After the Gothic steel
intestines of the Nostromo's inescapable corridors, to the tough-talking marines
of LV426's outwitted heroes, Alien³ finally makes its contribution
to the realms of Wayland Yutani.
From a personal
perspective, great bouts of time passed between my viewing of Alien³ and its preceding features. I watched the first two as a six-year-old kid, awed and inspired by the hellish imagery of wonder which it imprinted into one's imagination. My parents – however liberal
their generosity may have been for allowing me to watch the first two
18-rated features – were far from keen in granting me visual access to part three at such a delicate age. After many weeks of pleading for more Ellen Ripley, I
was forced to admit defeat as my parents took the video recording of Alien³ and made it a new member of that week's bin
collection.
By the time I finally
did get a chance to watch part trois – after a fellow school friend
thoughtfully brought a copy round for a Haribo fuelled sleepover – I was the ripe old age of 12. For me, over half a decade had passed since Aliens, and in that time, one had
managed to conjure up a whole army of ideas and expectations.
Furthermore, my parents' reluctance to let me watch this one made the desire to watch all the more enticing. What could have been so wrong with this
film which led my parents to such a frustrating decision? How violent could it possibly be? Was it
scarier than a cupboard full of spiders? Would it challenge my infantile mind far too rigorously? Why had my eyes
been out-of-bounds from this story for so god damn long? The enigma of Alien³ was far too intense for me to wait until my 18th Birthday, I had to see it
now!
And then, to my great misfortune, I saw it...
Narratively, the whole thing is what could possibly be described as a gallon of spilt manure. To say the plot was all over the shop would be something of an outrageous understatement. The film trampolines from one sub-plot to another, randomly telling a particular
type of story at one minute, only to saunter off the next and tell a totally different one all together.
The first chunk of the
film largely centres its attention around Ripley as she comes to terms with the
catastrophic events which transpired during the pre-credit titles, in her own unique manner (seriously, it's an utterly dismal opening; in the sense that it
grabs the “happily-ever-after” ending of Aliens by the balls and
takes a great big metaphorical dump all over its jolly face). The
story's protagonist – Ellen Ripley – has crash landed on a
colonised prison planet named Fiorina 'Fury' 161. During their
trip home, the LV426 survivors find themselves in a situation in which their ship has been
compromised by two alien eggs which have wound up on board (the poor
exposition of the opening scene makes their on-board arrival a rather
ambiguous affair, however common sense dictates that the Queen Alien
stowaway from the previous film was responsible for laying these
troublesome little tinkers prior to her fate in the Suloco's airlock). As the eggs hatch and the facehuggers
get busy doing what they do (whilst the crew snooze in cryosleep), an electrical fire is triggered; forcing
the ship to jettison its remaining members into the stars and
(hopefully) to safety. The escape vessel crashes and Ripley awakens to
discover that she's the only survivor. Moreover, she's also wound up
on an all male prison planet. Good lord.
Gradually, the plot
moves forward and Ripley spends much of the first act mourning over
her dead acquaintances.
These early scenes, as
a matter of fact, are where the plot of Alien³ works reasonably well.
First and foremost, Ripley's reactions regarding the discovery of her
dead crew are nicely executed. Instead of expressing denial toward the deaths of Newt
and Hicks, Ripley turns instead to paranoia. She refuses to accept
that a technical fault is the cause of her present predicament. She
will not rest until she's able to rule out (or maybe prove?) the possibility of
Xenomorph involvement. That paranoia remains locked inside Ripley's
mind until she goes as far as instructing the prison doctor to open up
the chest of Newt; her young-companion from Aliens. Finally, after
much convincing, she chooses to accept the evidence before her eyes and
cremates the bodies of her former friends.
The cremation scene may
well have be one more way of Ripley making extra sure that no skulduggery
is at bay, however the climax to act one works nicely as a symbolic
juxtaposition between a paranoid action and letting go of loved ones. Ripley's insistence that an alien on bored reflects that
of a person who's refusing to accept either the death of a loved one
or a terminal illness of their own. The final moments of act one,
where the bodies are finally sent to the ground (well..furnace)
are the moments where Ripley finally lets go, accepting that the
'facts' which she has been told are the ones which rein true to
reality (which, of course, they don't).
Whilst the cremation
scene begins by providing closure to the paranoia/denial
juxtaposition, it then decides to suddenly go and pull the rug from
under our feet by providing a secondary juxtaposition, in which it
reveals that Ripley's suspicions were in fact correct all along. As
the corpses of Newt and Hicks descend into the jaws of the prison's
furnace, the camera cuts to one of the inmate's dog, who thrashes
around in agony whilst a monstrous beast forces itself from the
canine's body.
The decision to build
up and then de-escalate Ripley's paranoia – only to go on and
inevitably confirm that her nightmares were a reality – during the
first act, sets up a theme which reflects nicely upon one of the more
memorable quotes from the previous feature. I am referring to the
line in Aliens, in which Newt says to Ripley that “my mommy always
said there were no monsters – no real ones – but there are.”
