return on investment, and that says to me that the society that started it is economically fucked.
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It’s weird to have this many people in an Alien movie, but not bad. I actually kind of like it. This is a good population density for it.
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With the quality of life we’ve seen in this setting so far, I’m pressing X to doubt that cholera isn’t rampant in the slums of human space. Definitely no way it was eradicated in the 1970s, even in an alternate history.
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Did we really need to carve up the corpse of an eight-year old? Like putting that on top of the drowning feels unusually cruel towards Newt, to the point of narrative spite. Not to mention that later in this movie we have a functioning ultrasound machine in the wreckage.
Though putting Newt in this particular environment is not something I think this movie could do well, so maybe she got lucky.
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Multiple inmates have glasses, this feels like a Theme. It’s also a very British colony, which feels odd in a way I can’t quite parse.
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There is some Gender to unpack here.
- Ripley is the only woman in a prison facility inhabited only by men.
- Many of those men are in the facility for violent crimes against women.
- Many of those men are also in a misogynist cult.
- There’s an attempted assault that’s fought off with jarringly-placed electric guitars on the soundtrack, presented primarily so Ripley beat the stuffing out of some guys.
- Clemens asks her if she’s married at one point.
- Ripley’s quick fuck with Clemens is the first time it’s been relevant for her, and the only display of consensual sex in the series so far.
- Ripley has a xenomorph queen gestating inside her, making her the effective mother of her own antithesis. and putting another lever of separation between her and anyone else on Fury 161.
The Aliens special edition (which, in a serious flaw with my method here, I didn’t watch) mentions that Ripley’s daughter Amanda died three years before the Nostromo’s shuttle was recovered, which lends Ripley’s relationship with Newt a hefty amount of regret and a desire to “do it right this time”; that doesn’t do any good from a story perspective if Newt is immediately killed off. A time jump of 10 or 15 years after the Sulaco returns to the Core would allow us to see how their relationship has developed from Ripley raising Newt on her own as a woman out of time.
You know, actually letting the character be a mother instead of just a symbol for one.
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I love how dismissive Clemens is of the cult as just one more copycat. They really do just tread the same water.
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Ripley’s being extremely cagey about the xenomorph despite it being an existential threat to the colony; there’s a certain amount of “she’d be written off as crazy” in play here, but again the movie doesn’t establish how much anyone knows about alien life in this setting. There’s nothing beyond a xenomorph’s growth rate and ability to quickly fill an environment to capacity that’s really anomalous here. But, to the series' credit so far, the xeno has only appeared in situations where all hands are lost and all evidence is destroyed. Unless Weyland-Yutani blabs or someone else finds the Jockey's ship, the info isn't getting out there.
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“It’s all right to say shit, it ain’t against God” - another one for the “lines that are way better than their movie would make you think” box.
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The scene with Bishop’s head is really, legitimately good. My favorite in the movie. It’s how these sorts of things should be handled: yeah, it’s the character you recognize, but time has passed and they’ve changed and there’s no going back. Serialized stories rarely do this despite being a format that makes it fairly easy to do.
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The Company already knows about the loss of Hadley’s Hope, thanks to “the network”, which I presume is a bunch of FTL communication relays
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Clemens is delivering his tragic backstory while the other guy is right there behind the curtain, which is odd considering how he’s been keeping it so secretive.
His history is another mark towards “total social collapse only avoided through forward momentum” - dude was called back into work at the hospital when he was already sleep deprived and visibly intoxicated, and then used as ablative armor when the inevitable malpractice suit happened. Which says to me that there are simultaneously very few doctors and they’re not particularly valuable to the system.
He then gets immediately ganked by the xeno, which I assume means that xenomorphs can detect revelations of tragic backstory and intentionally use them as a time to strike.
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I really like the Rumor Control meetings and how the warden always opens with “These are the facts”: it’s some personality for the community and the people in it, and that’s something that a lot of media just doesn’t include. What are the weird little things that this group of people do? What turns of phrase have caught on?
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I like that Ripley’s trying to use the methods that worked in the previous movies, but those methods are undermined by the resource limitations, the scale of the facility, and the extra failure points inherent in having more people involved. It’s a good way to vary up the threat without inventing ridiculous new abilities for the xeno out of nowhere.
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There are multiple introductions in this movie that feel very un-Alien: protracted death scenes, slow-motion shots, fades and wipes, a prominent soundtrack.
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I don’t understand why they suddenly have access to the Sulaco’s ultrasound suite now - this was the wreckage they pulled Ripley from, they’ve had the chunk on-site from the beginning. Why not use it on Newt instead of cutting her open? Did I miss something, did they actually explain this somewhere?
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Ripley says that the xeno’s “been in my life so long” and I think the script forgot that the events of Aliens happened just days ago for Ripley, and the events of Alien were on the scale of weeks to months. It's been in her life for less than a year.
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Crud? Crud? Really? That’s almost as inappropriate as the swelling music with inspiring speech.
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Hanzi on the walls. Well, probably technically kanji, given the setting. But they’re there. First time we’ve seen anything of the sort in the series.
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It feels kinda appropriate for the final xeno to be a de-escalation - we went from one to the hive and queen and then back to one. The premise has been stretched out far enough, it has to retract.
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Oh those 1992 CGI effects, they don’t look good. And they're re-used!
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Oh come the fuck on it survived getting dumped in the vat? Lead melts at 621.5 degrees! If fire hurts it, this definitely would. The sprinkler trick is fun, though, even as a repeat.
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Wild that Weyland-Yutani’s recovery team only has two dudes with SMGs for security despite knowing what these things do. And some questionable accents, though I suppose it was 1992 - no one in Hollywood had figured out that Japan was a real place back then.
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“Think of what we can learn from it” is such a daft cliche. Come on, writer, you can think of at least one concrete application for whatever you’re writing about.
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Ellen Ripley t-posing to her death while a gazillionaire does a dramatic “nooooooooo!” is the greatest death in cinema, I will not be taking questions at this time.
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It's not a good movie, but it's a bad movie in interesting ways. It's trying to do something new with what Aliens left behind, and while that's a contrivance it is about as good as you can get without going well into the weeds. It is, at the very least, attempting to say something. That something is barely coherent and ineffective, but the bar is on the floor.
The production for Alien 3 was notoriously tortured (so, so many fuckin' scripts), the blame for which I'll drop on Fox for meddling and Cameron for not leaving anything to build with. If you combined all the abandoned ideas into a gestalt and let it simmer, maybe you would have a good movie out of it. That wooden planet is really just a dyson tree and what I would give to have one of those in a blockbuster. I know some people swear up and down by the Gibson script but I gotta tell ya I barely remember that Hicks exists half the time and I could not tell you a single thing about him.
Anyway, this is the last of the movies I will have meaningful positive things to say about.
What was it, 5, 6 scripts?
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