Why don't (many) people like Alien3? (spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

OK, as I mentioned in another thread, I recently sat down and rewatched all four of the Alien movies. Alien: Resurrection is definitely not my favorite for reasons that would require a whole different thread to explain, but I’ve always liked Alien3 and can’t understand why so many people seem to hate it.

Is it the fact that two of the main characters from Aliens were killed off so perfunctorily in this film? If so, this really didn’t bother me at all (other than to evoke the pathos that I assume the director was aiming for). I mean, things happen and people die, whether in real life or the movies. I have no idea if there was any “behind the scenes” reason for their deaths (like, maybe the actors wanted too much money or simply weren’t interested), but I didn’t think their presence was necessary to the narrative of the third film.

Is it the fact that they had to “cheat” in order to set up the premise of third fim (i.e., introduce the fact that an egg was laid on the ship, even though there was apparently no opportunity for such a thing to have happened in the second film)? If so, I agree that this was a cheat, but it was still within the realm of possibility (unlike, say, the whole cloning scenario that made the fourth movie possible, but I digress). Plus, it was basically the McGuffin that was necessary to get the film started and didn’t have any other relevance to the plot of the film.

Is it the fact that Ripley died at the end? If so, I personally thought it was a brilliant plot twist to not have her save the day and escape the way she did in the first two films. Who says the hero has to live? Why isn’t self-sacrifice as noble as saving the day and surviving?

If not these aspects of the film, what was it that people hated? I mean, I personally thought the acting, cinematography, special effects and plot were all quite good, and the film succeeded in scaring me on a number of occasions. I thought the film was, on the whole, internally consistent with no major plot holes. And I liked the fact that it returned to the roots of the first film (a bunch of unarmed humans stalked by a single unstoppable monster and having to use their wits to survive).

I guess what I’m asking is whether people who hated the movie hated the movie itself (acting, plot, special effects, etc.) or whether they primarily hated what it did to the second movie (killed off beloved characters, introduced plot elements that weren’t in the second movie, etc.)

Regards,

Barry

2

I personally liked this one more than Aliens. It had a great atmosphere and gave the “heroes” very little hope in surviving. There was some nice ambiguities in the movie too. Criminals as theheroes, Bishop’s psuedo return (Was he real?) and the nature of the Alien’s themselves in that their offspring take on the attributes of their surrogate parents.

I took it that the egg was collected and placed on the ship by Bishop probably by hidden programing he wasn’t aware of. I’m sure Whalen-Butany would try something sneaky aside from just sending their representative.

3

Leaving aside for the moment my strongly-held conviction that there is no such movie as “Alien 3,” let me say that this supposed sequel makes no sense on any logical or dramatic level.
First off, logically, you have a prison “asteroid” with an ATMOSPHERE! (Just a bit of a hint for you: this is physically impossible, as asteroids are too small to hold an atmosphere.)
Second, you have an asteroid with a LICE problem??? How the hell did the lice GET there? You’d think they would delouse the inmates before transport and they sure as hell didn’t grow on this so-called “asteroid.”
Third, someone somewhere tell me HOW THE HELL Ripley wound up with an alien in her? When exactly was the thing implanted? That is never explained adequately in the movie.
Fourth, just how did an alien get on the ship anyway? The one that supposedly implanted Newt? (IIRC, it might have been Ripley.) Did anyone involved with the third movie even WATCH the second one?

Now, on a dramatic level is where this movie just totally sucked.
Fans of the series had emotional involvement with both Hicks and Newt. If you’re going to kill them off, fine…it’s your movie. But to do it INBETWEEN MOVIES??? Talk about a cop-out! That burned my ass more than anything else. They couldn’t come up with a script good enough to attract Michael Biehn, so they kill him off along with Newt, unseen, inbetween movies. What a crock.
Sorry. I know some things are a matter of taste. For instance, I know that The Godfather movies are classics…they are well-acted, well-written etc…but they aren’t my thing. I don’t like that kind of movie. But this is beyond taste. Alien 3 is just plain dog shit.

