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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
 Posted - 07/15/2007 : 11:22:35 PM
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Allow me to tell you why half-good/half-lousy movies are the best fun for me. Describing why an indisputably good movie is good is no fun, because if it’s that good, there’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said before and isn’t already known. Ditto for lousy movies. On top of that, if the reviewer likes an eminently good movie that much, s/he might overlook or deliberately ignore flaws; and the same reviewer might overlook or deliberately ignore virtues in an eminently bad movie.
By “half-good/half-lousy,” I don’t mean a movie where everything is reasonably competent with nothing being exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, resulting in me shrugging and saying, “It’s okay, I guess.” I mean a movie where some elements are really excellent and other elements are absolute crap, resulting in me not knowing what to think about the movie until after thorough analysis. And that uncertainty stimulates me to do said thorough analysis. That’s fun. Jaws 2 is a good example of this. So are all four Planet of the Apes sequels and most of the Star Trek movies.
Alien3 is one of the best examples of it that I’ve ever seen.
If you want to have some fun, when you see two sci-fi fans having an intelligent and friendly debate about sci-fi movies, walk past them and say “Alien 3” over your shoulder as you pass. Come back in 10 minutes, and they’ll be rolling on the ground punching each other out. “Love it or hate it” is how it’s most often described. Me? I neither love it nor hate it because of how evenly the pros and cons of the movie are distributed through its running length. Since the first two Alien movies were royally good movies, anything less than royally good would be a disappointment. So naturally, plenty of fans deemed the movie horrible simply because it didn’t live up to its predecessors’ standards. Others felt it was just fine because the lapses in quality were in places where it wasn’t as important to maintain the high standards. Still others were apologetically negative about the movie, citing corporate interference and the inadvisability of hiring a rookie director.
I’m not interested in any of that, because what’s wrong about this movie and what’s right about the movie are almost perfectly equal.
Here we go.
Naturally, the first thing we get is the standard 20th Century Fox theme. But at the tail end of it, instead of the grand flourish that we expect, the notes fall in pitch and volume until we see an opening starfield. I like this. It hints that this is not gonna be a happy carefree movie. Nice touch! The opening credits are shown over the starfield, intercut with shots of inside the Sulaco, where the survivors from Aliens sleep. [Sidenote: Why does the camera always pan down during starfield openings? Why not ever up? Or laterally? ] After Charles Dance’s credit, we see that there’s an open alien egg inside the Sulaco (it’s also upside-down, I don’t know why).
I hate this. I disliked it the first time I saw it, and I still do. For two reasons:
1. Part of the fun of a sequel that continues a story that has no obvious set-up for further adventures is finding out what has happened to set the heroes on the new adventure. This idea of oh-yeah-there-was-another-egg-that-nobody-noticed is totally unfun, both for its abruptness and its idiocy, which leads me to…
2. Ripley has had two encounters with aliens, and both times she thought she had killed the alien only to find that it was still a danger. I can’t believe that she would get back into the sleep capsule without doing a veerry thorough F.O.D. walk-down, looking for precisely that. And we know she didn’t do such a walk-down, because the egg doesn’t look to be too well-hidden. Sure, its not in plain sight, but its not like a simple stroll behind whatever that thing is that the egg is behind wouldn’t reveal it.
So this is disappointing.
The facehugger approaches Newt’s pod, cracks the glass, and bleeds some acid onto the deck. The acid eats through the floor which causes enough smoke to trigger the smoke alarms. The automated alarm announces “Fire in cryogenic compartment. All personnel report to emergency escape vehicles. Deep space flight will commence in T-minus 20 seconds.” Huh? Automated alarm system to announce a fire, but no automated sprinkler system? Those exist today,for God’s sake! And the automated alarm system obviously knows it sucks, because as soon as it detects the fire, it immediately announces abandon ship, and sleep pod jettison in 20 seconds (I could make a dig at Aliens for establishing that the Sulaco would have no conscious crew aboard, but I don’t feel like it).
Throughout all this, the music has been a tasteful cosmic-style ambience, with a lone female singer “aah”-ing away. No problem there. When David Fincher’s credit comes up, there’s suddenly an ominous bass note. It sounds like a synthesizer note with a wah-pedal effect. Maybe it’s a rookie initation thing.
The escape pod containing the sleeping crew of four jettisons and falls towards an ambigious-looking planet. On-screen text informs us that this is “Fiorina “Fury” 161. Outer-Veil Mineral Ore Refinery. Double Y Chromosome – Work Correctional Facility.” After a pause, the text remembers to add “Maximum Security.” Well, no f**kin’ s**t, it’s maximum security. How exciting would it be if she landed on a double-Y chromosome white-collar prison? I’m serious, if the pause before adding the last was there to heighten the effect of “Maximum Security,” it only did the opposite. Especially because not only is the designation an Informed Attribute, but there’s also never any evidence in the movie that the place really needs to be maximum security.
**nitpick mode on** Oh yeah, and “Double Y” should be hyphenated, you ungrammatical clods. **nitpick modes off**
We see a view from the planet’s surface: A coastline with industrial structures, high winds, and those futuristic-sounding thunder crashes that I’ve never understood. Do real thunder crashes not sound sufficiently frightening? The pod falls as a flaming projectile into the water, sending up a geyser of water. It looks almost precisely the same as when the Imperial probe droid landed on Hoth, it really does. When the geyser it at it’s peak, we get a fade-out. This is interesting in a neutral way, simply because you don’t see many fade-outs in sci-fi/action/horror movies.
I’ll continue tomorrow unless I’m suckin’ and someone tells me to shut up.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2007 : 9:53:58 PM
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We see a bunch of bald rags-clad men opening the pod and yelling over the wind and each other in thick and diverse British accents. There’s a dog that barks up a storm. There’s also a halfhearted attempt at a false scare with some loose wires meant to resemble a facehugger hanging behind a guy, but it’s too unconvincing (not to mention too early) to generate much feeling. The guy notices that there’s one survivor in the sleep tubes.
Cut to Ripley's unconscious body being placed on the doctor’s table and tended to while we see a computer image report saying that while Ripley has survived, Newt, Hicks, and Bishop have not. Each casualty is treated to a brief shot of them at the point of death. I gotta say, Newt’s does look rather gruesome, although later dialogue will contradict it a bit.
Here’s where we’re gonna have a shouting match. Nobody was pleased with this decision. The fans weren’t pleased, and James Cameron himself was very displeased. I remember in the theater hearing a couple of folks give a negatively incredulous, “What the f**k?!?” To this day, that’s probably the single biggest complaint about this movie, the killing off of two characters who we already knew and liked. NOBODY was pleased by this.
Except me.
I thought it was sad that they hadn’t survived, and I was a bit disappointed that we wouldn’t be seeing them in this movie. However, it’s an unwritten rule in sci-fi/action movies (a rule held very firmly to in Aliens) that you don’t kill nice guys, and you don’t kill little kids. This movie does BOTH before we even hit the 7-minute mark. And to make it even better, it does so without a trace of irony. It doesn’t seem like it’s done as a morbid joke, it doesn’t seem like it was done just to be different. It comes across as a natural result of events thus far.
Admittedly, I don’t know if Hicks et al. were killed off because the actors weren’t available, or if someone simply didn’t want to have to bother with writing for them. If the former, then nobody can be faulted for killing them off. Because if the actors don’t wanna do it, how’re you gonna make them? And what else are you gonna do, put a ringer in? Nobody likes ringers. Write them out of continuity with a throwaway line dialogue to explain where they are now? Nobody likes that either.
On top of all this, killing off beloved characters adds to the intended mood of the movie. This movie is all about mood. Dreary, gloomy, depressing mood. While nothing about any of the Alien movies indicates anything other than dreary/gloomy/depressing, this scene is the first sign in Alien3 that the mood is going to the max.
So call me all the mean names you want. Question my ancestry. Liken me to Hitler. Tell all your friends that I dip granola bars in vanilla yogurt. I don’t care. I like this scene.
