Very Bleak, Very Good

Rating: 8/10 (1 July 2002)

I have always been a huge fan of this series, and I, for one, love the diversity of the great directors that have marked each film in the series. This film has suffered great injustice at the hands of critics and the public, so much so it nearly drove a great director (Fincher) out of the business. Now, as often is the case, this film has been eternally compared to the previous film in the series, Aliens, directed by James Cameron. Why this film has taken so much heat is the "trained" moviegoer has been conditioned to "need" certain things from a film: the innocent vs. guilty, good vs. evil, clear rules of engagement, and the hero winning out in the end and returning to some "normal" or "great" life beyond the story of the film. Well, this movie delivers no of those. Only Ripley is truly innocent, good and evil are skewed, and there are no rules. The protagonists, the hero Ripley excluded, are derelicts and sociopaths with shaved heads. When you consider what Fincher created here, it is the complete antithesis of what you are "supposed" to want, and that's what makes it great. He creates a broken, reluctant hero down to her last gasp (yes, I know he didn't "create" Ellen Ripley but he had to make his own version of her for this film) against the most horrific of foes (fast, lethal, hideous, and kills for the sake of killing) in a dark, defective, claustrophobic environment (probably what space would really be like) with only a group of the worst humanity has to offer as her help.
The film begins with a cool sequence where the Alien is "reborn" as the heroes and survivors of Aliens (Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop) are in kryostasis. As they sleep, one of them, we are not sure who, is "impregnated" by the Alien as the ship begins to blow up. We are shown this sequence in flashes, as the scenes alternate between the movie and the credits against the backdrop of space all while a chilling opera soliloquy is played. I know many people hated the fact that Hicks, Newt, and Bishop are given the unceremonious boot, but what else would you do with them? They weren't Fincher's characters, the were Cameron's, and the only character Fincher needed was Ripley. The point of them dying is to show the last people (Newt especially) that Ripley cared about are now gone. She has nothing left. As soon as she befriends Clemons, guess what? It is a point. They ended is spectacular. For many, it ruined the movie. For me, I think it couldn't have been anymore heroic. Alien 3 definitely has a modernist feel to it, and some people can't handle that apparently. Ripley's speech to the convicts before the head out to lock horns with the alien is great and humorous in a dark way.
The part that summarized the mood and tone of the movie was classic modernist sequence was near the end when the furnace burns out, everything goes dark, we then get a shot of a sun rising over the planet's horizon to reveal a bleak, dead, wasteland of a world, and then we see the doors being sealed for the last time. We then hear Ripley's recording from the original Alien (where that came from I don't know, since it was recorded on a pod from the Nostromo and this pod was from the Sulaco) while a computer screen displays a paragraph with perhaps the bleakest statement to finish a movie.
Great performances from Sigourney Weaver and Charles Dance, while Charles S. Dutton was awesome as Dillon, the hard-core defacto leader of the convicts who realizes he is a monster, but acts as a hero nonetheless. Also, Eliot Goldenthal's score is dark and chilling, but excellent and perfectly matched.
This film is a dark, bleak, representation of how a film that breaks from the traditional conflict good vs. evil can be warped into something unique and really, truly make it work. It shows that sometimes victory doesn't always come in the ways we hope and that the hero doesn't always have to win or that the hero even CAN win. It couldn't be any more anti-Jim Cameron. Some great scenes, some great dialogue, an eerily cool environment and atmosphere, and a terrifically unique and powerful ending.