4

Why? There are a few reasons, but the biggest is that the movie’s a huge downer from start to end.

First, Hicks & Newt are killed, rendering everything Ripley went through (the emotional investment she makes, her willingness to sacrifice herself) in the previous movie completely futile. In addition, it felt like they killed them off because they were dramatic deadweight; they didn’t want to figure out how they would fit into the prison world scenario, so let’s just bump them off. It felt unnecessarily callous.

Second, there are no interesting new characters to latch on to. The first two films had a variety, but 3 has everyone looking and acting the same, with the only two standouts being the two Charleses (Dutton & Dance)–but one gets killed off too quickly and the other never develops.

The movie also is visually oppressive. All somber, lots of greys, Ripley bald and miserable. I suppose for a prison world you need it to look like that, but is it any fun to watch? No, especially when the tone is so serious–with zero comic relief and the bad taste of the early deaths still lingering.

I also happen to think that the final sequences of trapping the alien are incoherently assembled. People are running this way and that, the camera is spinning and looping in POV frenziness, but all spatial orientation is lost (probably because every visually oppressive chamber/corridor looks like every other). By then, you don’t know what’s going on and you don’t really care who’s getting killed because none of them mean anything to you.

Finally, Ripley’s death is a good way to end the film, but its execution falls flat. Here’s a character we’ve grown to love and embrace, but her sacrifice was an emotionally empty one for me. I stopped caring about anything in the movie long before.

Ultimately, the film is cold, clumsy, and relies on your empathy for Ripley without doing anything to earn the emotion it tries to milk, opting instead for a visual style that’s flashy but heartless. Resurrection is a movie that’s thoroughly ridiculous with a ton of problems, but I still enjoy its weirdness and inventiveness over Fincher’s cold fish.

5

For me, it was the fact the both sides were demoted.

Alien 2: a squad of heavily armed marine badasses against a full alien hive complete w/ queen.

Alien 3: a single alien against a largely unarmed prison facility.

It was like they gave all the guns to the marines in alien 2, and the only thing they could spare for 3 was a bad plot device.

6

I think the biggest problem with Alien 3 is that it wasn’t Alien or Aliens…

First time I saw it I tried not to expect either but I still came away a bit disappointed.

Not disappointed enough not to watch it again tho - and every time I see it I like it a little bit more than before.

It certainly stands head-and-shoulders above the rubbish which came after it…

TTFN

JP

7

I agree with what has been said, that the film is dull and without interesting characters. It has lots of atmosphere, but no real tension. It’s just a bunch of dark corridors and people you don’t care about getting killed. Fincher’s Seven was to an extent similar, in that it was very moody and stylish but not terribly coherent in the plot department, with lots of grimy chases and characters without depth or motivation; however Seven benefited from a great ending and two great actors (Spacey and Freeman).

To do a movie like Alien3, it’s not enough to have an alien leap out at regular intervals to despatch people. You need a human villain who the hero can interact with, and you need character development and character interplay. Most of the great action movies, thrillers, etc, are about character and emotion as much as special effects. You need characters who are going through things the audience can relate to (such as Ripley’s desire to protect Newt in the second movie), and A3 has nothing human to hold the viewer’s interest: just the most inhuman place you could possibly set a film.

In concept, I think it tried to be too clever: the no guns thing, the hairlessness, the harshness, and setting out to be as unlike the first 2 films as possible.

8

What is this Alien 3 movie you talk about? Such a thing never happened. The series ended with Aliens, as everyone knows. Aliens was a tightly-plotted, suspenseful action film that had a satisfying conclusion as well as expanding on the mythology (but not necessarily the mood) presented in the first film.