Cut away from Ripley’s ministrations to a shot of the pod being swung around on a giant crane. Inside the pod is the dog, barking at the facehugger that’s still in there. You mean the dudes hooked the cables onto the pod, hoisted it up, and are swinging to wherever, and they just let the dog hang about in/on there instead of taking him elsewhere? I guess so, because behind the dog, we can see lights swaying about to simulate the pod’s movement waaay up in the air. The facehugger, too, is a mystery twice over:
1. When the fire broke out in the Sulaco, we saw the sleep tubes being shunted down chutes into the escape pod for jettisoning. How did the facehugger know to follow them into the escape pod? I suppose we can grant a higher-than-animal intelligence to the adult aliens. But the facehuggers shouldn’t know s**t.
2. In the first movie, the facehugger died after letting go of Cain. We assumed that that was part of their nature life cycle. I don’t believe there was anything to the contrary in Aliens. So now we see a facehugger still alive and with full hugability after already having hugged face. So either continuity has been altered, or there were TWO facehuggers in the escape pod. If the former, then what killed the hugger in the first movie? And if the latter, then Ripley is a goddamn dullard for not doing the F.O.D. walkdown on the Sulaco, thereby missing TWO huggers.
Cut to the…meeting hall, I guess. Superintendant Andrews, the warden of the facility, is informing the inmates of the crashed pod and its female survivor. He says, in his gratingly nasal voice, that it happened “at 0600, on the morning watch.” As opposed to 0600 on the evening watch. He says he’s sent for a rescue ship that should arrive A.S.A.P. to get her out of there, and the inmates just grumble. It’s in this scene that the religious aspect of the movie comes into play. An inmate named Morse says that everyone has taken a vow of celibacy, and the having a woman around makes that vow difficult to keep. Ergo, they don’t want her there. I’m guessing that this bit is a leftover from an earlier draft of the screenplay where the movie was set on a planet of monks; because this particular plot thread, while referenced a few more times in the movie, doesn’t really go anywhere, and it’s only function is to give an inmate cause to defend Ripley later in the movie.
Also in this scene is the first appearance of the two noteworthy inmates. The first is played by Charles S. Dutton. At the time this movie was released, he was the star of a successful TV series on FOX called Roc, a domestic comedy in which Dutton plays the title character, a lovable family man. The show lasted for three seasons, picked up a couple Emmy nominations, and actually ran some episodes live on national TV, which is pretty neat. So it’s kinda hard to see this lovable family man playing a violent criminal and take him seriously…..until you learn that in real life, he had actually served 7 years in prison for stabbing someone to death in a street fight. I didn’t know that until about 20 minutes ago. Pretty bizarre.
The second noteworthy character is Dr. Clemens, played by Charles Dance. This guy is the only character besides Ripley who I can actually give a s**t about. He’s intelligent, he’s level-headed, and he’s understated. But beginning with this scene and lasting all the way until his last, he’s so understated that I needed to turn on the subtitles to catch everything he was saying. I’m serious, he mumbles his ass off!
Cut to the infirmary. Dr. Clemens picks something off of Ripley’s forehead and prepares to inject her with something. Just as he inserts the needle, Ripley comes to and grabs his wrist that holds the needle. Uh…I wouldn’t do that. Dr. Clemens explains that she oughta shave her head because of lice (prolly what he picking at earlier. In the director’s cut, there are more visual references to lice), and he tells her that her pod crashed and that she’s the only survivor. I like Ripley having one eye bloody/bloodshot from injury. In this kind of movie, a heroine doesn’t need to stay pretty. She stands up and asks for some clothes and to see the bodies. When Dr. Clemens says that nobody there has seen a woman, then turns away and mutters, “Neither have I, for that matter,” I swear he’s taking a page from Patrick Stewart. He looks like him, sounds like him, articulates like him. It’s all good, though, because again, Dr. Clemens’ quiet reserve is very refreshing amid the loudmouthed and profanity-filled inmates.
I was gonna do more tonight, but the Oakland A’s game just started (and they just traded Jason Kendall to the Cubs! Garbage!!!). I’ll continue tomorrow.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/16/2007 9:56:14 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/17/2007 : 10:22:31 PM
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Cut to Clemens escorting a clothed Ripley to the escape pod. He exposits that there are only 25 people in this prison, and they make lead sheet for toxic waste containers. He addresses her as Lieutenant Ripley (pronounced “Leftenant.” A British thing I’ve never understood). When Ripley asks how he knows her name, he says that it was stenciled on the back of her shorts. The only reason I can think of for that bit is to provide the basis for a half-hearted subplot to come, but it hardly needs to be there because there’s already enough of a basis as is. More on that later. I can buy her name on her shorts, because in Basic Training, we had our names on the backs of ours. Not our ranks, though. Besides, we saw the computer text showing her name and rank, so maybe he’s just being playful. Incidentally, this is the only scene in which Clemens raises his voice (over the machinery noise), hence it’s the only scene where I don’t have to use the subtitles.
In the pod, Clemens tells her that Hicks was killed by a collapsing support beam, and Newt drowned in her cryotube. He says that he doesn’t think she knew what happened. This contradicts the image of her that we saw earlier. Mouth open in what looks like a scream, one hand pressing against the glass. I’d say she had a ballpark idea of what happened. **shrug** Maybe he’s trying not to add to Ripley’s emotional trauma. Through her tears, Ripley notices a burn on the side of a cryotube and asks to see the remains of Newt.
Cut to one of the inmates as he finds the dog, whose face now bears facehugger scars. Pretty effective. The dog looks like he’s been through something ghastly. None of the facehugged humans in the previous movies showed any scars, though. **shrug** No biggie.
In the morgue, Clemens pulls Newt’s slab out of its rack, and pulls back the sheet. The camera cuts away as her eyes are revealed. I’m guessing it’s because the Newt mannequin might not have looked sufficiently like Carrie Henn. Ripley asks for a moment alone, Clemens and an unnamed inmate retreat to give her privacy. Just before Ripley closes Newt’s eyes, I notice that her bloodshot left eye (Ripley’s) is no longer bloodshot, and a minute later, it is. **sirens of the Continuity Cops approaching** Ripley closes Newt’s eyes in the classic cinematic don’t-actually-touch-the-eyelids manner. I’m serious, there’s a close-up of Ripley’s hand and Newt’s eye, and it’s clear that none of the four fingers ever touches the eyelid. Ripley gives the corpse a rub-down, finding no evidence of an alien, but still not convinced that there’s nothing there. Clemens comes over to find out what in the world she’s doing massaging a corpse*, and Ripley requests an autopsy. When Clemens asks on what grounds, Ripley says possible contagion of cholera. Clemens sees right through it, saying there hasn’t been a cholera case in over 200 years. Ripley looks pathetic for a few seconds, then whispers, “Please?” Then we cut to Clemens beginning the autopsy. It’s that simple!
[* - It is not possible to give a corpse an erection. Erections require blood flow. Corpses have no blood flow. I hate having to explain that.]
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I can see that Ripley wouldn’t want to go into what she’s really looking for, given that nobody would believe it, and it would take forever for her to explain it convincingly enough to be believed. On the other hand, for all Ripley knows at this point, there ain’t no rush, so why not try telling him and see what happens? And if you’re gonna lie about it, why choose an illness that hasn’t had a documented case in over 200 years?
The autopsy scene is well-done, I think. It’s not visually gross at all, just stage blood; but the sounds and the sights of the instruments make it viscerally repulsive. I like it! I also notice that in that particularly lighting angle, Clemens looks like Cal Ripken. Charles Dance continues to be nicely understated. When Ripley says, “Open the chest,” his expression is juuuuust enough that you can see the thought balloon over his head saying, “You’re serious, aren’t you?” When he makes to do so and she whispers, “Careful,” he stares at her for juuuuust long enough that you can see the thought balloon saying, “You know something that you’re not telling me, but I’ll find out later.” Nice! Clemens finishes the autopsy, proving that Newt had indeed drowned. He asks Ripley what she was really looking for. Ripley is spared having to answer by the arrival of Superintendent Andrews and Golic, his doofus assistant. Andrews cusses Clemens out for letting Ripley “parade in front of the prisoners.” After a brief spat, Andrews reluctantly grants Ripley’s request for a cremation of Hicks and Newt. Good enough, but there are two points that I’m drawn to:
1. Clemens helps Ripley's request out by going along with Ripley’s cholera line. I can understand him doing that to get Andrews off his ass; but when to cremate or not to cremate is the question, I would think Dr. Clemens, who is already suspicious enough of Ripley’s motives and doesn’t believe her one damn bit, wouldn’t be up for cremation at all until he had gotten some more convincing answers from her about what the autopsy was for.
