ALIEN 3: A Bunch of Lifers Who Found God at the Ass-End of Space

Alien 3 (1992; Theatrical Cut) – Directed by David Fincher – Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Paul McGann, Danny Webb, Pete Postlethwaite, and Lance Henriksen.

ALIEN 3 is a grim movie, soaked in murky olives and browns, but a nonetheless engaging movie until it makes the completely boneheaded decision to off the only two supporting characters it spent any real time developing. From then on, it’s just a movie about killing.

And fire.

Lots of fire.

I want to love ALIEN 3, but I can’t. The opening half of the film is very strong, as first time director David Fincher creates an impressive world for our latest alien installment. Picking up where ALIENS left off, we’re inside the Sulaco as Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Bishop are sleeping in their stasis pods. (Well, Bishop’s not really sleeping so much as he’s been ripped apart and powered off.) The opening titles are intercut with a facehugger crawling over the pods and then attaching itself to an unseen face. A fire starts, the escape pod is jettisoned, and crashes on Fury 161, a male-only penal colony.

Ripley survives. Everyone else dies.

ALIENS director James Cameron has said that he considers the demise of Hicks, Bishop, and Newt as a “slap in the face” to both him and the fans. I can understand that, but I don’t agree with it.

There are two ways that I like to evaluate deaths in fiction: emotionally and narratively. Emotionally, I hate that these three are dead. In a narrative sense, however, it does work. Ripley is a survivor, after all, and their deaths are just an extension of that premise. It’s cruel and harsh and not what I wanted, but as a plot, it’s not a horrible idea.

For the remainder of the film’s first half, we get to see Ripley try to figure out what happened on board the Sulaco and whether an alien is responsible. The film also starts building up the secondary characters. Fury 161 is a corporation prison planet. Weyland-Yutani wanted to shut the prison down, but the inmates ask to stay because they’ve found God and the corporation lets them stay on as a custodial force.

There are no women on Fury and the Warden (Brian Glover) wants to keep it that way. As soon as Ripley comes to his attention he sends for a rescue ship to come pick her up and tells Clemens (Charles Dance), Fury’s doctor, to keep her locked away from the prison population. Ripley and Clemens ignore the Warden’s request because that would make for a boring movie. Ripley gets Clemens to perform an autopsy on Newt and it’s a pretty brutal scene. Ripley has obviously become hardened by everything that’s happened, but watching her force Clemens to cut open Newt is pretty darn brutal.

An alien has survived, too, of course, and he comes bursting out of a dog. Gross but it’s a well-played sequence as the dog is going through all sorts of convulsions as the prisoners are holding a funeral for Hicks and Newt, who get tossed into the prison’s big furnace.

The alien ends up killing a couple of inmates and the Warden ends up blaming a deranged prisoner named Golic (Paul McGann) and disbelieving the whole alien angle.

Through this part of the movie, I’m kinda digging ALIEN 3. Is it as good as the two earlier installments? Not even close, but it’s not bad, either. I like the set up of having all of this action happen on a prison planet where the inmates insist they’ve found God. Nothing like a murderous alien monster to put these new ideals and morals to the test. We’ve also got three solid secondary characters in Clemens, the Warden, and Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the prison’s religious leader.

You can see the tensions starting to form as these three men will work with and against Ripley as the alien threat increases. We’ve got the aliens, the prisoners, a closed facility, and a young but clearly talented director ready to put all of these elements into motion. What could possibly screw this up?

Killing two of them off right away would do it, and that’s exactly what the film does for reasons I cannot figure out.

Clemens is killed in front of Ripley, who freaks and runs to the cafeteria, where the Warden is killed right in front of her.

What? Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought offing the two secondary characters the film has spent the most time building up was a good idea? With Clemens and the Warden gone, there’s a massive personality void in the film that Fincher tries to fill with all sorts of killing and fire and planning. Dutton is a great actor but he can’t carry the entirety of the non-Ripley portions of the film. As a result, it’s just a well shot bunch of rather meaningless action.

The feud between Fincher and FOX is pretty darn legendary. Fincher is the only director of the four ALIEN movies that’s had nothing to do with any of the re-releases, as the studio apparently re-cut the film without his approval after he’d turned in his cut and before it hit the theaters. There were massive problems on the set (they began shooting without a completed script), so who knows how much Fincher is to blame for the second half of the movie.

Whether it’s Fincher’s fault or the studio’s, the second of ALIEN 3 ruins the experience. Ripley finds out she’s got the alien Queen inside of her, which is a nice twist, but it just reinforces that the film spent an hour building up Clemens and the Warden only to jettison them. The corporation’s rescue squad shows up to try and take Ripley in because they still want the aliens for their bio-weapons division.

Yawn.

How about a film where they’ve got the aliens instead of yet another movie where this sits in the background?

