Alien 3
You can’t win ‘em all
I have loved every Alien movie I have seen up until this point. Alien? A classic pleading horror and sci-fi perfectly. Aliens? Social commentary about the military industrial complex and what it means to be a mother. Prometheus? What does it mean to create and how does generational trauma affect people? Alien Covenant? Michael Fassbender kisses himself. All sweet as, all a good time.
Alien 3? There’s lice I guess.
Before I rip into Alien 3 like a facehugger bursting from a chest, here are things I like about it.
So basically Ripley’s back and this time she’s got no hair.
She crash lands on a prison planet filled with religious zealots who turned to faith in prison and are all men.
The robot from the last movie? Kaput. The little girl who was so important last film? Donezo. The way Ripley progressed to understand and almost respect the Xenomorphs? Well, that’s gone too.
What remains? A flame thrower I guess.
The movie goes on where Ripley won’t share information with anyone for some reason and people think she’s nothing but trouble because she’s making them men horny.
But, it turns out there’s yet another alien on board the space craft but the twist this time? It looks like doo doo. They’re using early CGI and a puppet that doesn’t quite work. It’s not the fault of anyone that the effects haven’t aged well, but it does make the whole thing funny to watch.
Basically there’s a plan to trap the titular Alien 3 and then blow it up, that doesn’t work, so they try to trap it in some sort of molten metal and then that kinda works. But people from the Waylon corporation show up and are angry at Ripley for wanting to kill these Aliens because of, like, science or whatever.
Oh right and Ripley is somehow harboring a Xeomorph in her brain and she’s gonna die/birth it. So she years herself into the molten metal and you’re like, damn, being a woman is that hard, huh?
So here’s the thing. I understand a lot of the themes this film is playing around with but never seems to fully settle on.
Where you can look at the first Alien film as a metaphor for a few things, sexual violence, paranoia of the Cold War, the mistrust of corporate America post Nixon, Alien 3 makes text of subtext: you see sexual violence, characters say that they don’t trust each other, and a corporation comes in and says “hey, we’re the bad guys.”
I don’t have a lot to say about this film as I watched it last week and sort of forgot a lot of what I thought of it other than, it’s not very good.
The most important thing about this movie is the fact that one of the main characters is played by Ralph Brown who plays Ric Olié in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Oh, and Ripley has a tumor and has her head shaved so it’s a metaphor for cancer I guess??
The runtime is 114 minutes.