Now, if they had tried to actually make a third movie, they might’ve done something really stupid with it. Like give it to a director who’d made music videos and was much more concerned with proving himself as An Artist than as a real filmmaker. One who’d emphasize style over substance to such a degree that he’d just piss over everything the second movie had accomplished, all within the first five minutes of the film, just to prove that he was in charge of the franchise now. One who’d make the common early 90’s mistake that being all “dark and edgy” is a valid substitute for real depth, and you can make a movie that’s riddled with cliches and non-sensical plot holes as long as you don’t give it a happy ending. Because, you see, satisfying endings are just a Hollywood invention, and we’re making ART.

(Yeah, I’ve got some issues. Fight Club was pretty good, though.)

I don’t see them as separate. The way the movie started was just a sign of everything that came afterwards – it was all style, no substance. You’re implying that it’s not fair to the third movie to fault it for not being like the second one, but that’s not the point. It wasn’t just that they killed off characters from the second movie, it was that they killed off everything that drove the second movie. Your argument is that bad stuff happens all the time in real life, but this isn’t real life, and to say that arbitrarily killing characters is any deeper or more realistic than letting them come through in the end at the last minute, is absurd. But that’s the tone the whole movie takes. It’s even more trite and contrived than the first two – the biggest plot holes and examples of sheer pointlessness have already been brought up in this thread – but it just has this smug attitude throughout the whole thing that it’s doing something meaningful. By the end, when Ripley took the Nestea plunge into a vat of lava, all the music was swelling but I was just wondering, “What the hell was the point of any of this?”

9

Hmmmm…

Well, so far it really does seem like the biggest gripe people have with the movie is that trashed the previous flick, at least plot-wise. I’m sorry, but I think people need to get over that aspect and just learn to appreciate the movie on its own merits. The director wanted to tell a different story, and it was one that didn’t involve Hicks or Newt. Yes, he could have had a plot that returned them all safely to Earth and then have Ripley go through a series of adventures that culminated with her ending up on yet another planet full of Aliens, but that would have taken far too long to set up the premise.

Everything else is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. I personally thought that the two Charleses were very well drawn and engaging, and I thought it was brilliant the way the director managed to make the audience care about the various characters before having them be killed. Yes, the movie was visually oppressive, and that was one of the reasons I liked it. It’s a horror movie for pete’s sake! And was it really any more oppressive than the first two movies? The whole theme of this movie was self-sacrifice rather than Rambo-style heroics, and the visuals were perfect in my opinion. As for the “alien trapping” sequence, I thought it was very succesful in keeping the audience off-balance and letting us appreciate the mindset of the characters who probably did feel like rats lost in a maze.

Again, all these things are matters of opinion, and I certainly don’t expect anybody to agree with me about the acting, plot, cinematography, etc. But I just hate to see people trash the film solely (or primarily) because it sullied your cherished notions from the previous films as to who should live or die, or who should even be in the next film. I understand that people get emotionally attached to characters, and for those people who were rooting for Hicks and Newt it must have come as a rude shock to find out they were killed off-screen. That has more to do with your expectations going into the film, however, and not the quality of the film itself.

Personally, I applaud the director for daring to take the third film in a totally new direction and not just script “ALIENS: The Day After”. Much the same way that Cameron took the whole concept of “Alien” from Ridley Scott and rewrote it to suit his own sensibilites.

Barry

10

When I first saw it, I hated it, though in retrospect it’s grown on my a little.

But as others have mentioned, it has problems.

  1. Killing off both characters from the previous one. Newt drowns and Hicks is Impaled by a “Safety Beam”.

  2. Problems with the intial setup to get her onto the planet. Namely, where did the Egg come from(Some people say Bishop but I never bought it. I may have if there was any evidence in Aliens that he was working againest them)? Also, why is the Sulaco so poorly designed that a small fire will dump everyone into an escape pod rather then putting out the fire or even just pumping out the atmosphere in that section of the ship(and of course, the safety beams that kill people)?

