Alien 3, People Nothing

Originally published June 26, 1992 In order not to disappoint those of you who haven’t seen Alien 3 (or, as I like to call it, Alien 3, People 0) and therefore have to skip the column this week, I’ll “warm up” with this utterly irrelevant but nonetheless enchanting anecdote, so that you won’t walk away from this issue feeling cheated. Feel free to keep on reading until I say otherwise.

I got a call from Harlan Ellison the other day, who not only confirmed my observation in the column from issue #969 that smokers were going to have a new rallying cry thanks to Basic Instinct, but informed me that he had encountered it personally.

You see it coming, don’t you?

Harlan was in New York, having attended a memorial service for Isaac Asimov, at which Harlan was one of the speakers. It was later that night and Harlan, hungry, decided to stop at a pizza joint and buy a slice. So he’s standing there in the pizza place, about to start eating, and a woman right next to him opens up her pocket book, removes a package of cigarettes, and lights up.

Now this was one of those small joints that opens right out onto the street. It would have been no effort for her to puff to her heart’s content a few feet away, but instead she lit up illegally inside.

“Excuse me,” said Harlan, “but this is an open air restaurant. Would you mind taking that outside?”

Apparently having just seen Basic Instinct, she looked at Harlan smugly and said, “What are you going to do? Arrest me for smoking?”

Harlan didn’t arrest her. Instead, Harlan plucked the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it in her pocketbook…where it promptly worked its way to the bottom and, still lit, began to ignite the contents.

The woman shrieked, madly trying to salvage the interior of her pocketbook, and she took a swing at Harlan. She missed him clean and Harlan, referring to his slice, said, “Look, sweetheart, if you want to wear this pizza, just keep right on swinging.”

Did anyone leap to her aid? Hëll no. This is New York. Besides, I figure the place was filled either with non-smokers who were thinking, “Yes! Yes! Way to go!” or smokers who were thinking, “I’m not messing with this nut.”

The woman left in a huff with smoldered pocketbook, scorched dignity, and probably headed straight home to write a really angry letter to screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus to complain that she tried his stupid line and it didn’t work.

Me, I think Harlan should get together with Tony Randall, who (so I heard) on a Tonight Show appearance warned some massive wrestler sitting next to him to extinguish a cigarette and, when the guy wouldn’t do it, put it out for him.

I bet Harlan and Randall could exchange some terrific anti-smoking war stories. So here we are, well into this week’s installment, and now it’s time to move on to Alien 3. Spoiler warnings abound. So if you keep reading and the movie is ruined for you, don’t come whining to me about it.

When I saw the first two Alien films, there was a moment in each of them where my opinion of them solidified. I remember them quite clearly.

In Alien, it was when the crewmembers of the Nostromo who had not yet been devoured were trying to decide what course of action to take, and someone made the reasonable suggestion that they man the life boats and get the hëll out of there. And we were told that wasn’t possible the escape pods didn’t have sufficient seating capacity for an evacuation.

That little revelation jolted me right out of the picture. I envisioned the screenwriter sitting there, fingers poised over the keyboard, thinking, “Why don’t they just leave? Well…uh…not enough room on the escape pods. That’s good.”

No, it’s not good. It’s not like we’re talking about a crew of a thousand. The crew, even intact, numbered less than a dozen. And there was no emergency evac procedure to handle that paltry total? I didn’t buy it for a second.

So by the time we got into later stupidities, such as Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) risking the life and limb of herself and the remains of the crew to search for the cat, or the Nostromo’s self-destruct mechanism with its triggering device in the core of the ship (rather than the logical place, which would be next to the exit door of the escape pod; you know–start the countdown, hop in the pod and leave), I was so detached from the film that I was laughing all through the climax.

The point in Aliens where I made my decision on the film was midway through, after the marines had just gotten their butts kicked in their first encounter with the aliens. At first Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) wants to go back in and slug it out again, but Ripley calmly says, basically, “I say we get out of here and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

It’s a sensible moment, a logical moment. It’s everything the first film lacked. And even better: the other marines echo the sentiment. The fact that they don’t manage to return to the ship is due, not to stretches of credulity, but a perfectly believable plot moment with an alien warrior trashing the drop ship.

So I liked Aliens, starting with that moment. Liked it a lot.

Then we get to the third film.