Ripley ends up tossing herself into the furnace just as the alien Queen comes bursting out of her chest, and it’s a nice ending but an empty one. I do like how the aliens have chosen Ripley to be the host for their new Queen because it shows that they are not simply killing/reproduction machines. Now, maybe the fachugger chose Ripley because she was the healthiest and strongest survivor of the event on LV-426, but it certainly plays as a personal attack.

ALIEN 3 starts out strongly enough that it’s a shame to watch it sputter and clank its way to the end. The prison population could have served as an excellent cast of characters with which to play out this latest installment, bu the film isn’t interested enough in developing their characters for me to care about them.

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ALIEN / PREDATOR Review Index

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality
ALIENS: My Mommy Said There Were No Monsters. No Real Ones. But There Are.
ALIEN 3: A Bunch of Lifers Who Found God at the Ass-End of Space
ALIEN RESURRECTION: Must Be a Chick Thing
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: I Think This is a Manhood Ritual
ALIEN VS. PRDATOR: REQUIEM: Small Town America Kills Two Franchises at Once

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING (3D): I’m Not Going to Complain About 90 Minutes of Kate Beckinsale in a Catsuit …

Underworld: Evolution (2012; in 3D) – Directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sandrine Holt, Theo James, Michael Ealy, India Eisley, Stephen Rea, and Charles Dance.

… but I will complain about nearly everything else in this dreary, tired shoot ‘em up.

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING does not do for 3D what it does for catsuits.

Look, I’m never going to get tired of Kate Beckinsale. Ever. Even if she wasn’t jumping around looking all bad ass in her leather and latex catsuit, she’s one of the most stunningly beautiful women walking. That’s awesome, but that’s not enough to make a movie awesome, and unfortunately UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING is just not a very good movie.

I don’t really want to talk to much about the movie, and not just because there’s not a lot to talk about. The film jumps the story 12 years into the future because … well, because that’s the number someone pulled out of a hat. There’s no real discernible difference in this world. There was a “Purge,” where humans went all crazy killing all the vamps and wolves they could and driving the rest underground. They put Selene (Kate Beckinsale), Michael (Scott Speedman, who’s not in the film, but whose face was used to make it look like he was), and their daughter Eve (India Eisley) in cryogenic suspension and do all kinds of tests on them to come up with evil science-related stuff. Selene and Eve escape and then …

Then the shooting starts. It stops an hour or so later.

When the film does the franchise’s trademark shots of Kate looking sexy and bad-ass (usually in shots involving smoke, slow-mo, and her icy-blue enhanced eyes), AWAKENING is a reasonable enough facsimile of the first two movies to not be a waste of your time, but even the action sequences here seem tired and dated. Selene can walk around in the sunlight now, and the film takes advantage of this by … *grumble* … by having two scenes take place in the sunlight. One takes place in a car when the film establishes that Selene being in sunlight is a big deal. The second is when she gets out of the car and walks into a building.

That’s it.

What’s the point of her having these new powers if you don’t take advantage of it?

What’s worse is that most of the action scenes take place in dingy, cramped, dark settings: a vampire coven’s underground lair, an abandoned building, a pier, a rooftop, a science lab, and the big finale takes place in … a parking garage.

Honestly.

All of it creates a claustrophobic feel to this film, a feeling made worse by the 3D.

Which gets me to what I really want to talk about: 3D. I haven’t seen a 3D movie since Captain EO. Yeah, Captain EO. And after watching AWAKENING, I really don’t have a lot of desire to see another one.

Now, I am completely aware that UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING does not represent the finest and highest quality 3D technology the world is capable of producing. And were a film (like Hugo, for instance) made to take advantage of what 3D has to offer, I would gladly pay my money to see it, but AWAKENING does nothing with the technology that makes the use of it seem the least bit worthwhile. I mean, big deal, some shards of glass fly at my face. A werewolf sticks his snout in mine.

It doesn’t add anything to my experience.

In fact, it hurts the experience. Perhaps my “Real D 3D” glasses are to blame, but I’ll take a crisp, bright image in 2D over a muted, dull image in 3D any old day of the lunar calendar. At several times during the film I actually took the glasses off and just watched the film without them. I kept waiting for the sequence where it would all pay off, but it never arrives. I’m sure the extra $2 I paid (well, that the person I went with paid) to watch the 3D version helps the bottom line, but a bad experience hurts the bottom line of every film that comes along after this that has the 3D option.

I’ll offer two caveats to this: One, when we left the theater there was a massive line waiting to get in. My guess is that those people were there to see the 3D version of Phantom Menace because what else is in the theaters right now that could get that many people to wait in a huge line in the middle of a day (even a Saturday) in Reno? Perhaps my dissent puts me in the minority. There’s no shortage of 3D movies being released, so obviously there’s an audience for them, but a movie like AWAKENING just feels like a 2D movie with 3D tacked on.