2. Andrews wheezes at her that the place is filled with violent criminals, that they wouldn’t be pleased to see a woman around, and that she should keep a low profile. She answers with a quietly sarcastic “I see. For my own personal safety.” I know Ripley is a tough lady, but she’s not a stupid lady. She can hold her own in a fight, but she doesn’t go courting them. Granted, she’s been through two ordeals that make anything Andrews says seem totally unthreatening; but going through those experiences doesn’t make her invulnerable to a couple dozen violent criminals. So staying put is actually a pretty good idea, within the context that she doesn’t know about another alien being around. Of course, had Andrews bothered to tell her (and dialogue establishes that he is meeting her for the first time in this scene) that a rescue ship was on its way, it would’ve been an even better idea. I think a more believable reaction from Ripley would’ve been an irritated and dismissive nod.
Cut to huge open-air furnaces. Ripley and all the prisoners are gathered for the funeral, which Andrews presides over. Why are the inmates there? Andrews doesn’t want Ripley around them, and they never knew the deceased. **shrug** Andrews speech, read from a text, is short and apparently reverential, until the very end. He finishes with “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” When he says “dust to dust,” his voice takes on a kind of pleased tone, like he’s enjoying the chance to do one of these funeral things and say that line like preachers in the movies, way cool dude! Then Dillon (that’s Charles Dutton’s character, I forgot to mention his name in the previous post), gives an impromptu and much more genuine-sounding speech. Intercut with the speech are shots of the dog, now writhing in pain as the alien bursts out of its chest. Once again, I have mixed feelings about this:
UPs:
- The speech really does sound quite nice, and the image of the two mummified bodies falling in slo-mo into the furnace did make me (and probably most fans) feel a soft sadness at the final departure of these two cool characters.
- After two movies each with a frightening chestburster scene, how could this movie’s chestburster scene compete for visceral punch? I don’t know if that’s possible, but this movie makes a good try by having it burst from a pooch. Nobody likes to see a domestic animal in pain, so the scene generates a least a little bit of the intended feeling. It’s easily better than the scene where it burst from a dead ox (you can see it on the director’s cut).
DOWNs:
- Having a real pooch necessitates the death to be…not quite off-camera, but not in full view like in the previous movies. This does diminish the effect. Had we not already seen chestburstings, we could’ve relied on imagination to fill in the ghastly details. Since we have seen them…**shrug**…not seeing it full-on this time cushions the wallop a bit.
- The ironic juxtaposition of Dillon’s speech and the chestburst strikes me as rather twee. I remember on first viewing thinking, “Oh, heeere we go.” Especially because one line in particular, “Within each seed, there is a promise of a flower,” is a bit contrived. I understand the whole circle-of-life idea, but that particular line in kinda…angled, I guess. What “seed” was he referring to? Those bodies weren’t spores setting in fertile soil. They were being dropped into a furnace to be forever atomized.
- As much as I like the idea of killing off Newt and Hicks, when he says "We commit these bodies with a glad heart," even I can recognize what a kick in the teeth that might've felt like to those who didn't.
I'll continue tomorrow.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/17/2007 10:37:46 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/18/2007 : 8:38:09 PM
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Cut to a fogged-up shower mirror, which after a swipe of a hand shows the reflection of the now-bald Ripley. Props to Weaver for agreeing to have her head shaved for the movie. Even if she did get paid extra for it, it still couldn’t have been pleasant for her. Especially as it really doesn’t relate to anything in the movie’s plot. The plot’s given reason for everyone being bald is to prevent head lice. But there’s only a throwaway line early in the movie and one or two very brief shots of insects. Other than that, there’s no narrative reason for her to be bald. It does add a bit to the gloom, though. To see this eminently female protagonist now reduced to baldness and wearing drab green rags while mucking about on a prison planet with all her friends dead. A descent.
She enters the mess hall, where everyone stares at her. The very first shot of her entering the hall was, I think, a very good choice, because without her hair, she looks royally gawky. Very slender, bit of a longish neck, and now a bald pate…she looks not just gawky, but gossamer. Spindly. Among the prison population, vulnerable. Nice touch!
She has a seat across from Dillon. She tries to thank him for his funeral speech, but he says, “You don’t wanna know me, lady. I’m a murderer and rapist of women.” Once again, this movie was released when Roc was popular on TV, so I was thinking, “No, you’re not. You’re a lovable family guy. Knock it off.” Ripley replies with, “Then I guess I must make you nervous.” Even allowing for the fact that Ripley ain’t lookin’ too comfortable herself at this point, I think that line is a tad too flippant, just like the bit in the morgue. It’s pretty clear by now that the movie’s approach is that after Ripley’s experiences with the aliens, nothing is going to daunt her too much. Fair enough, and believable enough. But as before, I don’t think that would translate the way it does. I would imagine that violent hyper-male (double-Y, remember?) criminals would take Ripley’s line as a challenge; and I don’t think Ripley, now matter how hardened she now is, would be all-but-daring them to do something. I’m not buying it. One again, she may be tough, but she ain’t stupid. Dillon tells her with mock-pleasantness that the inmates have been able to resist temptation thus far only because there’s never been any temptation there to resist.
Cut to Dr. Clemens and Ripley hangin’ out…somewhere, I guess…among the iron pillars and beams of the complex. Clemens exposits that the inmates had found religion five years ago, and they’d chosen to live there as custodians after the prison was officially closed down by The Company. Mmmm….even among only 25 people, I think five years is a pretty short incubation time for a religion. Clemens ducks Ripley’s question of how he managed to get stuck here by asking her again what she was looking for in the autopsy. Ripley ducks his question with “You attracted to me?” That’s how the subtitle prints it. After listening to it four times, it’s ambiguous whether it’s a question or a statement. Either way, it’s pretty f**kin’ stupid. Trapped on a planet of double-Y men, no women in sight, and suddenly a woman shows up. Gee, ya think he might be attracted to you? I don’t know if that was supposed to be brilliant insight on Ripley’s part. If so, it ain’t workin’. And by the way, this scene also required subtitles for me to catch. SPEAK UP, DAMMIT!!!
Time for a death scene. In a giant airshaft complete with giant rotating fan, an inmate sings “In The Year 2525” while scraping crud off the ceiling. He finds the molted facehugger skin, gives it a once-over, then drops it in disgust. Noticing movement in a hole in the wall, he sticks his head in, thinking it’s the dog. This is not the least bit suspenseful because we all know what’s going to happen. Guy off by himself, sticking his head in dark places, giant fan. Do the math. No scare at all. Especially as his dicing in the fan is not believable at all.
Do you have a household fan at your place? See how the blades are angled instead of blade-on in the direction that the blades rotate? That’s how the fan is able to push the air in the desired direction. The fan in this scene is similarly angled. The blades are angled so that the air should be blowing toward the inmate. It shouldn’t be sucking him in, it should be pushing him back. While boring quick cuts are in use for this scene, they’re not so quick that we can’t clearly see that there is no alien pulling or pushing him into the fan. We're supposed to believe that he's being pulled into the fan by the suction created by the fan. Sloppy!
And that’s only half of the sloppiness.
The angle of the blades, in addition to determining direction of air flow, is also a coincidental way of reducing possibility of serious injury. If you stick your finger in the top of your fan and try to slow down the blades that way, you could easily get cut because the blades are end-on in relation to your finger. But remove the front grill from your fan and try to stop it with your finger. Since the blades are angled so that they’re not end-on, your finger is bounced off the blade upon contact. It might smart a little, but the angle of the blades cause your finger to be knocked back. The same should happen to this inmate, but on a larger scale. The first blade to touch him should knock him back. Since he’s on a solid surface and not hovering in air like your finger in my example, maybe the second blade would knock him back as well. And that should be it. That’s not to say that the inmate wouldn’t be injured or even killed. He would certainly be injured and maybe killed, simply by the blunt force trauma of a heavy-as-hell metal blade moving as fast as it is striking him. But it would be BLUNT force trauma. It shouldn’t splatter him all over the walls like that. At worst, the blade would strike him in the head and near-decapitate him. At best, it would strike a leg and require a below-knee amputation.
