 Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles D. Dutton, Brian Glover
Director: David Fincher
Year Of Release: 1992
Plot: On her way back to Earth, Ellen Ripley’s spaceship breaks down and crashes onto a desolate planet. Fury 161 is a penal colony and former lead mine, which now has a skeleton staff of wardens and inmates to keep it ticking over. However Ripley’s arrival causes more trouble than just the fact that she’s the first woman any of the planet’s inhabitants have seen in years, as she’s also inadvertently brought the relentless alien creature with her, and may be carrying one herself. |
As a film critic, Alien3 causes me a lot of problems. Of all the xenomorph films, it’s probably my favourite, although I’m not actually sure why. As my job is to review films and say exactly what I think is good and bad about them, it’s puzzled me for a long time why there are some movies, like Alien3, that I really like but where I can’t actually indentify the reasons why. In fact with Ellen Ripley’s third adventure, I could actually do a better job telling you what’s bad about it than good, even while I really enjoy it.
Sometimes I think I’m just being an annoying contrarian. You know the sort. The people who only like obscure directors or music acts and then denounce them as soon as they hit it big, not because they’ve suddenly becomes popular, but because they hate the idea of liking something lots of other people enjoy. It makes me wonder whether my insistence that Alien3 is my favourite Alien movie is simply because it’s the one nobody else likes very much.
However I don’t think that’s it.
When film fans talk about movies or journalists write about them, there’s a tendency to dissect them into their constituent parts, talking about the editing, screenplay, and various other elements, and to rationalise and try to pin down exactly how films work and why we think certain movies are good or not. However sometimes I think that I and other film fanatics needs to admit that there are times when our reactions to films aren’t necessarily down to logic and reason. We are after all talking about an artform that’s largely designed to appeal to our emotions, and so just as in normal life, pinning down why something makes us feel a particular way isn’t always easy.
There are times when I’ve read film reviews and its clear to me that all someone is trying to say is that they liked a movie even though they don’t have any good reasons why. To compensate they’ve ended up cloaking their reaction in film-speak to try and bring some sort of reason and logic to why they enjoyed the film. Of course a review where someone simply says they likes or hated a movie isn’t much use to anyone, but sometimes I think a little more appreciation among journalists and film fanatics of the fact that cinema isn’t a purely rational medium wouldn’t go amiss.
After all, it’s kind of like explaining why a joke is funny. You can talk about timing, plays on words, use of the unexpected and there’s even a school of thought that says words beginning with a ‘k’ sound are the most comical. All these things may be true, but ultimately the important thing is that the joke is funny, and we all know how variable people’s sense of humour is.
With Alien3, I could probably give you a better argument or why it’s a bad film than a good one. The film had a hideous production process, which shows through in the film’s lack of clear themes and motivations. The movie is fairly slow and ponderous, you can barely tell one bald prisoner from the next, the special effects are interesting but not very convincing and some of the dialogue is atrocious. I can seen every reason why people don’t like the movie and why most people think it’s the worst of the Alien films, but I still enjoy it.
Despite numerous viewings where I’ve tried to pin down what I think is good about the film, I can’t get much further than that it has a few excellent scenes and some good acting from Sigourney Weaver and Charles S. Dutton. I wish I could find some brilliant arguments as to why it’s a great film, and that everyone else has been wrong about it, but I can’t.
However it is a useful film to help me remember that sometimes the reason I and others like a film isn’t all about directing, editing, acting, dialogue and filmmaking style, sometimes it’s alright to like or dislike a film just because you do, with no logical reason to it at all. That may sound ridiculously simple, but it’s something I think a lot film critics, academics and super-fans would do well to keep in mind.
TIM ISAAC
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