The second caveat is that the 3D trailer for Wrath of the Titans looked much better than anything offered in AWAKENING, so it is completely possible that I just happened to sit through one of the worst examples of what the current tech can do.

All of the above being true, I didn’t have a completely horrible time. No, AWAKENING isn’t a good movie, but it is a mildly diverting one. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to give Selene a kid to worry about (for the fifth film, how about we give her nothing to worry about and just let her kick ass?) and I’ve completely had it with the vampire/lycan hybrid angle, but if you’re either a fan of the franchise or a fan of catsuits, there’s nothing else in the theaters right now that offers both. AWAKENING isn’t anything it doesn’t advertise itself to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically good.

But, hey, 90 minutes of Kate Beckinsale. I’ll see anything she’s in, catsuit or not.

Well, anything except Pearl Harbor.

YOUR HIGHNESS: I Will Probably Die On This Quest

Your Highness (2011; Unrated Version) – Directed by David Gordon Green – Starring Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Justin Theroux, Zooey Deschanel, Toby Jones, Rasmus Hardiker, Charles Dance, and Damian Lewis.

It would be wrong to say that YOUR HIGHNESS is disappointing because, as it so clearly advertises, it’s made by the people who made Pineapple Express.

Which sucked.

So it doesn’t really come as a surprise that YOUR HIGHNESS kind of sucks, too.

I mean, sure, I did once say that all I wanted out of modern cinema was to bear witness to a scene in which Natalie Portman played a panflute to draw the attention of a Minotaur with an erection, and that someone would then cut that erection off the minotaur, and later Zooey Deschanel would try to put said sliced erection in her mouth, so I’ll give YOUR HIGHNESS credit enough for that, but other than that sequence, this is a really dreadful film …

It’s a shame, too, because there’s a decent amount of talent assembled in the movie, and there is an honest attempt to both tell a story and deliver a real character arc for Thadeous (Danny McBride). McBride and James Franco (who plays his brother, Fabious) have some decent chemistry, and there’s nothing wrong with watching Portman and Deschanel romp around in period costumes for 100 minutes. I love the idea, too, of a raunchy medieval comedy, but while this film hits the first two fine, it fails in the third. YOUR HIGHNESS is just … not … funny.

No one in the movie acts like this is anything more than a high school play. It’s honestly one of the worst acted movies in recent memory, with all of the principals putting off that ridiculous vibe of, “Hey! We’re making a comedy here! Aren’t we being silly? Aren’t we saying dirty things?” Watching YOUR HIGHNESS is like watching an extended SNL skit where the actors are purposely being stupid with their performances and looking off-camera for their lines. McBride, Franco, Portman, and Justin Theroux all completely overact – I get that this is the point since everyone is doing it, but it’s just not that funny and it just doesn’t work.

In fact, this is one of those movies that is so bad that watching the Gag Reel is infinitely more rewarding than watching the actual movie.

I’m sure these folks had a grand old time making the movie (it’s obvious from the bonus features), so it’s perhaps doubly unfortunate that so little of that humor made it into the actual film.

The premise here is that Fabious is the perfect son and perfect prince and perfect hero and Thadeous is the imperfect son and imperfect prince and imperfect hero. Fabious is about to marry Belladonna (Deschanel) when Leezar (Theroux) shows up and kidnaps her because he believes he’s the chosen one who is destined to impregnate a virgin and control a dragon. Fabious, of course, decides to go on a quest to rescue her, and Thadeous (who skipped the wedding because his feelings were hurt) is like, “Good luck,” but their father the King (the always good – even here – Charles Dance) makes him go along with them.

Soon into the quest, Fabious is betrayed by his men, forcing Thadeous and his squire Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) into a more prominent role. So then … things happen. They join forces with the duplicitous Isabel (Portman) and there’s lots of sword fighting and killing and sexual jokes and Courtney getting raped by the aforementioned Minotaur. They save Belladonna, she and Fab get married, and Thadeous and Isabel go off to defeat an evil witch and get her chastity belt removed. For much of the time spent watching this movie, I had the feeling that this movie was made because McBride, Franco, and director David Gordon Green got roasted and thought it would be awesome to make a movie where they could get Portman and Deschanel to say as many naughty words as possible.

YOUR HIGHNESS is good for a few small laughs (there’s a musical bit in the film between Deschanel and Franco that works, and another in the Deleted Scenes that’s good, too), but in the end it’s just not very good because it’s just not very funny. The film would have been better served using the extended scenes included in the bonus features. There’s one with Portman and McBride and another with Deschanel and Theroux that are funnier than most of the gags in the film, but were cut, presumably because they go on too lon.

They don’t. The film does.