Deliberately abrupt cut-away to Ripley lying on a cot. Her eye has now healed. She turns onto her other side, and sees that Clemens has a bar code tattooed on the back of head. We see that she and Clemens have gotten it together. I’d love to know how the discussions for this scene went. I’m sure there had to be somebody wanting to make a sex scene as graphic as the violent scenes. But the movie goes for a subdued approach, giving us enough to make it clear that they’ve blasted each other through the ceiling, but left the details to our imagination. It don’t think it really would’ve mattered too much either way, but I count this as a plus, simply because restraint in an artistic medium can be difficult, especially when you’re trying to top previous entries in the franchise. This franchise has nothing sexual about it (shut up, all you FreudoGoths, I’ve heard your arguments, and they don’t wash), so throwing something graphically sexual might’ve given the message of “It’s hard to keep the violence fresh, so we gotta give you something.”
Beginning to dress, Clemens acknowledges that he’s ducks Ripley’s question of what he’s doing in this prison. Clemens reiterates his question of why the bodies had to be cremated. Ripley’s answer is interesting not for what she says, but for how she says it. She “I had a terrible dream in hypersleep. I had to be sure what killed her. Anyway, I made a mistake.” It seems to me that she is, at least partially, believing it. Given the fact that she’s bothering to get close to someone and is in as relaxed a mood as she has even been in the entire franchise, it seems that she really does believe that the danger is over. **shrug** Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I’m reading it.
When Ripley mentions that she’s fraternized with a prisoner, Clemens tells her that he is not a prisoner. She mentions the bar code, and he acknowledges that “That does deserve an explanation. But I don’t think now is the moment.” By now, it’s clear that Ripley and Clemens have a chess match going on between themselves. They each want to trust each other, but neither wants to give away too much. Clemens makes it obvious to her that he does indeed have something to give away, while Ripley doesn’t need to do the same because it is self-evident. For a mere subplot in a mere horror sequel, this is pretty damn good! Clemens is likable, and it’s clear that whatever it is he’s hiding, it’s bothering him and he’d like to get it off his chest….if only he trusted her a little bit more. Ripley is likable, and we know what she’s hiding, and she’d like to get it off her chest…if only she felt that he would trust her. Not only is this interesting to see, it also has me rooting for both of them. That’s hard to do. In any genre.
The discussion is cut short when Clemens is paged to come immediately to vent shaft 22 where, “one of the prisoners has been…diced.” Clemens leaves with characteristic reserve, and Ripley lies there looking pensive.
I'm afraid the next post won't be until Saturday evening. My band has a show to rehearse for tomorrow and perform Friday. In the meantime, I hope I'm doing a good job of making this interesting.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/18/2007 8:44:06 PM |
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Gristle McThornbody
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
Germany
186 Posts |
Posted - 07/21/2007 : 2:38:01 PM
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quote:
In the meantime, I hope I'm doing a good job of making this interesting.
Yep, you are. As someone who falls outside of the "you either love it or hate it" camps concerning Alien3, I'm enjoying the review.
"Hi, I'm Bob Evil!" |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/21/2007 : 4:07:40 PM
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Thank you kindly, Gristle! :)
In the air shaft, gore covers the walls and ceiling. Ridiculous. When Andrews asks who the victim was, Clemens answers that it was Murphy, adding that the boot lying nearby is Murphy’s. That’s a tad bit much to establish Clemens as the resident intellect. We can already tell he’s the resident intellect, and how he knows that the boot is Murphy’s is never explained.
Aaron (who I mistakenly referred to as Golic in the morgue scene), the doofus, gives us the first good hint of his doofosity here. He says “Almost happened to me once. I’ve told them so many times, ‘Stay away from the fans.’” Today, this character is seen as a futuristic forerunner of Forrest Gump; but it’s actually conveyed with impressive subtlety. So much so that the movie will later add a throwaway line just for those who don’t get it, and there’s no shame on anyone who didn’t. Rather than have Aaron do outright stupid stuff or say outright stupid things, he just reacts to events in a mildly dim manner.
There’s only one problem, though; and to me, it’s a biggie: There’s no narrative reason at all for him to be a doofus, and the only reason I can think of for him being a doofus is that the makers felt the audience needed someone we could relate to and that said someone would be a doofus. I f**kin’ hate that. In a film class I took (at a community college, go figure), the chick at the front of the room was going off at the brilliance of Charlie Chaplin creating this tramp character that went right to the heart of every man, someone we could all relate to and be inspired by and root for, etc. I wasn’t buying it, and I let her know it. So Chaplin figured that if the audience needs a character to relate to, the best choice would be a timid oaf? F**k you, Chaplin. I don’t relate to timid oafs. This Aaron character in Alien3 makes me feel the same. Well-portrayed, but an insult to my intelligence, and there’s no dramatic reason for him to be a doofus.
Dr. Clemens, on the other hand, is hitting much closer to what I look for in a cinematic inspiration. While Andrews and Aaron are jawing, Clemens is examining the acid burn in the floor, and he mumbles that “[t]he fans were blowing.” While this confirms what I said in the previous post, it also begs the question of what this movie is giving us as the cause of Murphy hitting the fan. Once again, we saw clearly that the alien was nowhere near him as he rolled into the fan. He wasn’t pushed, pulled, or thrown by the alien. Sloppy.
At 35:18, there is a brief shot of Clemens crouching while he examines the…residue or slime or whatever left on his fingers after examining the burn in the wall. I love that shot. You can almost see the thought balloon saying, with a cinematic scientist’s curiousity, “What is this?” The gears in his mind are turning. He doesn’t know what this is, he knows that he doesn’t know what this is, and he wants to find an answer. Now that’s somebody I can root for and be inspired by! Similar to the scene in the original when Ash and Dallas are looking at the ultrasound of Cain and wondering what the facehugger is doing and quietly discussing options. I love it.
Andrews throws cold water on everything telling Clemens to report to his office in 30 minutes and storming off. The camera pans back as Clemens continue to peer thoughtfully into the hole.
Cut to Ripley at the escape pod, retrieving the flight recorder. The movie gives us one of the most obvious fake scares I’ve ever seen by having the camera track around the bulky objects, creeping up on her, and the music swelling. Movie, knock it off. This early in, you ain’t gonna kill her no matter what. You’re not fooling anybody.
It turns out to be Clemens. He tells her about the death at the fan and about the burn mark. Ripley looks increasingly uncomfortable while Clemens wears a you-know-something-dammit look. He tells her sternly that he wants to help but “I need to know what’s going on…or what you think is going on.” I like that addendum. It shows that Clemens really does want to help, but he still can’t trust her yet. Nice! She says that she’s gonna plug the flight recorder into the remains of Bishop, and he says fine, but he’s gotta go get cussed out by the Superintendent first.
In Superintendent Andrew’s office, Andrews wheezes at Clemens that he’s received word that the Company considers Ripley to be V.I.P. and wants her treated accordingly until they arrive. Neither Clemens nor Andrews knows why, and Andrews is pissed that Clemens let her out of the infirmary. He attributes Murphy’s death to “walk[ing] around with a hard-on.” Clemens replies with “I’m the doctor. You’re the jailor.” Andrews leans back with a smirk, then hisses, “We both know exactly what you are,” and Clemens takes umbrage and makes to leave. Clemens stops him cold by threatening to reveal his dirty secrets to Ripley. Clemens sits, end scene.
I like this. With the alien just beginning to get his momentum going, there’s room for subplot. Ripley/Clemens is neato enough, and now we’ve got a Shady Past angle thrown in. I like Clemens, so I’m intrigued as to what it is that he doesn’t want her to know about. Whatever it is, he ain’t proud of it, because he got offended when Andrews first hinted at it. “We both know exactly what you are.” My curiousity was piqued. What is he? We’ll find out, of course. But in the meantime, it’s a good subplot!
