From: caruso@socrates.umd.edu (John Caruso)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.movies
Subject: What's wrong with Alien^3?
Date: 21 Aug 92 00:56:58 GMT
Article-I.D.: socrates.1992Aug21.005658.25530
Organization: University of Maryland University College


	Alien^3 was, quite simply, the worst film I've seen this year,
and possibly in several years.  When I came out of the theater I felt
like I needed to take a shower.  And I have reasons why I felt this way.

	First of all, Alien^3 was relentlessly mean-spirited.  When
we're told that Newt and Hicks have died in the crash, my first reaction
was surprise and disappointment.  But I thought about it for a few moments
and decided, ok, they want to take this film in a new direction, away
from Aliens; let Newt and Hicks go and see what happens.  Unfortunately
I was wrong...they wouldn't let them go.  Instead we were treated to
the scene of Newt lying dead on a slab, and Ripley probing for a growing
alien (ignore the illogic of thinking the embryonic alien could survive
in a dead host).  Probing wasn't enough, though--now Ripley demands an
autopsy, though it obviously would be sufficient just to cremate both
Newt and Hicks.  Why do an autopsy, then?  So you can show the audience
a little girl having her chest split open with a bone saw.  Because gore
sells and the audience will love it.  For the sake of accuracy, we don't
actually see Newt being sliced open...we just hear the crunch of the bone
and get to watch her blood trickle out into the pan.

	This same ethic informs the rest of the film as well.  We see
the inmate sweeping out the exhaust chute, and we see the giant fan
just past him, and it's easy to put two and two together.  But that's
never enough in this film; instead, after he's killed and takes the
painfully obvious slide into the fan, we're treated to the sight of
the scattered chunks of his flesh hanging from the chute.  Later there's
the dog.  No, it's not enough that it lies down and starts to whimper
and we know exactly what's going to happen; we get to watch the entire
sequence of the alien bursting through its ribcage.  It makes me wonder
how Fincher would have filmed the ending of Old Yeller.

	Ok, so Alien^3 was a gritty, brutal film that just showed life
like it is, and I'm a whining pantywaist who can't deal with Real Life
Movies.  What drivel!  This is the kind of nonsense spewed by people who
can only address an argument by attacking the person.  There are plenty
of films that use violence effectively and in different ways; take Witness,
Toxic Avenger, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as wildly varied
examples.  The violence in Alien^3 (with just a few exceptions) is unlike
that in any of these films--it's more in keeping with the spirit of Friday
the 13th, where the only reason for showing graphic deaths is to pull the
audience into the vicarious thrill of.  Alien^3 pretends to be an "art"
film, but the style of its violence reveals it for the exploitist crap
that it is.  Courage, sacrifice, loyalty, passion--things that were at
the heart of Aliens--are thrown aside in Alien^3, and not with any lofty
artistic intent.  It's just an ugly, sordid little film.

	Think of Ripley's near-rape (and her subsequent rescue), the
scene where Ripley questions Bishop, the "love" scene between Ripley
and the doctor, the "kill me!"/"fuck you!" scene with the inmate, and
on and on and on.

	But to even talk about Alien^3 in these terms is to give it far
more credit than it deserves; I've gone right past the complete incoherence
and rampant idiocy of the plot itself.  Ripley goes to find the alien so it
can end her life, but she's already fully aware--has had it graphically
demonstrated to her--that it won't kill her because she's a host.  We're
shown the doctor as an enigmatic character with some world-shattering
secret, but once it's revealed it seems almost trivial...and then after
he's had more character development than anyone else on the planet, he's
offed anyway, so it becomes a moot point.  The prisoners have evolved
their own religious system and a society based around it, so the movie
explores this, gives it dimension and meaning, right?  Maybe a good film
would.  In Alien^3, the whole religion angle was just that, an angle--
window dressing thrown on to make the film appear deep and intellectual.

	The dialogue was laughable.  It's a sad statement when the single
funniest line in a movie is "Fuck!".  There wasn't a single event in the
film that was surprising or suspenseful; in many cases, potential suspense
was destroyed because we were shown the danger immediately, and it became
just a matter of waiting for the hammer to drop.  The direction was painfully
obtrusive in so many scenes, like the "looking up at the doctor through the
cage of the elevator" or the "drifting down to the level of the prison
warden" scene (and so many others like them).  I won't even talk about
the one time interesting but relentlessly beaten-to-death "twirly alien
down the passage" scenes.  The final scene, with the Christ-like backwards
swan dive into the pool of flame, is so overbearingly pretentious it defies
belief--and again shows that this film takes itself very, very seriously.

	If Alien^3 had been only a laughably inept attempt at moviemaking
I would have just walked out of the theater, felt ripped off for a moment,
and then forgotten it.  But it wasn't.  Alien^3 wasn't content to be bad
on its own; it reached out and tainted the other films as well.  As people
have pointed out, the sacrifice and struggle in Aliens is made meaningless
by the events in Alien^3.  This is absolutely true.  You can't take Alien^3
in a vacuum; it's part of a continuum.  And as a conclusion to the Alien
story it falls far short, and leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

- John