"You've been in my life so long." (Alien 3 (DVD))

Member Name: Jake Speed

Product:	Alien 3 (DVD)
Date:	28/10/09 (106 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not a lot

Disadvantages: No story, they kill off Hicks & Newt

Any list of great sequels would have to include the 1986 film Aliens, a rollercoaster follow up to the Ridley Scott classic with great characters and bravura direction by a young and inventive James Cameron. The only problem was that, somewhere along the line, if 20th Century Fox wanted to wring more money from the franchise (and of course they did) they had to come up with a way of topping it - or least making a film good enough to stand as a blood relative to the first two. The possibilities were endless. The aliens somehow end up on earth? A trip to the alien homeworld? However endless these possibilities were they passed the studio by completely. Instead we got a third Alien film with, quite literally, no story whatsoever. I think it's known in the trade as the Barbara Broccoli/Michael G Wilson school of filmmaking but I digress. In Alien 3, directed by a very young David Fincher, Ripley, along with Hicks and Newt from Cameron's Aliens, crashlands on a desolate prison planet occupied by an assorted group of murderers and rapists who have adopted a form of religious fundamentalism.

"We're 25 prisoners in this facility," says the warden, played by none other than Brian Glover. "All double-Y chromos. All thieves, rapists, murderers, child-molesters. All scum. Just because they have taken on religion doesn't make them any less dangerous." Hicks and Newt are killed in the crash but Ripley survives. Naturally though, an alien egg was aboard the escape pod and duly hatches and grows before proceeding to pick off an eccentrically cast collection of British thespians as the film wallows in monochrome grime and steadfastly refuses to give the audience anything resembling a good time or a coherent narrative.

Alien 3 had an infamously difficult development history - which is actually more interesting than the film itself - that obviously didn't help matters. A William Gibson script, which you can find on the Internet if you look and is quite good fun, featured Hicks and had the aliens as a sort of intergalactic weapon of mass destruction being fought over by rival powers. It was ultimately rejected, as were several other screenplays or treatments. New Zealand director Vincent Ward then came onboard the project for a while and came up with a bizarre story where Ripley would land on a wooden planet populated by monks or something. The end result of this revolving door of writers and directors was Alien 3 entering production with 27-year-old rookie David Fincher (later to disown the film) at the helm working from a screenplay hastily cobbled together from rejected drafts. Ward's religious angle was maintained but his striking designs were dumped.

One of the major problems with the film is the incomprehensible decision to kill off Hicks and Newt - Ripley's fellow survivors from Cameron's film - right at the start. The first time I watched Alien 3 I was so gobsmacked to see these characters so casually bumped off after all they'd been through in Aliens I actually rewound the film just to check I hadn't just imagined things. Honestly, was Michael Biehn really that expensive to hire again!? He's not exactly Tom Cruise on the sliding scale of bankable actors. Cameron himself called this move a slap in the face to fans of Aliens and the death of Newt - the little girl who virtually becomes Ripley's daughter by the end of Aliens - was an "obscenity" according to Alan Dean Foster. The problem is, as a stand alone film Alien 3 is a mildly interesting (if somewhat depressing) sci-fi/horror picture - but as a third entry in the Alien series it is an absolute disaster, effectively killing off what could have been a fascinating and enjoyable unfolding franchise. They really had nowhere to go after this one and it showed when the ho and indeed hum Alien Resurrection pitched up in cinemas several years later.

Alien 3 is actually not that badly directed. Fincher does a reasonable job with the alien chasing people down corridors and zooming POV camera shots and the first ten minutes of the film are very atmospheric indeed, leading one to anticipate a much better picture than we actually get. The film seems depressingly nihilistic and grimy though and much smaller in scope than its illustrious predecessors. It has little action, no jumps or great moments that you remember afterwards and consists largely of the mostly British cast sitting around debating what to do. The problem here is the lack of story or any real excitement. The film always seems vaguely thrown together and lacking in motivation. And after all the carnage of Aliens with its incredible third act which piles climax upon climax, Alien 3 always seems rather dull with just one solitary alien running around. I understand the desire not to retread and do something new (there are no guns in this film) but Alien 3 is surprisingly boring at times. The film is so unmitigatedly uncommercial you wonder at times who exactly it was even made for. An alternate version of Alien 3 was released years later on the 9-disc Alien Quadrilogy box-set in 2003 but I'm afraid I've never seen that version so can't say if its any better than this deeply disappointing original/official version of the film.

You rooted for the characters in Aliens and, to a slightly lesser extent, Alien, but here it's hard to care about the characters or even remember half of them. Brian Glover is slightly incongruously cast the prison warden Andrews, a one dimensional idiot of a character who naturally doesn't believe a word Ripley says. "Let me see if I have this correct, Lieutenant -it's an 8-foot creature of some kind with acid for blood, and it arrived on your spaceship. It kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant. And of course, you expect me accept all this on your word." Charles Dance as Clemens, an inmate and doctor, is developed as a vague love interest for Ripley for no purpose whatsoever and the nutty Golic, played by Paul McGann, is another character lost in an editing room somewhere. These characters are simply undeveloped and unlikable and their constant shouting and barking of expletives grows tiresome very quickly indeed. You wanted Hicks, Hudson, Newt, Dallas etc to survive in the previous films but in Alien 3 I just wanted the alien to wipe the lot out. Another problem is the fact that - explained by a nasty strain of lice on the planet - everybody has a shaven head so you find it hard at times to even tell people apart.

Ultimately, even the mighty Sigourney Weaver can't save Alien 3 from being a very disappointing third film in the alien series. My very rarely watched copy of Alien 3 has scene access, a theatrical trailer, and a making of documentary. You'd probably be better off with the Quadrilogy as it includes two classic films and another version of this. It can't be much worse.

Summary: Depressing sci-fi sequel