Subject: REVIEW: ALIEN 3

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1992 21:03:54 GMT

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                                  ALIEN 3
                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper
			Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper

          Capsule review:  Fury is a dreary, ugly prison colony
     planet, made up of "double-Y-chromosome" criminals who have
     rediscovered monastic life.  To this planet comes Ripley and
     her alien.  And Ripley's nightmare starts over.  ALIEN 3 will
     probably kill the series.  Director David Fincher's previous
     major credit is music videos for Madonna.  Rating: -1 (-4 to
     +4).

     In 1979 Ridley Scott directed ALIEN.  Scott had previously directed the
moody story THE DUELLISTS.  The inspiration for ALIEN was the weird
surrealist paintings of H. R. Giger.  The world Giger creates has the feel
of an alien culture, the feel of a mind incomprehensible to humans at work.
In 1986 James Cameron directed ALIENS.  Cameron had directed TERMINATOR.
His inspiration was apparently to show how a company of marines reacts when
faced with something like the alien threat of the first film.  While many of
the sequences are lifted from the previous film, Cameron brought complexity
to the character of Ripley and had a reasonably complex plot.  Now 20th
Century Fox has made ALIEN 3.  For a director they got David Fincher, who
has had a successful career directing music videos and television
commercials.  The inspiration appears to have been an empty slot at the
beginning of the 1992 summer release schedule.

     I thought the first film was the best of the series and the second film
was a step down.  It borrowed whole sequences and ideas from the first film.
Also it seemed to sidestep very lightly the moral issue of the earth people
stealing and transforming a planet already colonized by an intelligent alien
race.  It is genuinely surprising and more than a little disturbing how many
of the audience were rooting to see the aliens exterminated because they
were hostile to humans and not cute and dewy-eyed.  Unintentionally, ALIENS
was an intriguing test of whether the audience would still buy into
attitudes that had caused major foreign policy failures in the past.  (And
the answer was an undeniably "YES!"  Audience cheered ideas as blatant as,
"Let's withdraw and nuke 'em from orbit."  Perhaps what it showed was that
in the end we are just only to those we find appealing.)  There were many
who preferred the second film for its realistic treatment of marines in
space.

     The third film is easily the weakest of the three.  On one of the
ugliest planets ever portrayed in film, human criminals and an alien tear
away at each other in the cinematic equivalent of a pit bull fight.  The pit
is Fury 161, an evacuated lead mine and prison colony.  There the worst
outcasts of the galaxy have been isolated and have formed a sort of monastic
order living in the lead mining facilities.  They have no weapons and, to
make the place even uglier, they all have to shave their heads because the
planet is infested with lice.  On this delightful planet crashes Ellen
Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver), the future equivalent of Typhoid Mary.
When deaths start occurring on Fury 161, Ripley realizes what she has done
but--for reasons never explained--still refers to tell the inhabitants even
while people are being killed.  Most of the rest of the film is running and
screaming through the ugly lead mine.

     Fincher has filmed ALIEN 3 with a lot of superficial attempts at style.
The foundry seems like one big dark and ugly basement.  One or two scenes
with odd camera angles, shooting up or down on characters, would be welcome.
Fincher, perhaps used to short music videos, does not seem to know that
eventually this becomes very tiresome.  The plot takes a long time to
advance and in the first half is also short on action.  Without sympathy for
Ripley from previous films and some minor flashes of humanity from the
prison doctor, the film is without sympathetic characters at all.  The
screenplay is by three people with two different conjunctions: it is by
David Giller & Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson.

     This is a film that I can recommend only to people into the "Alien"
series as a series.  (And since this is a third director with a third
concept and a third style, this is much more loosely a series than it might
be.)  As a film it is no better than much of the low-budget productions that
show up only on cable.  I rate this one a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.

[Minor spoiler]


The way the alien is killed ranks with one of the most absurd sequences I
can think of in a major science fiction film, and is arguably inconsistent
with previous entries in the series.

					Mark R. Leeper
					att!mtgzy!leeper
					[email-masked]