Alien 3 Sucks For More Reasons Than We Usually Say It Does
Posted on February 2nd, 2016 by Adam-Troy CastroOriginally published on Facebook 2 February 2015.
The fatal problem with ALIEN 3 is not, *not*, that it takes a big steaming dump on Ripley’s heroism from the prior film, by killing off Newt and Hicks, the two people she bonded with and rescued in the prior movie.
Sure, that sucked, but let’s be honest: I was spoiled on that plot point before I went to see it. I was dismayed, of course, but I’m a horror guy and I recognize that the ALIENS franchise was made up of horror films. In the best horror, and indeed in the best stories, life isn’t always fair; sometimes it’s spectacularly unfair. I was 100% willing to give the movie a fair shot, to prove that it would reward our tolerance of this development that upset us, by going places worth going. So, no, that was not a fatal problem. I withheld judgment.
The fatal problem is that, *having done that*, it gave us a story that sucked, thus following its deliberate violation with a cowpie in the face.
It’s first of all a story that doesn’t advance the mythology one iota. ALIEN gave us our first exposure to the life form; ALIENS showed us what it was like when human beings fought them in a fair fight; ALIEN 3 showed us nothing more except a slightly different metamorph and the lesson that anybody we love, including the heroine whose fate we had given such an emotional investment, will be taken from us not only without warning but without meaning. That was one point.
It’s second of all a story that violates who Ripley is, turning her a woman who – having suffered the most devastating loss one can imagine and then being forced to suffer it all over again – proceeds from absolute emotional desolation with Newt’s autopsy scene, to hopping into bed with the first guy who treats her with kindness. (Sure, she uses sex to avoid answering his questions, but there’s a post-coital shot of her smiling her secret smile, and THE WOMAN SAW HER DEAD SURROGATE DAUGHTER GETTING HER RIBS SPREAD ONLY A FEW SCENES BEFORE, and that is not the woman we know, nor a woman we want to know.)
And third of all —
it’s a goddamned stupid story.
People complain about Newt’s off-screen death. You know what offended me more?
Late in the movie Ripley and company come up with a plan to kill the canine metamorph: they will lure it into a trap and crush it under thousands of gallons of molten lead.
This they actually accomplish.
But the alien doesn’t die; in a jump-scare moment, it leaps out of the pool of molten lead, as if propelled by a spring.
Sure, somebody said. It’s an Alien. It can have any capabilities the writer wants it to have.
Sure. I agree with that.
It can, for instance, be repelled by flame-throwers, as in the prior movies. OR it can be wholly unfazed by molten lead. Either it can be driven back by fire or it’s not affected by heat. YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH.
It can be stymied by a closed door, as happens a few times in this movie. It can be knocked to its knees by a pissed-off blue-collar woman in a power loader suit, as happens so memorably in ALIENS. OR it can be so powerful that it can swim upward through uncounted tons of molten lead, and propel itself leaping out of that ungodly weight. YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH.
It can be ripped to pieces to bullets or it can be invulnerable to thousands of tons of falling lead. YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH.
I was offended because I watched that scene and I thought, “There are any number of things in the first two movies that strain common sense, or biology, or conditions in outer space, but there is no point, in either of them, where I had my nose rubbed in the attitude that the people who wrote it think we’re goddamned idiots and won’t notice something this profoundly stupid.”
The only alternative explanation is that they were too stupid to tell the difference themselves, in which case the story becomes what you get when excited six-year-olds play with action figures, and the stories six-year-olds make up about toy Indy and toy Chewbacca and toy Superman, fighting the giant rocking horse, are not regarded by the rest of us as canon.
It did not happen.