Critically assessing Alien³
is inherently problematic, thanks to creative interference by Twentieth-Century
Fox that so thoroughly frustrated director David Fincher, he continues to
refuse to discuss (much less revisit) his feature debut. Yet while the
theatrical cut is notable mainly for the abominable changes made to it by
studio suits, the DVD “assembly cut” – which restores 30 minutes of footage,
and is modeled after an early Fincher version – is a fascinating, often
fantastic, film, one simultaneously indebted to and self-consciously divorced
from its acclaimed predecessors in ways both clunky and inspired. Fincher’s
set-up – in which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), now stripped of all but minor
traces of warmth and optimism, crash-lands on remote male-only penal facility
Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161 populated by religious extremists – provides another dank,
isolated environment full of wet, shadowy corridors for his creature and its
inevitable victims to navigate. However, while his milieu and its eventual
hunter/hunted tensions prove somewhat familiar, the director paints his
material in distinctively morose shades. And does so from the outset, in which
he callously kills off Newt (Carrie Henn) and Hicks (Michael Biehn) in order to
recast Ripley as a hardened borderline-fatalist driven less by self-preservation
instincts than by defiant fury at space-mining industrial titans Weyland-Yutani,
whose at-all-costs endeavors to capture an alien for use in military
applications continue to stalk her even on Fury 161.
During its breakneck centerpiece sequences, Alien³ leaves a been-here, done-this
impression, failing to generate requisite suspense from scenarios that, for the
most part, have only one possible outcome. Still, in-between well-orchestrated
but relatively unimaginative chases, Fincher morphs the franchise to his
liking. The director employs a barrage of upward-tilted low-angle compositions
which, aside from their disorienting and dizzying visceral effect, strikingly
express his characters’ hellbound circumstances. A funereal sequence proves a
technical and emotive gem, boasting not only a magnificent panorama of
crematory fires overlaid with triple close-ups, but generating potent death-rebirth
dynamics via intercutting to the ox-belly nativity of the alien. Even in his
maiden studio outing, Fincher’s technical skills are imposing and firmly wedded
to his tale’s underlying emotional core, a black hole that becomes increasingly
bleak as Ripley and her zealot-criminal comrades begin to face the threat at
hand. Only rarely do glimmers of happiness peek out from beneath the film’s
midnight shroud courtesy of Ripley’s warm, comforting relationship with the
facility’s doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), though even then, sex is a
romance-free affair and the lingering bliss it leaves proves short-lived, a
mere fleeting pleasure in a life beset by hostile forces.
Fincher’s early exterior landscape of Fury 161 has an
apocalyptic gorgeousness that’s in tune with the pessimism of his story, which
replicates many elements of Alien and
Aliens (more the former than the
latter) while seeming intent on killing the series off. The much-ballyhooed
revelation about Ripley’s physical condition struck many in ’92 as unforgivably
mean but, in retrospect, it plays like the natural evolution of the franchise’s
running birth-mother-child subtexts, downbeat thematic threads well-suited to
Fincher’s gloomy, cynical Christ-like conclusion. Alien³’s emotional and spiritual desolation is encapsulated by Fury
161’s inhabitants, led by homicidal rapist-turned-preacher Dillon (an intense,
empathetic Charles S. Dutton), whose severe faith maintains tenuous order in
the compound and is tested – to negative consequences – by the appearance of
the female Ripley. In the assembly cut’s finest addition, the alien, having
been successfully trapped by Ripley and company, is released from captivity by Golic
(Paul McGann), a disturbed lunatic enraptured by the extraterrestrial “dragon.”
It’s an act of fanatical faith-run-fatally-amok that sums up the film’s disdainful
critique of religion, merely another dead-end avenue for salvation in a random,
vicious universe where hope is a fool’s luxury and even the altruistic
sacrifice of heroes is less likely to grant others deliverance than merely
provide said martyr with a true, final means of escape.
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