Stupid Awesome: Alien 3

Alien 3 came out in the summer of 1992, and it was a big deal at the time. Excitement had built up for it, people were looking for the next big follow-up to the '86's James Cameron flick, and was ready and rarin' for some more bug blastin' action! And... They didn't get that. You know how I sit here and pontificate to y'all about how to cut stupid movies some slack because in the end, they delivered what they promised and nothing more? (i.e. Pirates of the Caribbean promised nothing more than two hours of Johnny Depp acting like a lunatic, Transformers and Battleship promised nothing but a couple of hours of explosions, ect.) As I said, you really shouldn't judge a movie for what it isn't, as opposed to what it is. Sadly, Alien 3 is the picture perfect example of a movie that promised more than what it delivered. All the commercials and movie trailers for it made it look like it was going to be a darker but more action packed film, along the same lines as it's immediate predecessor. I mean, watch this trailer and you'll know what I mean:

Now, for those of you who has seen the movie... You know that what you just saw consisted of just about every action scene in the movie. Alien 3 was one of those movies that, like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Superman Returns, went through so many rewrites and revisions, that it was bound to disappoint no matter the outcome. One of the scripts was written by David Twohy, the guy who co-created the Riddick Chronicles with Vin Diesel. Which when you look at Pitch Black, you got to wonder if that was a take on an Alien film he had in mind somewhere. You can read all about those various proto-versions of the movie on it's Wikipedia page, and there's plenty of them available online to read. But the short of it is that the movie promised to be this worthy successor to Aliens and ended up being something that was the exact opposite. It was a suspense-horror movie, that the trailers tried to sell as an action movie. Just by false advertisement, it was going to end up sucking balls for a lot of moviegoers. I mean, it's like imagining going into a what you're thinking is a buddy comedy movie, and you get a serious toned political movie about ponzi schemes. You'd be kinda pissed, wouldn't you?

This beautiful art here? It's like this
through the entire first book.

Now personally, I hold a special place in my heart for the Aliens franchise, and you might expect, it goes back to a comic book. Now you see, back in 1988, Dark Horse Comics, still a fledgling comic company that never ventured beyond B&W books focused on a lot of independent comics. One of the earliest rights they got a hold of was the rights to comics of the movie 'Aliens', and boy did they ever deliver. I was in eighth grade when the first book came out. It was B&W, and my immediate impression wasn't that enthused. I mean, it's not in color like Spider-Man or Batman. Why should I take it seriously? And that was when I not only discovered B&W comic books, but discovered just how powerful it can be with shading alone. The pictures you see off to the side are excepts from that book, and man, oh man, was the entire book done like that and was it beautiful. Mark A. Nelson was the artist, and I remember looking at his art and just staring at it in amazement, blown away about how detailed and rich the illustrations was. (It was the comic that started me off on wanting to draw comics, but it would be in 1990, with MacFarlane's Spider-Man book that REALLY cemented that desire for me.) Now as great as the art was, the story was even better! In a nutshell, it picked up ten years later, after the events of the second movie. (The third movie had not been produced yet.) Ripley was nowhere to be found, Newt was placed in an psychiatric hospital, since the events of LV-426, and an acid-scarred Hicks had become an alcoholic mess of a soldier, when a rival corporation has discovered a star chart leading back to a homeworld where the Aliens may have come from. It was a trilogy, all written by Mark Verheiden, with the first drawn by Mark Nelson, the second airbrushed by Denis Beauvias (and man, was that stuff beautiful! Utterly gorgeous, even today!), with the third drawn by Sam Keith... Who is a 'take it or leave it' kind of guy. Not my cup of tea, but I understand why people liked his work. Just on Aliens, following Nelson and Beauvias... It was really out of place.

Seriously beautiful.. This is the art
in the second story arc.

These comics were an awesome story, that would have made an even more awesome movie. It started with a slow and suspenseful build up, that ended with a goddamned apocalypse. And then it kept going! It was really impressive. So if you hadn't read the comics, you had your expectations from the first two movies to go by. If you were a fan of the comics, you had the expectations from the comics as well, and let me tell you... Those would be some impressive expectations.

And the movie failed to meet them. Not only was the five years of stories that I had faithfully been reading totally negated, but the two main characters who I had been following so closely for the last five years were killed unceremoniously off-screen in the FIRST FIVE MINUTES! To say I was pissed was an understatement. Later, Dark Horse reissued those comic stories, with some rewritten editing, and the characters of Newt and Hicks changed into new characters of “Billie” and “Wilkes”, and the Ripley that showed up in the third book was changed to being an android or something. In all honesty, it still works, and fits into the movie universe continuity... But it really wasn't the same for me. This comic I had read and loved, that really got me into being a hardcore comics fan, and aspiring comics artist... No longer “counted”. And to make it more irritating, the editions that Dark Horse sells now are all the edited versions. It makes sense for them, but it's not story I loved. And it was all because of that damn third movie. You could live with it, if the movie had been good. I mean, Terminator 2 negated a lot of the established stories from Dark Horse's really good miniseries of them, but I didn't mind, because Terminator 2 was a good movie.

