Continuing in my track of Alien films we now get to what might be considered the most baffling of the bunch.
The one that I think most people are either dismissive of if not flat-out disliking.
Because Alien 3 is a weird. Taking place after the seamlessly phenomenal Alien and Aliens. Alien 3* decides to drop its only surviving character into a weird prison world inhabited by every scum delinquent you can think of.
Only they've seen to find some sort of spiritual solace in a form of Christian Millenarianism** Fundamentalism.
Although the entire religious aspect is more of an veneer upon an already-established story.
This movie starts to make a lot more sense when you look at one of its key writers. Vincent Ward. The guy who was responsible for "The Navigator: A medieval Odyssey"
The man loves writing religious terminology and story elements into his works.
He loves playing with the idea of how Theology and belief can work to affect the human mind.
Supposedly the original idea for this movie was to have Ripley land on a planet composed of a monk society that would look at her as some sort of coming anti-Christ because of the evil Xenomorph carried within her.
It's a neat concept but supposedly nobody wanted to take it on in Hollywood so they stuck it on a prison colony took some of the religious symbolism and fluid into that.
It doesn't pay off all that much.
The religious context is there but only so much that it makes certain characteristics of certain people more pronounced.
Otherwise a fair bit of the movie is the same as the other Alien films. Try to convince people that the alien exists, acknowledge the existence of the alien, find a way to fight the alien and then finally try to execute it. With waning success one way or the other.
This movie is also taking it back a step from the Aliens film by: reducing us back down to one's Xenamorth and having a lot more focus on characters.
Only unlike the original alien film this one goes off the walls with its characters in set pieces.
It's so weird and awkward and kind of cartoony having all these locked up criminals awkwardly interacting with each other.
It's like spending a day in Arkham Asylum from the Batman Universe only all the major villains of gone out to do their crimes again and we're left with all the secondary delinquents.
I know I'll get Flack for this but I really like Alien 3 maybe even a little bit more than Aliens. It's by no means a better film.
Far from it, Alien 3 is incredibly problematic and filled with issues the whole concept is taken in such a weird direction that I just can't help but admire it.
You really felt that the people making this thing we're trying their best.
Time has not been kind to Alien 3. It's become lampooned by critics and audience members alike over the years.
but I still think there's a place for it. I'll take a weird movie trying something new over a formulaic good movie any day of the week.
The acting is possible for the most part. Balancing between Solomon more mundane conversations between Ripley and this prison physician who she hooks up with and the over-the-top slightly crazy performances of all the other prisoners.
Camera work is okay everything has this kind of ugly yellow and brown lens on it and unlike so many other films that works pretty well here.
The whole place is supposed to be dour and rundowns would make sense that it looks like crap from the start.
There's some CGI they use for their alien that's a little iffy (Bad At some points) and I kind of wish they would have played that down and just had a man in the rubber suit hiding in the shadows and chasing people around with quick cut camera shots and lots of panning movement.
They even do the whole Evil Dead thing where we get the perspective of the animal as it chases the person down.
It's just something about the one-off alien that's so much more entertaining than a million aliens. I mean there's a lot of fun in watching a group of military grunts mowing down thousands of Xenomorphs with a hail of gunfire but the idea of one little creature scurrying around the darkness hunting people off one by one driving half of them insane and creating discontent amongst the survivors.
The best way to watch this movie is to not look at it as a another alien film, but to see it as something of a character study of Ripley herself.
This poor person that is now gone through three individual encounters dealing with these horrible monstrosity. Escaping with only the hair of her life, left usually with a little dangle of Hope rather that be a small cat, a small girl or just the knowledge of knowing that those horrible creatures killed yet again.
But then she always comes back and everything goes right back to hell.
Everyone she knows and loves dies, every glimmer of humanity she has is destroyed and she just becomes more and more gloomy as the series goes on.
At this point she's pretty much indifferent to everything.
She's more interested in just making sure these creatures will finally die and doesn't even care if she has to interact with Psychopaths to do it.
There's a particularly interesting scene where a large scary inmate is talking down to Ripley. Telling her that he's a bad dude, that he's killed, raped and done other deplorable things.
And all she does is sit down across from him and say. ''Well my presence must make you really uncomfortable then.'' As he's being cooped up in prison bound to a religious code and not seeing a woman in years.
She just doesn't give a damn and it's kind of intriguing to watch the movie from that perspective. You watch a person break over a series of films, it's almost morbid in a way.
*I sometimes jokingly refer to this movie and 'Alien Cubed' because of weird naming Convention of putting a small 3 in the corner next to the main title. Not sure who thought that was a good idea. I guess it sticks out a little bit but it just makes the naming convention all the more confusing.
** Millenarianism most of the time refers to the idea that a great social economic or political change will take place over a series of time, that will lead to some sort of euphoric state.
Essentially finding Nirvana by simply waiting long enough.
Not to be confused with millennialist which is the coming belief in the Golden Age. Both concepts are pretty similar though technically distinct.
And I'm now wondering if the movie knows the difference.
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