Just the Ticket #141: Alien 3

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

This review connects back (as all of my Alien April reviews have so far) to my 65 review, where I made reference to Hicks and Newt dying between films. Which pissed off a lot of fans at the time, and still does, considering how integral they were to Ripley's character growth and psychology in Aliens. Michael Biehn even fought to get paid the same for his "this character died from this cause between films and here is their blurry, pixelated photo" cameo in Alien 3 as he did for his entire active role in Aliens.

To ensure that Just the Ticket isn't killed off between films, reduced to a cameo, or underpaid, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, send a beacon to the comments section at the bottom of this post because it's the only way to be sure my site doesn't get nuked from orbit, help out my ad revenue as you read to keep The Company happy, and use the air ducts to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can like what you see and receive the freshest Xenomorph eggs of news on my chest-busting content.

When I saw it for the first time when I was younger, I didn't make the continuity connection with Aliens. I didn't even remember Newt and Hicks being important. So to my young, ignorant brain at the time, Alien 3 was good.

1992's Alien 3 was David Fincher's directorial debut, three years before his breakout effort with Se7en, and like a more palatable McG or Michael Bay, his music video directing sensibilities (including some angles, close-ups, and pans that would define his later crime thriller work, good use of before-it-was-overdone slow motion, and a third-act tunnel chase with frantic camera spins and a first-person perspective that won an MTV Movie Award even though a Xenomorph can clearly outrun a human under all circumstances) are on display here. Stylistically, it's a fun film to look at that mostly feels like it fits into the series' established Universe, having a similar, wet, industrial atmosphere to Aliens, but returning to the contrasting color thematics of Alien (this time, using warm vs. cool cinematography instead of the original's black vs. white set design).

But as substance goes, Alien 3 is the empty, unimpressive result of nearly a decade of squashed ambition, studio and production interference, cast and crew disinterest, conflicting ideas, expired messaging, and near-scriptless execution that have been better explored and detailed by multiple others in this critical and editorial space. I am aware of the "Assembly Cut" of the film, but unlike with Bunnyman's alternative cut, I lack the time and level of fandom interest or curiosity to do a comparative analysis here. So, the theatrical cut it is....

Sigourney Weaver reluctantly returns as Ellen Ripley, sole survivor of the Nostromo and the Colonial Marine vessel Sulaco. With her pod from the latter having crashed on a foundry/prison/monastery called Fiorina "Fury" 161 as the result of an electrical fire, Ripley must contend with the loss of her love interest and surrogate daughter in the crash, ensure that there is no further Xenomorph infection (which she does by seducing the colony's doctor and lying to everyone about what the threat actually is until it's too late because a movie needs to happen), and contend with the...personalities...of the male colonists.

Speaking on them for a bit, Fury 161 is a metalworking facility populated and run exclusively by "double-y chromosome" male convicts who found religion (what that religion is was decided randomly by dice roll, a blender, and the unfinished script's three-plus writers during a drunken game of Twister, and I have no idea how many of those deciding factors I'm joking about).

I looked up the "double-y chromosome" thing, and it's most likely referring to an XYY configuration, as just being YY would not provide enough genetic information to create a viable organism. In Alien 3, being XYY apparently makes men extra-male to the point that being within breathing distance of the opposite sex turns them criminally and/or sexually violent.

For obvious public viewing reasons, this is made a case of "tell, don't show," as several of the entirely bald, mostly white and British characters (and Charles S. Dutton) state that they are sexually repressed and were imprisoned on Fury 161 for committing violent sexual and/or otherwise physical crimes against women, up to and including murder. There is a single scene wherein Ripley is jumped by a group of prisoners and rescued by Dutton's character, who beats them to death offscreen, but mostly, they just come off as assholes whose defining character traits (aside from monastic baldness and British accents) could have been anything else and made more sense in a better movie.

The doctor she sleeps with (to keep him from asking her about the serious threat that she has been fighting for two movies by this point because the smart person in a franchise needs to make stupid mistakes eventually) fails as both a prisoner character (because his "big secret" that is built up as blackmail fodder by the warden is just an over-hyped case of drug use and medical malpractice in comparison to the literal rapists and murderers he lives and works with every day) and as a replacement love interest compared to Hicks (the doctor, played by Charles Dance, sleeps with her once offscreen, and is killed early in the runtime by the film's single alien).

Speaking of the alien (which can be referred to as the Doggomorph or Oxenmorph, depending on which cut you watch, because the biological size accuracy of a fictional species' gestational form is something people get mad about), after going from one Xenomorph in the original to "plural, but one is big now" in the sequel, the problem becomes, "the franchise is already set in space and people with money didn't like the 'Alien On Earth' scripts, and we don't have the technology to go plural-er and bigger, so let's go un-plural and less big, but it grew inside an animal this time." I guess the threat level has kind of a Tremors 4 feel to it, like, growing differently makes it physically different, and the lack of weapons and working technology (because Fury 161 is a forgotten prison colony run by inmates) kind of takes things back to the spur-of-the-moment ingenuity tactics of old. But when it comes down to it, we're just watching Ripley (who, spoilers, was impregnated by a Queen Facehugger because Sigourney Weaver wouldn't do this movie unless Ripley died, and we'll see how long that lasted next week), Charles Dutton, and a bunch of diluted clones of Nux from Mad Max: Fury Road try in vain to not get killed by the Doggomorph (which is mostly slightly-better-than-modern-SyFy CGI, as compared to the fully practical creatures from the first two entries) until Weyland-Yutani sends the Resident Evil sequel teaser to "rescue" them.

In the end, a mixture of hot lead and Flashdance turns the Doggomorph into an underwhelming explosion of particles, and Lance Henriksen (credited as Bishop II, so maybe another android?) shows up with the "rescue" team to convince Ripley to come with them so Weyland-Yutani can allegedly safely remove the Queen embryo without killing her. But Ripley does a Judgment Day Jesus dive into the opening credits of Spawn, clutching the blurry, slow-motion Queenburster puppet like a disturbing baby as they both burn to death in molten metal. We hear one last instance of Ripley's closing line from Alien as a pan through the wreckage of the Sulaco's escape pod takes us into the credits.

The story behind Alien 3's hellish development is perhaps more interesting and bias-inducing (among the other human reactions it induces) than the movie itself, which is just a less coherent, less thought-provoking amalgamation of the first two films that treats commitment like Ripley treats the Xenomorph species: as a terrifying threat to its own viability that needs to be ejected into the suffocating, frigid pseudo-vacuum of space and so incinerated that the absence of proof that it existed is guaranteed to incite madness and stupidity among those who are told otherwise.

By no means good, but by no means worth the amount of hatred it gets, the best way I can sum up Alien 3 as a finished product is "maddeningly okay."

C-

Whether you find my opinions to be okay, maddeningly okay, or just maddening (but hopefully much better than that), please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, send a beacon to the comments section at the bottom of this post because it's the only way to be sure my site doesn't get nuked from orbit, help out my ad revenue as you read to keep The Company happy, and use the air ducts to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can like what you see and receive the freshest Xenomorph eggs of news on my chest-busting content.

Next week, the Quadrilogy comes to a close, so Stay Tuned and

Ticketmaster,

Bursting Out.