review by Marcin Wichary
Alien³ 1992
Rewatched May 19, 2012
Marcin Wichary’s review:
Man, does Ripley have a streak of bad luck, or what. The universe had 60 years to figure things out; for us, it’s been thirteen in between the first movie and this. For Ripley, however, we’re talking just a few weeks during which her entire life turns into crap.
Perhaps the Alien universe could be some sort of a film school graduation project, a template for any director to imprint with their own ideas and style. I watched Alien³ marathon-style right after the first two movies, and it couldn’t be any more fascinating to have them juxtaposed this way. Cameron replaced horror elements with balls-to-the-wall action and almost caricatured protagonists; Fincher instead throws in his trademark explorations of despicable people, pseudo-metaphysical elements, and torrents of discomfort and borderline sadism towards the characters.
The problem is, this is his first movie, and he’s not very good at any of it yet.
So, what went wrong? Many things. To start with, all the sacrifice and heroism of the second movie are undone in the first few minutes in a huge middle-finger to both Cameron and the audience. To lash out on Cameron is fine – he deserves it – but us and our emotional involvement? Tsk tsk. Huge faux pas.
And that’s just the beginning. Watching Alien³ reminded me of what Richard Feynman called cargo culting: the movie is essentially trying to replicate the first two without understanding what made them good. We need an alien, of course. We need The Corporation too, so let’s shoehorn it in. The first two movies had arbitrary countdowns, and fake endings? I suppose we need to get all this in. And the icing on the cake is that we sit through a film that not only feels, but even looks like a fourth VHS copy of the original.
Just like Aliens served as almost a demo reel of ideas found in Cameron’s earlier and later movies, for a huge Fincher devotee like me, there are some fascinating moments here hinting at his future mastery, and harking forward to Seven, The game, The girl with the dragon tattoo. But that’s a Fincher fan talking; as a fan of Alien I still wish someone intercepted him before he got involved in this movie, and plain simply yelled: Get away from her, you bitch.
BEST REVIEW ENDING
Haha. Cheap shot, but then Fincher is reportedly actually a huge asshole. :·)
Marcin, Bill — bummed I missed on this but perhaps an Alien: Resurrection screening soon?
I feel the same way about the first three but my feelings are strong with Aliens, mostly because I actually saw that one in the theater as a kid and before I saw Alien. The whole range sensor/radar thing was great for me at the time.
Watching it again a few weeks ago back-to-back with these points out that yes indeed, Alien is the strongest of the three, and Alien3 is the biggest letdown.
That said: if you know the history of the making of this one, you'll know that Fincher was very, very unhappy with the end product and amount of studio manipulation and interference with the end product as well as the fact that he had to start shooting the film without a finished script! The wikipedia entry on the film is illuminating, given the various scripts that were proposed. The William Gibson treatment is probably the most intriguing and would have been an awesome screenplay I think, had it been made.
Oh, cool, I just read the Wikipedia entry – fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation. However, while I understand that Fincher might have been unhappy, I think he can still be held responsible, given that he agreed to do it to begin with, and then didn’t withdraw his name from it.
We didn’t have enough energy to sit through Resurrection, although I have to admit I am a bit curious and would like to re-watch it at some point.
BTW “A number of cast and crew associated with the series, including actor Michael Biehn, previous director James Cameron, and novelist Alan Dean Foster expressed their frustration and disappointment with the film's story. Cameron, in particular, regarded the decision to kill off the characters of Bishop, Newt, and Hicks as "a slap in the face" to him and to fans of the previous film.”
Heh.
Oh, cool, I just read the Wikipedia entry – fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation. However, while I understand that Fincher might have been unhappy, I think he can still be held responsible, given that he agreed to do it to begin with, and then didn’t withdraw his name from it.
We didn’t have enough energy to sit through Resurrection, although I have to admit I am a bit curious and would like to re-watch it at some point.
BTW “A number of cast and crew associated with the series, including actor Michael Biehn, previous director James Cameron, and novelist Alan Dean Foster expressed their frustration and disappointment with the film's story. Cameron, in particular, regarded the decision to kill off the characters of Bishop, Newt, and Hicks as "a slap in the face" to him and to fans of the previous film.”
Heh.
Fincher wasn't to blame for the mess that was this. He has shown multiple times that he can tell a good story. Alien3 is not a good story - it had multiple screenplays, elements of all stapled together into a "concise" whole and was written while they shot it. Fincher did his vision as best he could, but it's hard to have a vision when you get the three pages you're going to shoot an hour before you're supposed to shoot it.
I think it’s simply hard to say and we’ll never know.
Your points might be true. The counterpoints would be: What if Fincher didn’t yet quite know how to tell a story or fix one that wasn’t so good? What if he wasn’t determined/strong enough as a director to have it his way? What if he was simply too cocky and believed that he could salvage the mess (assuming he recognized it as a mess) and still fill in the big shoes left by Scott and Cameron? In the end, many movies later, he proved himself, and perhaps this movie just took one for the Fincher team – kind of like Steve Jobs’s NeXT failures were necessary for the success of modern Apple, Inc. But it’s kind of awful that it was this great story that needed to be mutilated for that to happen.
If we agree that we'll never know, it seems unfair to lay the blame on him by default.
One movie later he proved himself. Admirably. I feel like he probably didn't just learn that overnight.
If we're to blame anyone, it should be Vincent Ward and his ridiculous "wooden planet" script. ;)
I feel it’s actually fair to blame the director by default; there’s a reason even on this site the most important metadata is:
“Alien³ · 1992 · Directed by David Fincher”
…and not the writer, the producer, or the studio.
Worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEf5XSKFjo8
And from Fincher himself in an AICN interview in 2008 regarding the blame: "Well, certainly through no desire of the studios to give me anymore creative freedom, but I mean look… yeah I walked naively into this spinning propeller of Hollywood, but what I learned was… The thing is is that the creative executives at studios are not really in a position to tell you who the best cinematographer is to work with and the editors or those things. They all have opinions about that stuff, but ultimately those are the decisions you have to make for yourself and I sort of… on my first movie… I would have been much better off making a movie with all of the guys I had been making commercials and music videos with for years, because they would have been invested.
Now, I worked with some amazing people and you know Norman Reynolds is fantastic and Terry Rawlings was amazing and I got to work with Jordan Cronenweth at least for a short period of time on that movie, but what you learn from that first and I don’t call it “trial by fire,” I call it “baptism by fire,” is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say “Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,” and you have to agree with them, you know?"
Thanks for sharing – this was fascinating to read/watch.
Thanks for sharing – this was fascinating to read/watch.