Cut to Ripley in the…junkyard, I guess. She finds the broken and slimy remains of Rook and makes her way out only to be cornered by inmates intent on rape. No Death Wish 3 here, she doesn’t whip their asses handily. Rather, they seem to be about the have their way, when Dillon arrives with a crowbar. Tossing a “y’okay?” over his shoulder, he does the whipassin’ himself. Some stage gore on the end of the crowbar indicates that he has bludgeoned one’s brains in, and he tells her to take off while he “re-educates the brothers.” This scene serves two purposes. First, to follow through on the whole surrounded-by-rapists bit. Second, to establish Dillon as a good guy. **shrug** It’s okay, I guess, but in a few minutes, the first won’t matter; and the second was pretty much a foregone conclusion anyway. The scene ends on a gigglesome note when Ripley punches out a would-be-rapist from a distance of about six feet. Mr. Fantastic.
Elsewhere in the maze of corridors, three inmates are taking inventory of…I dunno what. There’s some throwaway dialogue about which profanities are acceptable and which aren’t that I take as a pretty lousy attempt at a humor that doesn’t need to be here in the first place. They notice that the candles lined along the corrider and being extinguished one by one. (It was at this point that I noticed that there are no flashlights. The inmates are holding giant 4th of July sparklers. **shrug**) One of the men goes off to relight the candles so they can see. I don’t know why he’s bothering, as there’s more than enough lighting as there is. I think this is like those old movies where one match illuminates the whole room (Ten Little Indians, etc). The audience is just supposed to with it, because realistic lighting would leave us…**shrug**…in the dark. No sweat. The guy stumbles right into the alien just sitting there. How he failed to spot it for as long as he did, I have no idea, even allowing for dimmer-than-shown lighting. The other two guys hear his screams (and he takes a helluva long time to die. Tough dude!) and take off running like Laurel and Hardy, only without holding hands. Eventually, they find the first guy’s corpse, and the alien kills another one of them. The lone survivor of the trio, face splattered in blood and guts, takes off running again. End scene.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/21/2007 4:08:19 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2007 : 12:41:48 PM
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Back by her lonesome in the infirmary (although why she’s being left on her lonesome by everybody at this point, I don’t know), Ripley reactivates the remains of Bishop. Bishop is not in good shape, but he seems to retain his dry sense of humor. Bishop confirms that there was an alien on board. Since we already know that because we already saw it, the movie doesn’t give us a big musical sting. This is about Ripley’s shock, not ours. Bishop also confirms that The Company knows everything that happened. He then asks Ripley to disconnect him. This is a very good “kill me” scene. Because it’s no longer than it needs to be. Ripley does not plead with him to hang on to his will to live, because she can see precisely why he no longer has it, and she’s not to keen on robots anyway. Bishop doesn’t give an impassioned speech about why he wants to die, because it’s already self-evident; and he’s just a robot, besides. She simply gives him a “You sure?” He says, “Do it for me,” and then she disconnects him. It’s not flippant in its brevity, it’s not dismissive, and it’s not disrespectful. It’s just plain good.
No sooner has Bishop stopped whirring than the lone survivor of the most recent alien attack is carried into the infirmary by Dr. Clemens, Andrews, and Aaron. The man is raving about “the dragon” that “feeds on minds.” The “feeds on minds” bit is curious (never noticed it before using the subtitles). Taken literally, I guess I can see it. After all, the guy did see one of the dudes die by headbite. Still, “feeds on minds” implies a bit of psychic vampirism. **shrug** With all the surrealism surrounding the alien imagery in the franchise…hell, why not?
Dillon tries to get him to speak calmly, but the guy is too spooked. Off to the side, Andrews, who we’re not supposed to like, comes off pretty well. He says, “I’m afraid we’ll have to assume there’s a very good chance this simple bastard has murdered them.” The tightening of jaw as he says the last is a nice touch. As the warden of the place, he’s taking this seriously. And knowing what he knows and what he doesn’t know, it’s understandable that he would see a very strong chance that the now-crazy guy murdered them. But Dillon gets offended by it, saying that the guy may be a fool, but not a liar. Oh, I guess that settles it, then. How dare Andrews jump to insane conclusions like that?
Ripley enters the milieu and says with obvious certainly that he’s telling the truth. Dr. Clemens stares at her with a priceless, “This is getting intolerable, you not telling us everything.” She wants to speak to the raver, but Andrews overrides her with “You are not in full possession of the facts.” Mmm…this doesn’t entirely square with what he said in his office to Clemens about a woman showing up and all hell breaking loose. I think that at this point, Andrews would be highly interested in what she would have to say. Instead, he points out to her that this man is a particularly brutal multiple murderer*, a depiction that Dillon reluctantly agrees with. In what I think is a stab at humor, said multiple murderer gives a big ol’ Oops-guess-you-caught-me grin. I remember hearing people in the theater giggle at this. Andrews says that he’ll give Ripley a chat after his official duties are done. Ripley and Clemens give each other more glances.
[ * - I hate that phrase, “brutally murdered,” or “brutal murderer.” What is a NON-brutal murder/murderer? ]
Cut to Andrews office for the chat. During the cut-away, Ripley has told Andrews everything about the alien. Andrews recaps it for us, and he doesn’t believe a word of it.* Aaron echoes Andrews skepticism in a fashion that only seems like a obvious sign of his oafishness after having seen the movie already. The script and the actor playing Andrews really did a subtle job with it. Props! Andrews does ask the key question, though: “What do you suggest we do?” Upon hearing that the place has no weapons, Ripley has no suggestions. Andrews orders Aaron to escort her to the infirmary and keep her there.
[ * - What is that thing Andrews keeps rolling in his hand? He was doing that in the earlier scene with Clemens, too. ]
Cut to the infirmary. Clemens is telling Ripley that there’s no way off the planet, but that a ship is coming specifically to pick up Ripley. He asks her what she and Andrews talked about, and she doesn’t wanna say. Then she lets out a convincing congestion cough. The dialogue surrounding it makes it seem irrelevant, a set-up for Clemens to stick her with another needle; so it’s only after first viewing that we realize how relevant it is. Well done!
The inmate who saw “the dragon” is in the room also. While Clemens is giving Ripley a once-over, the inmate asks if Ripley is married, says she oughta raise some kinds, waxes nostaligic for when women liked him, then looks at her and says out of nowhere, “You’re gonna die, too.” I don’t why horror movies try to be more disturbing than they’re able to be by doing the whole prophesy-as-cryptically-insane-rantings bit. It never works. Not on me, anyway. Especially in this case, because we don’t give a crap about the character. He’ll, we don’t even know his name. Doubly especially as he’s interrupting the dialogue between the two characters in this movie who really are interesting. Shut up, you
goofball. They’re tryin’ to have a chat over here.
At 53:13, Clemens puts his fist to his chin as he looks at Ripley, and it’s a priceless shot of someone who is weighing a pending decision. I love it (And he responds to “You’re gonna die, too” by drawing the curtain shut. I love that, too.). He then asks “Are you?” Married, he means. But it’s set up as possibly meaning is she gonna die? I think what the movie is going for is to give the audience some uncertainty as to whether Clemens is to be trusted. We know there’s something about him that we don’t know and he doesn’t want Ripley to know, so is he really a friend?
Ripley asks him point-blank for answers, and he gives them. All right! Let’s find out this shameful secret he carries!
He says that during his residency and after having becoming secretly addicted to morphine, he served a 36-hour stretch in ER and got blitzed afterward. He got called back because of an industrial accident that had 30 victims. 11 of them died not from the accident, but because he, in his drunkenness, prescribed the wrong dosage of painkiller. He got 7 years in prison and nobody wanted to hire him afterwards, so he stayed on Fury 161. He concludes with “I think I was let off lightly.”
