Subject: RETROSPECTIVE: ALIEN 3 (1992)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 23 Jun 1997 15:10:50 GMT

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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