Ripley is the sole survivor of an emergency crash landing on prison planet Fiorina 161, caused by an alien face-hugger, or -huggers, trying to penetrate the sleeping capsule. Where the face-hugger came from, we haven’t a clue. The queen left eggs behind, on the Sulaco? When? Where? The face-huggers were cracking the capsules? How? They couldn’t break through the glass specimen casings they were enclosed in in Aliens until Burke (Paul Reiser) released them. One would think the sleeping tubes would be even tougher material.

Still reeling from all this nonsense, I haven’t even begun to consider that the prison planet she’s landed on makes no
sense.  Here’s a Company so rapacious that it thinks nothing of abandoning or killing its own employees, but it is willing to go to the expense of sending out a semi-annual supply ship to keep two dozen double-Y chromosome losers happy.  As I said, I haven’t even begun to mull over the absurdity of this.

No, I’m sitting there, still incredulous that Newt–whom Ripley risked life and limb for–is dead, virtually making the
last half hour of Aliens moot.  I’m also angry that Hicks is dead, aborting a promising character relationship with Ripley before it even got going.  So there’s Ripley at the funeral…

And her nose starts to bleed.

That was the moment.  The moment I thought, “Oh, terrific.  She’s got an alien gestating in her.  Not only is everyone on this stupid planet dead, but Ripley’s going to die, too.”

I was 99 percent certain, and it was finally confirmed for
me beyond any shadow of a doubt when the alien warrior got up-close and personal with her, and then left her alone.

It’s not a good sign when a movie is that predictable fifteen minutes in.  The whole trick to movie making is looking like you’re going to be predictable, and then coming up with twists and turns so that the outcome is utterly unexpected, but at the same time completely logical.

A3 does not make that effort. A3 makes very little effort about anything.  In the first two films there was some attempt to give all the supporting players some degree of personality, so that when they inevitably became alien-chow, their deaths meant something.  Not so this time.  Aside from the fact that, with all their heads shaved, all the prisoners look remarkably alike.  They never rise above the position of cannon fodder–their deaths are meaningless.  There are only two characters who seem to have any depth at all.

One is the doctor, played by Charles Dance, who dies shortly after a roll in the hay with Ripley (thereby perpetuating the filmic notion that any time Sigourney Weaver takes her clothes off, trouble ensues.)

The other is Charles S. Dutton, who plays the religious spearhead of the convict group.  But even his character is reduced to delivering a supposedly rallying speech that is more notable for its profanity than its uplifting spirit.  Bill Murray’s “It just doesn’t matter!” oratory in Meatballs was more moving.

Originally the script called for Dutton’s character to sacrifice himself and Ripley to escape…until Weaver took it
upon herself to insist that Ripley be offed.

I will admit that such an approach is a nice twist to the type of “Hollywood ending” so neatly skewered in The Player.  But I question the timing–after Ripley has survived two previous films, that’s when they go for a downbeat ending?  She makes it through all that only to succumb at the end?  It makes the first two feel like exercises in futility.

What I have to give the creators of the film credit for is nerve–more guts than brains, really.  Most of the script’s text

is eminently forgettable, but the film has far more subtext than either of the previous two entries.  Whereas the first film was essentially a space-going haunted house stories, and the second a military operation with maternal overtones, A3 has the audacity to try and produce a two-hour religious metaphor.

One doesn’t usually come out of an SF horror film discussing theological symbolism, but A3 is replete with it.  When Ripley first shows up, the religious converted convicts view her with suspicion and fear.  As well they should–in most theologies, women represent two things:  They bring ruin upon man (Lilith, Eve, Pandora) or they are the lifebringers, the providers of salvation (Mary).

The lifers assume that Ripley represents the first instance, and they’re not incorrect.  After all, shortly after Ripley shows up, all hëll breaks loose in the little hëll they’ve created.  In this scenario, the alien becomes more than just a marauding force. It’s the incarnation of evil itself — a dark, slavering Satan figure, punishing the convicts for their sins.

But as the film progresses, Ripley takes on the second religious female persona–the bringer of life.   For Ripley has an alien growing inside her…and not just any alien, but a queen.  Whereas in Aliens it was one mother (Ripley on behalf of Newt) versus another (the Queen, protective of her eggs), this time they are united, albeit unwillingly.   Thus Ripley fills multiple functions:  would-be savior of the human race and surrogate mother to yet more aliens.

