Kill me! Please!

Rating: 5/10 (27 June 2002)

David Fincher has populated his movie with a metric ton of completely unsympathetic characters. The alien spends most of its time chasing random, interchangeable bald convicts to their doom. (They even *look* the same!) Anyone who begins to show some sort of character development (the doctor and the dastardly warden come to mind) are slain immediately. Only Charles S. Dutton gets any mileage out of his character, and manages to pull off the single act of heroism in the entire film.
As for our returning heroes: Hicks dies off-screen. Newt appears just long enough to undergo a chest-cracking autopsy. Bishop is reactivated long enough to lament that he is no longer "top of the line" and ask to be switched off again. Ripley herself spends half the movie bemoaning her fate ("We're f*cked!") and trying to convince a convicted rapist/murderer to kill her and put her out of her misery. Clearly, these don't even resemble the scrappy, resourceful characters we've come to admire. No one seems particularly interested in overcoming their situation; I have to ask why should we care, either?
What does it all add up to? There is not a single moment of suspense in this entire movie. I really didn't care whether the alien hunted down all those generic convicted felons. I didn't even really care if it hunted down Ripley, since she is clearly set up as doomed from the beginning. This is grim stuff, but not in any interesting way.