  3. The characters. I can name all the crew members from Alien, I can name a good portion of the Marines from Aliens, but I still cannot name any of the prisoners from Alien 3, despite having seen Alien 3 about 5 times. They weren’t interesting, but rather just Alien Fodder.

  4. Ripley dies. Okay, this doesn’t bug me as much as it used to, but it does negate the fact that Ripley has always been a survivor and finally buys it on a trash heap of a planet. I can accept it now but it really annoyed me when I first saw it.

11

SolGrundy: See, everything you say about why you hate the third movie is basically why I hated the fourth movie. In the third movie, Ripley died. In the fourth movie, however, she’s back alive due to a plot twist that neither made any sense nor had any preparation in the previous films (cloning and racial memory? Give me a break). And then, to top it off, Ripley is somehow part alien? Talk about pissing on everything that drove the previous movies!

Which is to say that I can understand why you might be upset about the third movie. Unliek the fourth movie, however, I thought the third one logically dealt with the issues from the previous films instead of just tossing them out the window and starting over.

Barry

12

No, I don’t as it has none.

13

Alien 3 was directed by David Fincher. He’s not credited with writing anything with it. James Cameron did both direct and write Aliens, though. I like the direction of Alien 3, but that’s about it. (Fincher’s a highly script-dependent director, in my view. Give him the helm of a good one, and you get a Fight Club. Give him a mediocre one, and you get The Game; give him a formulaic one, and you get Panic Room. He is what he eats.)

That said, while the writers did have Alien 3 avoid being “ALIENS: The Day After,” it only avoided that by instead being “ALIEN: The Day After.” Not too praiseworthy.

Still, the film doesn’t irritate me in the way that Alien: Resurrection did. While it is pretty much a cold rehashed fish (although a well-filmed one), it’s at least a coherent one. There really wasn’t any unrealized potential in the whole affair. Alien: Resurrection had all sorts of neat avenues it could have pursued, but was just an incoherent muddle (although again, an interestingly filmed one; I would have liked the director to be less tied down).

14

There was a third movie? Oh, really? I just totally wiped that out of my head. I have dim memories of plot cheats—egg? Huh? Hicks and Newt dead?----but that’s it. I hate movies that insult my intelligence, and Aliens 3 did it. It was boring. Unless this was an insidious new from of horror, it was just boring.

15

So it would have been perfectly fine for, say, The Empire Strikes back to casually kill Han Solo right before the movie begins?

No. This is a sequel and it owes it to its audience to maintain the emotional threads we appreciated from the previous film. Sure, he could have killed Newt and Hicks off just fine, but to do it off screen (essentially) is less than a cop-out. It’s an insult.

This movie was so obviously the result of pitch meetings, rewrites and problems with people’s agents it was ridiculous.

No, he didn’t. The first film had two survivors: Ripley and her Cat. Both appear in the second. Cameron didn’t say “oh, well, we don’t need the cat–we’ll just say it died in hypersleep,” which would have been far less idiotic than killing two of the principal characters from the previous film, as Fincher did.

But since continuity of the emotional theme of the series isn’t important to you, I’ll offer just some of the more than adequate other reasons to loathe this movie:

It’s shot so dark you can barely see half of it.

The alien is obviously CGI in parts and a model in others. Aliens used people in suits to MUCH better effect.

Every single character except Ripley is bald and male, so they are difficult to even tell apart.

The only decent character besides Ripley in the film is one of the first to die (the doctor).

The scale of the film is massively deflated from the second – the aliens were an enigmatic, malevolent force of nature in the second film. Here, it’s just a slasher movie with an alien in place of Jason and no teenagers.

There aren’t any memorable or sympathetic characters in the movie.

There is no comic relief.

There are no memorable bits of dialogue, except, maybe “well then we’re f***ed,” which isn’t exactly brilliant.

It is nonsensical for “Bishop” to show up at the end. (How would Weyland-Yutani even know that Bishop would have any emotional resonance with Ripley – she hated Androids, so far as anyone knew, AND they couldn’t know that “her” Bishop wasn’t still functional.)