I have mixed feelings about this:
DOWN:
As a dark secret, it’s not very impressive. Surrounded by murderers, robbers, rapists (and rapists who rape robbers), a “dark” secret of a moment of incompetence as the result of intoxication is not terribly noteworthy. It’s also a let-down after Andrews first hinted at the existence of the secret with “We both know exactly what you are.” After hearing his story, we now know that what he is is simply a guy who made a fatal error and feels horrible about it. That’s it, so…**shrug**...I can’t get too worked up over it. Also, the morphine angle meant absolutely nothing, so I don't know why it was there in the first place.
UP:
As a character moment, it’s excellent. In a place of murderers, robbers, rapists (see previous addendum), the local population doesn’t seem to feel too bad about their crimes beyond the fact that their crimes landed them there in the first place. But here’s Clemens, who despite no longer being an official prisoner, is more of a prisoner of his own conscience than anyone else. When he says “Nobody else would employ me,” I get the sense that even if someone would’ve offered to employ him, he would’ve stayed on Fury 161. When he says, “I think I was let off lightly,” it’s an acknowledgement that what he did was his own fault and what happened to him as a result is his own fault, and that he alone must suffer for it, even to the point of self-imposed exile on a prison planet; and he does all that with quiet reserve. This is so different from what you expect from Hollywood. And Charles Dance sells it perfectly.
His secret revealed to Ripley, he picks up a needle, strikes a casual pose and asks her, “So, do you still trust me with a needle?” She looks up at him, and at 55:36, there a shot of Clemens, needle in hand, looking into the camera. Look at that image and ask yourself if you’d trust him with a needle. I can’t describe the look on his face, but it makes me totally uncertain as to whether I would trust him or not, even though everything about me is screaming to trust him. I like the guy, dammit!
Ripley does trust him, so she extends her arm. Clemens gives the injection with his usual skill, and then everything about him and his relationship with Ripley is rendered totally irrelevant by what happens next, and it made me so goddamn angry that I’ll continue tomorrow.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/23/2007 12:50:25 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/24/2007 : 8:51:54 PM
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No sooner has Clemens withdrawn the needle when the alien grabs him from behind, tosses him in the air for a bit, then chews a hole in his skull. Exit Dr. Clemens.
Fabulous. The only interesting guy in the whole movie, and the movie has just killed him off. This movie is 114 minutes long, and we’re seconds shy of the 57-minute mark. So we’ve got half a movie left and nobody apart from Ripley to give a s**t about. And the fact the Clemens is killed off with very little build-up (and, as it’ll turn out, even less pay-off) just makes me wonder who the f**k thought this would be a good idea. All I can say is that this movie just got a hell of a lot less interesting.
Ripley cringes in the corner while a CGI alien approaches. This was the shot that was in the TV ads. It gets inches away from her neck, open its mouth, and opens its other mouth.* There is what’s supposed to be a dramatic pause, but it fails to be so because again, at this point in the movie, we all know that they ain’t gonna kill Ripley off this early, and certainly not in such an unheroic fashion. Knock it off, movie. The alien retracts its other mouth and retreats back up through the ceiling.
Incidentally, the “you’re gonna die, too” inmate is watching all of this while lying straightjacketed in bed. I don’t think the movie ever did anything with him after this scene. It’s hard to tell, because the inmates are so indistinguishable from one another. **shrug**
[ * - The aliens sure do slobber a lot. It must be a bit of a challenge for those creatures to stay hydrated enough to do that. ]
Ripley takes off running in the direction of the mess hall, where previous dialogue had established a confab was being held. In the mess hall, Andrews is wheezing that one man got sucked into a fan through carelessness, Golic is in the infirmary in a deranged state (so the movie does give his name. That’s the second time I’ve done that. Did that on the …Apes review, too. I suck.), and everyone oughta tighten it up for a few more days until the rescue ship for Ripley arrives. Pretty obvious ironic juxtaposition of Andrews nothings-wrong-everyone-stay-calm bit intercut with shots of Ripley running pell-mell to warn them that it ain’t. Not too bad, but a little undercut by the fact that, once again, given everything that Andrews knows and doesn’t know, he’s not being unreasonable.
At this point, I wondered why Ripley didn’t share the flight recorder information from the Sulaco with Andrews when she was telling him of the alien. Then I figured that, since that discussion happened after she disconnected Bishop, maybe she had permanently disconnected him, or threw him back on the junk pile, or otherwise rendered him forevermore useless in accessing the flight recorder. No biggie.
Ripley enters, shouts that the alien is here and got Clemens. Andrews yells for someone to get that raving woman out of here at once, the alien pops down, pulls Andrews up, and offs him. It’s not very terrifying because all we see and hear are the other prisoners going nuts. In fact, the scene ends on a deliberately humorous note when one inmate*, after a silent post-kill pause, shouts, “F**K!” I remember that that was the biggest laugh in the theater. While it’s not as playful as the entirely of Alien: Resurrection, I still disliked it. Can you imagine if the death scenes in either of the first two Alien movies had been played for laughs? I’m with Clive Barker on this, I hate it when horror is mixed with humor, because it dilutes the horror.
[ * - I notice that I keep saying “one inmate.” I’m sorry about that, but they all look alike, dress alike, and sound alike. I can’t tell them apart.]
Cut to an after-kill scene, where one inmate (there I go again!) is mopping the blood off the floor while making a big show out of not standing underneath the spot in the ceiling from whence the alien came. Again, this has gotta be for laughs, but I ain’t laughin’. This movie has, in the span of a minute and a half, gone from pretty damn interesting, to rubbish.
Back in the….meeting area, I dunno….everyone is discussing what to do and who is in charge. Nobody wants Aaron in charge, and Morse (There. A name for one of them.) calls him “85,” which Aaron bristles at. Everyone wants Dillon to be in charge, but Dillon doesn’t want to. He asks Ripley to be in charge, seeing as how she’s an officer and is the only one who’s seen these alien things before. For her part, Ripley looks totally beaten, as well she should. She and the Marines couldn’t beat them with full weaponry, and now she’s gotta lead a bunch of dumb criminals with no weapons. Profanity-filled dialogue establishes that there are no weapons, no working cameras, and pipes too numerous to seal off. During this scene, Ripley coughs and rubs her throat. It’s more foreshadowing, and it’s perfect. I didn’t notice until repeat viewings.
Cut to silhouettes of Ripley and Aaron silhouetting behind a map. This is totally reminiscent of the scene in Aliens where Ripley and the Marines are looking over the digital schematics. Aaron points out again that there’s miles of tunnels, so flushing it out is not an option. Ripley says no sweat, because it’s gonna hang about right where they are anyway. When Aaron asks how she knows, she goes into Don Knotts mode, swaggering in an I-know-what-I’m-talking-about-and-you-don’t mode, saying that the alien is like a lion in that it sticks close to the zebras. They come to a huge door labeled “TOXIC WASTE DISPOSAL” The placing of the letters makes it look like the name of a death metal band. Aaron tells her that the room has never been used and that the walls are solid steel, six feet thick. If something is trapped inside, there' sno way it can escape. Captain, this is LaForge. We have a working theory!
I’ll continue tomorrow or Thursday.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/24/2007 8:57:00 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/26/2007 : 6:25:23 PM
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In a storage room, Ripley, Aaron, and an anonymous inmate look over the drums full of explosive liquid. Aaron can’t remember the name of it, anonymous inmate supplies that it’s “Quinitricetyline.” After doing a cursory google search, it’s a safe bet that that’s a Star Trek-style made-up chemical. After another “Don’t call me [85]” bit, Aaron leaves. The inmate (his name is David, like I care) tells Ripley that they all call him 85 because that’s his IQ, and that this stuff in the drums is really super-duper explosive. Makes me wonder what this prison has all the stuff for, then. **shrug**
With David’s revealing of why they call Aaron “85,” I think the movie does a skillful job of finding the balance between giving credit to those in the audience who caught on and spelling it out for those in the audience who haven’t. Give him a nickname, use it a couple times, insert one line of natural-sounding dialogue that explains it, then move on. And that one giveaway line is not delivered unsubtlely, it’s just less subtle enough for those who haven’t caught on, without being an irritating insult for those who have. Good stuff!