And the movie suffered on a bunch of fronts for it too. It was the one Alien film that new director David Fincher wouldn't come back to do a commentary for, because his experience for it was a nightmare. Constant script changes, producers and actors pulling rank, budget slashes, and so on. It had started filming before there was a finished script and upon completion, the studio had dismantled and reassembled the movie without his consent. He's pretty much disowned the movie, and seeing the movies he later would have crafted (Seven, Fight Club, and Panic Room) it's hard to blame him for the movie. Essentially, this movie had so much it had to live up to, and it just couldn't do it. But here's the funny thing. Once I got over the fact that a comic story I loved was negated, and once I got over the fact that this movie pretty much killed the potential of sequels (boy was I wrong there!), and once I accepted that this was a movie that was created by accountants and not a directorial vision...

...Alien 3's actually not that bad of a movie.

No, seriously. It's not that bad of a movie. You have to accept that it's a DIFFERENT movie, and not the movie we were expecting or wanting... But it's not a BAD movie. Allow me to explain.

Once you put aside the notion that you're pissed off the movie wasn't an action movie, and you start treating the movie as an actual Sci-fi/Horror movie, it's attributes really start to shine through a lot. Alien 3 is actually a pretty good suspenseful movie. The mostly spoiler free premise is this: On the way home from LV-426 (Acheron), the Colonial Marine ship, the Sulaco experiences an electrical fire on board. (Possibly due to a xenomorph being on board.) As a result, the lifepods are ejected, and it crash lands onto Fiorina “Fury” 161, a double Y chromosome maximum security prison. It's a violent and hostile planet, that has a problem with lice. (So everyone has a shaved head.) Ripley is the only survivor, or at least she believed so, until she discovers that an Alien has traveled down with her and is now in the prison with her and the criminals. (Anything more gets into spoiler territory. And while I'm sure most of you who's reading this has seen it... Still, for the few that haven't... I'll be cool.)

The story's not really that bad. It's pretty typical, and at this point in time, it's almost redundant with alien monster movies, but at the time, it was pretty original. A woman is stuck in a penal colony, with a bunch of murderer, rapists, and thieves. We know they found religion and have taken a vow of celibacy, but do they believe in that vow, or is it just because temptation was less than likely? The warden is less than friendly and cooperative, and the only thing keeping them at bay is that there's something there that's worse than them. It really adds to the sense of isolation and suspense to make a really good horror movie.

The characters, let's talk about them a bit. Ripley's returned from the first movie, and honestly, she's not that different. There's actually some likable flawed characters in this movie. (Bearing in mind they're mostly violent convicts.) There's the prison medic, Clemens, who's a very level headed and quick tragic fellow. (Tragic as in how he got there.) The Warden Andrews, who's this serious cock in an asshole, but you can kind of see why he's like that. (I mean, you'd be impatient too if you had to be in charge of that dive.) crazy prisoner Golic, who's played by Paul McCann. (Known to you Doctor Who fans as the Eighth Doctor.) And the character who really sells the movie to me, and to me, makes it decent it the leader of the inmates, Dillon, played by Charles S. Dutton. For those that don't know, Charles S. Dutton, was the star of a really good show in the 90's called 'Roc', a comedy that dealt with a lot of social issues, without being too preachy about it. The acting on the show was so great, they even did the last few seasons live, because all the actors were trained Broadway performers, and it showed. It didn't get high ratings because... You know, it was a good show and not some stupid piece of crap. Well, Dutton plays the character of Dillon. He's supposed to be this hard ass convict, who's the leader of the inmates, and founder of this sort of fundamentalist religion they've vowed to follow. And Dutton REALLY sells the role. As silly as the events in the movie can be, he does it all straight-faced, honesty and with conviction. He's a great actor. (Interestingly enough, he was in another movie, that's also kind of an Alien rip-off, called Mimic, which also had a lot of great talent involved in it, including Dutton... But it really sucked, but HE was great in it.)

A lot of what makes the movie work for me is the atmosphere. It's a wonderful set that's dark and foreboding. The prison truly feels like an uninviting place, a perfect place for a horror movie. Some of the camera work is great. One of my favorite scenes in the movie, is the final chase scene, where much of it is shot through the perspective of the alien, scaling walls and dodging in and out of doorways. Alien 3 was one of the last big budget monster movies to use practical effects, as the following year gave us Jurassic Park, and after that, everyone and their mother swore by CGI, whether it worked or not. (It was pointed out below that there have of course been big budget movies that use practical effects still, such as in Christopher Nolan's movie, like in Dark Knight, where they actually suplexed a goddamned semi truck. But generally speaking, studios seem more adamant about computer generating everything.) The music in the movie, really hit it home. It's a very dark and foreboding, experimental style of music, I've seen it used many times in other dramatic movies since, but composer Elliot Goldenthal was the first to actually develop this for a big mainstream movie. He calls it one of his best musical scores, and he's right. I don't talk about movie scores a lot, but I'm a huge lover of them. And while it's easy to praise the John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfmans of the film industry... A lot of really good musical scores are actually from very underrated movies. It's easy to say the Dark Knight's score is awesome, because the movie is too. But Mortal Kombat is an awfully silly movie, that's soundtrack wise is mostly known for it's techno soundtrack... But not a lot of people remember the really good musical score by George Clinton. (I think I might have a theme for my next article now.) So yeah, Alien 3's music is really good.

Yeah, Alien 3 has it's flaws. And some of them are rather serious flaws too. And while it did piss me off when I first saw it, I grew to rather like it. Honestly, it should be worse. It can be predictable. It should have been an utter disaster of a movie, but somehow... It works. It's a far, FAR better movie than many give it credit for. Fincher just did that good of a job... Even if he did disown the movie. 

Stooge Rating:

SHEMP