The characters are utterly and completely stupid, in true horror movie fashion: “let’s go out into the dark tunnels and look for the alien so it can pick us off one by one.” Why didn’t they just stay in the cafeteria for Christ’s sake? Sooner or later, the alien would have had to come for them in a brightly-lit area and they could have at least TRIED to kill it with spears, shovels, axes, whatever. Aliens didn’t give the characters easy choices to ignore like that.

Who sets up an entire prison planet to house two dozen guys? And then doesn’t even lock them up? Or provide guards? Or give them some useful labor to do?

You can literally go on and on and on pointing out idiotic choices made in this film by the writer and director. Sure, it looks nice and has some nice visuals, but they do not even come close to making for a good film.

Of course, Resurrection is worse, but that’s a different story.

16

A very minor point to add to the mix (I agree with most of the other points):

As already discussed in another thread recently, most good ‘monster’ horror movies show very little of the monster, if possible, as the audience’s imagination can make a better job of creating something truly scary.

Alien managed this extremely well, as we were slowly introduced to the species in a proper horror setting. As mentioned, Aliens was more of an action flick, but the third film was never going to recreate a ‘horror’ feel like the first film, when:

  1. We have plenty of knowledge about the alien.

  2. We see it close up on a number of occasions.

So judging it against an excellent horror movie and an excellent action movie, I think it fails to match either of them.

17

Just like everyone does with Godfather 3, Jaws 4 and Rocky V.

Not only was Alien 3 not a very good movie, for any number of reasons, quite a few of which have been mentioned in this thread already; it was terribly disappointing compared to the other movies in the series.

Not quite so bad that it literally sucks the good out of the previous movies by osmosis-vacuum; but paired with 4 and the potential for shudder 5 shudder it comes pretty close.

At least when Lucas decided not to produce Episodes 7, 8 and 9 he ensured that the good to bad ratio would forever, in the worst case scenario, be balanced in the Star Wars films. Once you produce more bad movies in a series than you have good movies, the whole series becomes a joke.

18

I didn’t like it because, not even taking the plot into account, it was boring.

It seemed as if they ran out of interesting scenes and situations. The aliens weren’t scary anymore either. It lacked the excitement needed for an action, and the scares needed for a horror.

The other thing I personally didn’t like, was the use of “fuck.” Now I have no problem with characters saying “fuck.” Films like “Pulp Fiction,” “South Park” and “Full Metal Jacket” showed us that “fuck” can be funny. The thing I have a problem with is gratuitious use of “fuck” for shock value, which I feel it was.

The constant vulgarity and gore (I’ve seen much, much worse, but this just didn’t seem in context) just served to detract from the film. Plus, the plan to kill it was silly and too simmilar to the first.

19

#1 It was a former mining colony converted into a prison after the mine was shut down, that’s why it was such an extensive facility.
#2 It’s a prison, people cuss a lot in prison.
#3 The cafeteria wasn’t any more safe than any other place. Remember when that guy was standing in front of everyone in the cafeteria and he said “there is no alien” and a pair of big claws drop out of the cealing and yoink the guy away in less than a second?

20

My biggest problem with Alien 3 is that the aliens aren’t scary. Alien-Cam is a cheap attempt to make the aliens seem fresh and new, but really, by that point, the jerky-cam was already a tired cliche. We don’t care what the alien point of view is. They’re not invisible monsters, so we don’t need their viewpoint to be able to figure out where they are. It comes down to the kind of horror that tries to create fear by bashing the audience over the head again and again, and typically this sort of horror technique is used by inexperienced directors.

My other problems are ones other people have mentioned here, but mostly the flat, interchangeable characters; the lackluster environment; the cheap, pointless deaths of Hicks and Newt. It isn’t scary. It isn’t any fun. It’s just depressing in a pointless, non-catharctic way. Who will live? who will die? who cares?