In the next scene, Dillon gives Aaron a run for his money in the denseness department. Going over Ripley’s plan to burn the alien out of the pipes and trapping it in the toxic waste disposal unit, he asks her why he and his fellows should help her out. ?!? He watched Andrews get chomped, he knows the alien is still around, and he can probably figure that it kills pretty indiscriminately…and he’s asking why he should help her out? She answers by appealing to his masculinity, end scene. I have no idea what that was even supposed to be about. In fact, I don’t see how Ripley figures they can burn it out of the pipes after dialogue has already established that there are miles of pipes for it to travel through. With less than two dozen men, just prepping the tubes for burn-out should take so long that the alien could pick them all off before they came close to completion.
Tiny montage of men passing buckets of combusto-juice and mopping the floors with it. Looks like caramel.
Unknown inmate who is off by himself so nothing will happen to him gets kacked by the alien while climbing a ladder. He drops his bucket of juice and the ignito-stick he was carrying. In super-slo-mo* the stick falls into the juice, and at normal-speed it goes BOOM. Inmates run everywhere, a couple go flying, a couple flail with their bodies aflame, Ripley ducks a fireball, and I don’t really care about any of this. Dillon turns on the sprinklers. We get a subtle foreshadowing shot of a bucket breaking under the rapid temperature change when the water hits it. It’s so short, that I didn’t remember that shot at all until now.
[ * - I hate slo-mo. The only time I don’t mind it is when it’s necessary to visually explain what’s happening. This is one example. The scene near the end of The Unwatchables is another. ]
With the plan having colossally failed with the loss of at least one and probably a few inmates, the movie then gives us a laughable slo-mo low-angle shot of the defeated inmates solemnly trudging back to….wherever it is they’re going. It looks like footage from a nationalistic documentary of soldiers returning from a costly war. Ridiculous. And there’s even the keyboard/angelic chorus, too. One of the men is pulling a corpsewagon (Bring out yer ded!) Finding another corpse, Dillon says, “This makes 10.”
Time for an ESPN Game Recap, sponsored by Pepto-Bismol. Real men don’t wear pink, they drink it.
Alien3 scorecard
25 men plus Clemens (doctor), Andrews and Aaron (minders), and Ripley = 28.
Exit the guy at the fan, the two dudes who saw the candles going out, Clemens, and Andrews = 23.
Exit the dude on the ladder, and either nine or ten more = 13 or 14.
The first two movies were much easier. When someone died, it was either one-by-one, or we got to see a shot of who it was who had just died. Abstract math and horror movies don’t mix.
Okay. Post-barbecue, everybody yells at everybody else about what are we gonna do, until they notice that Ripley seems ill. She goes off to use the neuroscanner to see what’s wrong with her, and everyone goes back to yelling at each other. Dillon comes up with the brilliant plan of reassembling all of the survivors. Uh…where did they all go in the first place?
At the neuroscanner, Aaron runs the diagnostic of Ripley. Aaron needs instructions from Ripley to use the thing, and it comes off well. It’s nice to see folks in futuristic movies unfamiliar with the futuristic technology. It’s common in other franchises for the characters to all be familiar with the all gadgets all the time. It’s actually kind of jarring in its realism that here’s somebody who is unfamiliar with a particular gadget, and believably so. There’s plenty of modern gadgetry I’m unfamiliar with because I’ve never had occasion to use it. We can easily believe that Aaron’s unfamiliarity with the neuroscanner is less due to his idiocy than his never having had to use one before.
He finds an alien in Ripley’s chest. Ripley gets up, pauses dramatically with her eyes closed, then quickly looks at the scanner screen. Seeing her worst fear realized,…I’m gonna be generous and say that maybe the angle wasn’t the best it could’ve been, because from here it looks like she’s stifling a laugh rather than a sob.
In the theater, this blew me away. I couldn’t believe it. This movie actually let Ripley get planted with an alien (I know everyone says “impregnated,” but “planted” is actually more accurate). My interest was re-energized. What’s gonna happen? How is this gonna play out?
Cut to the Communications Room. Ripley wants Aaron to send a message to the Company that the whole prison is toxic and that nothing should come to the planet. Aaron is incredulous, as that would prevent his own rescue. He refuses to give the password to enable said communication. Ripley gives a veeeerrrry brief explanation that the Company doesn’t care who dies, and that if the alien gets off the planet, it’ll kill everything. And she says it in almost those exact words, no more. I don’t buy it. Given that Ripley knows that Aaron doesn’t know a thing about this, I’d think she’d give a far more detailed explanation of why the Company must not land any ships on the planet. Aaron doesn’t budge, and Ripley, uncharacteristically, gives up extremely easily. A couple “no way”s is all it takes. So, with a resolution born of hopelessness, she quietly and calmly strolls off to find the alien herself.
So Aaron is alone when he receives the communication from The Company saying:
“EEV 2650 NEUROSCAN DATA RECEIVED
EXPIDITING MEDIVAC TEAM
ARRIVAL WITHIN TWO HOURS”
Aaron slowly and anxiously approaches the screen. The camera focuses on his dogtags as he does, as if to mean something. What it might mean, I have no clue; and I really don’t care, because as a veteran myself, I hate the cinematic visual trope of dog tags being worn outside the shirt.
The message continues:
“ABSOLUTE HIGHEST PRIORITY
LT. RIPLEY BE QUARANTINED
UNTIL ARRIVAL
AWAITING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT”
I giggle at “absolute highest priority.” The -est in “highest” kinda establishes that, doesn’t it?
The “awaiting acknowledgement" line is repeated about a dozen times, and the scene cuts away before we find out whether or not Aaron does acknowledge it. Coy movie!
I’ll continue tomorrow or Saturday.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/26/2007 6:38:09 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/28/2007 : 7:26:58 PM
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Cut to Ripley alone in the bowels of the prison, searching for the alien. For about two minutes we watch her as her flashlight illuminates dripping water than might be alien saliva. I notice again that the lighting is bright enough that there’s no real need for a flashlight, but as before, I think it’s….whatever you call the indoor equivalent of day-for-night.
As she paces through area, she begins talking out loud to the alien that’s nowhere in sight. “Where are you when I need you,” “I’m part of the family,” etc. I like this. It’s similar to when she sang that song in the final scene of Alien. Some intrabanter to keep her nerve up. She encounters what she thinks is the alien and stabs it with a metal pipe. It turns out to be just a pipe filled with insects. No sooner has she dropped the pipe when the alien descends from the ceiling, as Ripley’s terror goes up a notch. And cut away to…
This was a good cutaway. What is the alien gonna do with Ripley now that Ripley holds an alien herself? What is Ripley gonna do the alien barehanded? We’ll have to wait to find out. Suspense!
Cut away to Dillon being surprised by Ripley’s entrance behind him. “It won’t kill me,” she says. Splendid. The suspense lasted less than five seconds, and the payoff still was nowhere close to being worth it.
Ripley tells Dillon that she has a queen inside her, that the queen can create thousands more aliens, and that it has to die, so Ripley herself must die, and she asks Dillon to do the honors.
Waitaminit. Two minor nits and I major nit I have with this.
1. Minor: How does she know it’s a queen? Ripley’s never seen the in corpus humanis images of either a queen or a regular alien except the one in this movie. We saw that, and there was nothing to differentiate it from the regulars. **shrug** Maybe the alien told her. Maybe it held up the Queen of Spades and pointed at Ripley’s chest.
2. Minor: Cain didn’t take this long to die after being implanted, did he? How much time is this thing gonna give Ripley? Gestating aliens must be reading a copy of the script so they know not to burst out until the proper moment.
3. Major: Why does Ripley need Dillon’s help to commit suicide to death? What about the fan that the dude got diced in? What about the furnaces? Ripley, stop being a wuss. If you wanna commit suicide, you don’t need anyone’s help, just f**kin’ do it!!! Don’tcha hate that? Some gloomy person you know is always talking about suicide but never does it. They just want attention. I think Ayn Rand was correct: The most honest suicide is done alone.