This was a line which I always felt summed up the overall theme of
the Alien franchise. Alien and Aliens were films which felt as
though they crawled out from the back of one's mind. These were
films which followed a woman who found herself trapped inside a nightmare. In
this universe, everyone's fears and terrors physically existed along-side them. The opening scene of Alien³ once again establishes
this; confirming that Ripley's suspicions are, in actuality, solid
facts.
Yet after a reasonably
solid first act, everything goes utterly pear-shaped thereon. The main
problem with it is that it feels as though each scene in the film had a
different screenwriter working on it without actually knowing what each other happened to be writing. One minute we have a sub-plot
revolving around Ripley forming a sexual relationship with the prison
doctor; then we have one where the planet's doctor turns out to be a
prisoner who was sent down for the manslaughter of several former
patients; then there's this bit with Dillon and his band of religious
chums; then we have a tale about a prisoner being accused of
committing the crimes which the devilish Xenomorph was responsible for; then
comes along a rather unpleasant bit where some prisoners attempt to
rape Ripley whilst Dillon chooses to protect her; and then we've got
some stuff about the company coming to take the murderous alien away
from those expendable residents which occupy the lands of Fury 161. Oh yeah, and there's some bit where Ripley finds out she's got an alien sleeping in her chest.
I'm not saying that
these are necessarily poor sub-plots (the second from last one I mentioned fits
in perfectly with another theme which also weaves throughout the first two
films; the company as the antagonist), nor am I saying that they
couldn't work within Alien³. The crux of the problem is that one of
these sub-plots will start up, and without providing any kind of
resolution or point to that particular sub-narrative, the whole thing just wonders off
and starts conjuring up a brand new secondary-story to entice its
audience with. The end result is a collection of short stories –
set on Fury 161 – with no satisfactory pay offs to any of them. These sub-plots continue to build
up in their numbers as the film moves closer to the end credits; when
finally, the third act buckles and decides to go 'fuck it' by
turning everything into one big cat and mouse chase.
And this is the biggest
disappointment with Alien³. It starts off feeling ambitious, tickling
the audiences curiosity with a set of enigmatic characters and
unanswered side story. Furthermore, it's first act proves that the
writers behind this production (though I am aware of the troubles
they had with production, particularly in the screen writing
department) understood the nature of the story they were continuing to tell –
that nightmares are a reality in Ripley's universe. Sadly, as the
minutes pass by, it insidiously disappoints by failing to pay off
anything which it sets up. Its a narrative with ADHD; one which
starts off with a whole assortment of ideas eager to explore, yet
ends up resorting to 30 minutes of people running around corridors.
Yet despite the chaotic
narrative, Alien³ does manage to get a fair amount right in terms of
its aesthetic appeal. The yellow and brown tinting, intestine-like
corridors and the Xenomorph-doppelgänger plumbing to Fury 161's prison complex manages to both respect and expand upon the hair-raising
aesthetics surrounding the series. The Fury 161 compound is
just what one would imagine a prison to be like within this fictional
universe; reinforcing the message that this future is a million miles
away from what one might imagine a glossy utopia to be.
The visual qualities
surrounding Alien³ had more of an impact on me than the film itself,
as a matter of fact. During the years in which I was forbidden to
view the film, all I had to go on were quick clips from television
channels which were advertising late night screenings of the film (I would have stayed up late to watch them, yet this was before the days of owning a TV in one's room). The mud
brown cinematography from those brief spots were all I had to go on.
With little information of the overall story, my imagination got to
work; weaving all sorts of weird and wonderful fables out of these
short nuggets of nightmarish glory.
To add to these TV
spots, my local video store provided a copy of the film for rental
purposes. The front cover's drooling Xenomorph jaws, hissing silently into a petrified Ripley's ear was yet another unsettling-yet-appealing puzzle for me to place into the jigsaw
of my mind. One more image to contribute to my own envisioned edition of this yet unseen film.
Such a positive
impression one had regarding the aesthetics - plus six years of
imaginatively constructing my own tailor-made-version of Alien³ - certainly had an effect on my overall response to the actual outcome.
I was expecting something truly incredible, yet with the wandering plot(s)
and lack of direction, I ended up walking away feeling somewhat
empty. Furthermore, the decision to kill off Ellen Ripley at the ass end of
the climax split my heart in two. During those earlier years, Ripley became an iconic part
of my childhood self. She was the unstoppable warrior who could
survive the impossible. Whole platoons could be wiped out before her,
yet she would forever walk out the other side (more or less) unharmed. Whilst everyone else around
her cried and cowered during their final moments alive, our hero would
ascend from the bowels of the alien underworld, saving whoever she
could; be that feline or child. Monsters may very well be real in
Ellen Ripey's world, yet Ellen Ripley was immortal within the confines of this realm.
Although I can
understand why they chose to kill off Ripley as a means of bringing closure to this franchise (which it did...until 1997), such a
decision was an assassination of the only hero whom I was convinced could never cease to exist (except for the Doctor of course, though he had not yet entered my life by this point).
While Alien and Aliens
inspired the architecture which holds up ones imaginative
foundations; Alien³ was a film which could fail to impress the very imagination which was shaped by its predecessors.