And boy, does director David Fincher feast on this notion.  Because Ripley isn’t just any old savior.  She’s the Messiah.  I mean, even this humble Jew picked up on that.

Humanity has, to all intents and purposes, evolved into the soulless, heartless “Company.”  Their activities and disregard for human life have caused all the problems in the first two
films.

So Ripley, basically, dies for our sins.  Just to jackhammer the point home, Fincher presents us with a final view of Ripley plummeting into the purging flames of an inferno (Hëll?), her arms outstretched in perfect evocation of the crucifixion.   In so doing, she takes the newborn queen with her, thus saving humanity from…

Well, from nothing, actually.  If the Company really is that hot to have an alien, they can just hie themselves back to the original derelict ship that Crewman Kane discovered in the first film.  Presumably it was far enough from the colony to escape the nuclear blast that climaxed Aliens…after all, it eluded detection for a couple of decades.  The Company would then have thousands of eggs to choose from.   To quote Ren and Stimpy, “Happy Happy Joy Joy.”

With this utterly pointless and futile death of a heroine who deserved so much better,  I was watching the film and was reminded of the Harry Chapin song, “30,000 pounds of Bananas,” in which a doomed trucker’s brakes go out on a run to Scranton,Pennsylvania, and he hurtles to oblivion with the title fruit as cargo.  And there’s a line in there which goes:  “And he said, `God, make it a dream!’ as he rode his last mile down.”

That’s what I felt like.  Trapped in a high-speed vehicle (a climactic and confusing chase through endlessly spinning tunnels, for example, induces vertigo rather than tension) and I sent out a prayer that perhaps this could all be a dream.

It’s rare that I would be happy about the notion of blowing off a whole film by wishing for the hoary cliche of one of the principals waking up. But A3 undercuts Aliens, which I enjoyed immensely. If I have to sacrifice one film or the other, I’ll ditch A3 in a heartbeat.

And it’s so easy to do.  In fact, A3 makes more sense if
it’s a dream…because then, as with Total Recall, you don’t have to worry about lapses in logic.  Since when do dreams make sense, after all?

Better than religious symbolism, I can easily paint all sorts of dream symbolism to “prove” A3 was a figment of Ripley’s imagination.  The film was Ripley’s every nightmare incarnate. How does Newt die in A3?  She drowns.  This is an obvious dream allusion to the sequence in Aliens where Newt was up to her neck in water and subsequently kidnapped by an alien.  Ripley got there just in time to see the head of Newt’s doll sink below the water.  After the autopsy in A3, pretty much the only thing left intact was Newt’s head.

• In Aliens, Bishop is impaled by the Queen (checkmate).  In A3, it’s Hicks who dies by being impaled.  Same death, different guy.  Coincidence?  I think not.
• In dreams you frequently have no true sense of where you are.  Locales shift with dizzying speed, and with no rhyme or reason.  That happens throughout A3.  Ordinarily one would have to chalk this up to bad directing–but if A3 is a dream, then the liability is actually a plus.
• Ripley parades around nude in the sickbay without overmuch concern.  Commonplace in dream circumstances.  She has sex for no particular reason with the doctor other than that he’s there. Reasons don’t matter if it’s a dream.
• Look at the last lines of Aliens, for heavens sake:
  Newt: Ripley…can I dream now?
  Ripley: Yes, honey.  I think we both can.
  There you go.  She says it right there.  She’s going to dream now.
• Compare it to the final words of A3, which is a recording of Ripley’s final log entry on the Nostromo’s escape ship. From the way the shot is framed, it’s clearly supposed to be originating from the ship that Ripley crashed onto Fiorina 161. Now why in hëll would the voice log from the Nostromo be on an emergency escape pod from the Sulaco?  It makes no sense whatsoever…but if it’s a dream, it doesn’t have to.

Please, someone at 20th Century…consider this as a possibility.  I mean, otherwise, the only thing that really makes sense is that the prisoners were double-Y chromosome guys. Because you come out of the film saying, “Why?  Why?”

(Peter David, writer of stuff, is curious if–in Don Simpson’s book–being critical of Alien 3 means that Peter David is, in fact, jealous of those involved.  Perhaps Don ought to consider getting another book…maybe one that doesn’t have all the pictures colored.)