Alien 3 (1992)

Tagline: The bitch is back.

Curiosity: It’s David Fincher’s first film! It’s the thrilling conclusion to the Alien trilogy (because Alien Resurrection doesn’t count)!

Plot: The survivors from Aliens crash land on a prison planet called Fiorina. Er’rybody dies except for Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Her escape pod is found and she is nursed back to health, if only physically. She seems a wee bit unstable since A) her friends just met awfully violent ends and B) she’s pretty sure the aliens (or xenomorphs, if you prefer) were behind. Got-damn aliens… Anyhoozle, it turns out her suspicions were correct, as an alien bursts out of a dog, resulting in something that’s a lot faster and angrier than anything Ripley has dealt with before. While she has a few potential allies, like the religious leader Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) and romantic interest Clemens (Charles Dance), Ripley feels she must work on her own to track down this menace and figure out who else might be infected.

Thoughts: I like Alien³ in theory. It’s pretty dark, especially after the hopeful ending of Aliens. I mean, Fincher kills a kid in one of the most awful ways possible, and then forces Ripley to perform an autopsy on her body to make sure she wasn’t impregnated with an alien. That’s messed up. The principle cast is decent. Weaver plays Ripley differently each film, this time making her into a nihilist whose sole goal is to finally wipe out the aliens, without much sense of self-preservation. When you factor in all the time she’s spent in hyper-sleep, for Ripley the events of Alien were only a few weeks ago, so I get why she’s cracking up here. Dutton gives Dillon a bit of a Malcolm X quality, providing a great deal of strength for and from the character. Dance is always welcome because he’s British and very, very dry. With one exception, the rest of the prison planet consists of white dudes who only get a few lines a-piece, so they feel interchangeable.

Alien³ started filming before the script was even finished (the sequel was originally pitched as a vehicle for Hicks and Bishop from Aliens), so I’m willing to go easy on Fincher, who obviously went on to better things. But man does this thing start to suck after a while. The tension goes right out of the movie after Newt’s autopsy, settling for scene after scene of the alien massacring characters I don’t really care about. Elliot Goldenthal’s over-the-top score attempts to highlight tension in scenes that lack it, which just makes me long for Jerry Goldsmith’s reserved score from Alien that much more. Alien is such a quiet, creepy, claustrophobic film. Alien³ gets stuck in Aliens’ “big dumb action movie” setting without enough firepower to ratchet up the excitement. The closing battle is especially dull and confusing – it amounts to a whole lot of running, yelling, and tunnels. My God, the tunnels.

Reflection: Somehow, my DVD copy of the film is the original theatrical cut, which features Bishop (Lance Hentriksen) before he was retconned for Alien vs. Predator, which makes it easier to ignore that series. Oh wait, this is a bad movie blog…