Planet of the British!

Rating: 5/10 (16 August 2005)

Ridely Scott's 'Alien' was an excellently constructed thriller. In the opening, a strong ensemble cast faced a vague sense of menace; over the course of the film, this gradually transformed into a fight to the death between just one of the characters (Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver) and the eponymous beast. The sequel, directed by James Cameron, was also good, but at heart a more conventional Hollywood blockbuster. For the third film, David Fincher was in the director's chair, and I'm a big fan of Fincher's later films, 'The Game' and 'Fight Club'. But 'Alien3' is not his greatest work.
Fincher keeps the murky, claustrophobic feel of the earlier films (a mood also apparent in his next film, 'Se7en'). In the original movie, the camera never dwelt on the alien, we only saw it in brief, terrifying glimpses. This was justified by the alien's exceptional speed of movement, but perhaps necessitated by limitations in what the special effects department could do, circa 1979. By 1992, technology had moved on, but Fincher stuck to the formula, and the fact that we never truly comprehend the exact nature of the monster adds to its capacity to scare us. But Fincher also added some broad comedy, a lot of gratuitous swearing, and, with his setting of a prison planet occupied almost entirely by British-accented convicts, a certain resemblance to a vulgarised 'Porridge'. Riply, meanwhile, has transformed into someone almost unimaginably macho; the prisoners are supposedly men with two Y chromosomes, but a desexualised Ripley appears to possess more testosterone than all of them together.
The real problem with the film, however, is principally that as the third movie in a franchise, there's not really anywhere new for it to go. The plot is presented to us with little in the way of underlying explanation, but it's basic contours are already defined. The fourth film in the series was called 'Alien Resurrection'; this one might have been called 'Alien Rehash'. It ends with an overlong action sequence devoid of variety (whereas in the first film, every kill was sudden and fresh). And the impact of the ending is muted when you know that in spite of the apparently terminal conclusion, another movie followed in a couple of years. The rest of Fincher's work is all original. But here he is just another hack director, forcing another life out of a great, but exhausted concept. Two films should really have been enough.