As an aside, I notice that “Kill me” is the Alien franchise equivalent of Star Wars’ “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Dillon doesn’t really believe her, but hey, when someone offers you a free kill, how can you say no? Ripley grabs the bars, spreading her arms for Christ imagery (**derisive snort**), and tells Dillon to do it. There’s a looonnng crescendo on the soundtrack as Dillon holds the axe and stares at Ripley as she waits for the killing blow. So long, in fact, that I was expecting her to turn around and say, “You still there?”
Dillon’s axe blow strikes the bars as Dillon says that he ain’t gonna kill one of the few remaining survivors before they kill the alien itself. Ripley gets angry and tries to muscle him. Here we get something that I had to rewind a few times to figure out why it was so jarring. Dillon slams Ripley against the wall and says, “I want to get this thing, and I need you to do it. And if it won’t kill you, then maybe that helps us fight it. Otherwise, F**K YOU!!!” Then he lets go of her, and she slides down the wall.
What’s jarring about this is throughout the second and third movies, Ripley has being the lady with the answers/plans among cowards, dunces, and losers. When she had to get tough with somebody, she did. In Aliens, she grabs Gorman by the lapels, she grabs Burke by the lapels, she countermands Bishop without a glance over her shoulder. In this movie, she gives orders to Clemens without explaining what for, and she comes up with a plan that everybody just goes along with. But in this scene, someone else is lording it over her. And not without justification. Dillon makes a good point that someone who is alien-proof is a good asset to have when trying to kill an alien. Dillon wants to live, so naturally he’s not going to throw away a resource. So when he sticks it to Ripley, he doesn’t seem villainous about it. The scene ends with him telling Ripley that after they kill the alien, he’ll kill her, “quick, easy, and painless.”
Then we get the most goofball moment of the entire trilogy (I don’t count the fourth one, because that whole movie was goofball): The Motivational Speech. I won’t transcribe the whole thing, but there are a few items of note:
- When Aaron objects to the plan to fight the alien instead of waiting for the company to show up with some firepower, Dillon overrules him with “You’re not one of the faith.” As I said early on, this must be a leftover from a previous script because this faith, whatever it is, is mentioned several times but it never comes into play.
- While everyone knows that the company should be there in days, only Aaron knows that they’ll be there in just a few hours. With Aaron obviously agitated by the prisoners’ plan, I’d think that he’d find this a good time to mention it.
- This movie predates Braveheart by a couple years, I think; I wonder if someone in that movie didn’t take a cue or two from this one for the speechifying. Only less goofy in Braveheart, as they knew what the fight was about.
- There’s a lot of profanity in this movie, and it gets irritating before too long. But Ripley’s line here, “They think we’re…we’re crud!” would’ve been a good place for some. First time I saw this, I noticed how off that sounded.
- This movie predates Army of Darkness by a few months. The inspirational speech in that movie was very similar, musical cues and all, but had a better climax.
- This is the most difficult and important sell of Ripley’s life. I know that the movie doesn’t wanna rehash all the details that the audience already knows, but c’mon. Ripley could explain her how she knows that “[the company] won’t kill it” in a bit more convincing detail than she does.
At the climax of this speech, the inmates finally agree to go for it, why not? No wonder their religion took hold in only five years. These chumps’ll fall for anything. They seem more motivated by Dillon’s bravado than Ripley’s reason.
The first two movies avoided all this goofy s**t by having the characters already know the score and not need any convincing.
I'll continue....either tommorow or not 'til Wednesday, as I've got a full plate after tomorrow.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/28/2007 7:36:47 PM |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 07/30/2007 : 12:11:19 PM
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Cut to Dillon explaining the plan to Ripley. The idea is to lure the alien into the lead pouring chamber, start the piston, and flooding the place with molten lead. Dillon’s gone through quite a change. First, he didn’t want to lead, and let Ripley come up with the idea of burning the alien out of the vents. Now, he’s the brains of the outfit. Earlier he had said that the thing killed half his men, but actually it was the botched plan that did that. **shrug** I dunno. I guess it’s more believable than having Ripley come up with this new idea, because the inmates wouldn’t go along with another idea of hers after the first one failed so spectacularly.
After about half a minute of various inmates expression specticism to each other, one of them find the alien munching on an inmate’s corpse. The CGI alien is making pelvic thrusts that are impossible to misinterpret. Someone else might read something into the supposed eroto-horror of the creature, but to me, it just looks like a stab at humor.
The inmate takes off running, and we get Alien-Cam! The alien has allowed us to place a camera in his helmet so we don’t miss a minute of the action. It really doesn’t add anything to the suspense. It just makes the chase look like a music video, which is precisely what the director was making before this movie. I’ll give him credit for trying something different, but I don’t think anything could’ve helped this uninteresting chase scene. What makes the chase uninteresting is that we can never tell where anybody is in relation to anybody else. Everyone shouts about “It’s in Channel A,” and “Door B-7 safe,” but to the viewer…so what? What does that mean? At one point, one inmate says, “Over to ‘E,’ everybody!” and another answers, “Where the f**k is ‘E?’” That’s what I was thinking. Maybe with a high-speed car chase, spatial agnosticism can be overlooked, but in a foot chase, where speed alone isn’t enough to maintain interest,…c’mon, we gotta know what’s happening.
The chase also necessitates CGI for the alien. Sometimes it’s okay, but there are a few shots that look like Who Killed Roger Rabbit?. Cartoonish. In the first two movies, there were no chase scenes, probably because the makers knew that the alien costumes made that impossible. The development of CGI by the time of this movie must’ve led somebody to figure that now they could show the alien doing things we’d never seen before. I’d’ve rather they didn’t.
I’m deliberately glossing over the details of the chase, because it’s just not interesting. Inmates shout “Where is it?” and one by one get killed. The alien runs right through the lead chamber, Ripley has to calm down a panicked dude. There’s a shot of a company ship landing at the facility. Dillon plays tug-of-mutual-irritation with the alien over an inmate, somehow wins, and literally drags the inmate into the lead chamber. The alien cam pursues but is unable to catch them. WTF?!? Once inside the chamber, the rescued inmates dies from his wounds, the alien makes to enter. The piston is started, the alien seems to recognize the trap and leaves again, and everybody runs around yelling at each other again. Couple more dudes get kacked.
The company men arrive. Aaron, who seems to have been sitting by his lonesome during the chase (can’t blame him, the way it’s gone), is hugely relieved to see them. Men wearing…I dunno, whitish bio-armor or something…storm in, and an Oriental guy asks in a veeerrry thick Oriental accent in Ripley is still alive (at least he doesn’t pronounce it as “Liprey”). Aaron says yeah, she’s trying to kill the alien. The scene ends with a dramatic shot of a man in a trenchcoat silhouetted from behind.
Cut to two inmates running through an intersection and colliding with each other. They have a good old laugh about it, and whenever two folks laugh at each other in the midst of immediate monster-movie danger, one or both will get kacked. One does, and the other crawls away. Ripley arrives to do battle with the alien, and she holds her torch like a lightsaber. I’m serious, at 1:36:41 through 1:36:46, tell me that ain’t a deliberate wink at Star Wars.
Ripley and Dillon lure the alien into the chamber, and Morse closes the door, sealing them in. Morse makes his way topside to pour the lead. Then we get the most retarded moment of the trilogy. Ripley and Dillon have a brief bicker of who gets to sacrifice his/herself for the other. I never have liked the Altrusitic Suicide in monster movies, because it’s just never believable. This one would’ve been completely believable, because Ripley has a damn good reason to want to die by being drowned/burnt in molten lead with the alien: It beats having an alien burst out of her chest. But what’s Dillon talking about? He volunteers to stay in the lead pit instead of Ripley simply because he agreed to kill after, and only after, the alien was killed? They both know that Ripley’s time is very very short anyway, and Ripley has already said that she wants to stay in the pit to die with the alien. That being the case, there’s no believable reason why Dillon wouldn’t say something to the effect of, “God bless you sister. We’ll all have our peace, thanks to your sacrifice,” and then take off. Invoking a previous oral agreement that she can’t die until after the alien is killed, with dying during the alien being killed apparently unacceptable to Dillon, is just %&$*#-ing retarded. The credits give screenwriting blame to Vincent Ward, but it’s known that not much of Ward’s draft made the finished product. If I was Ward, I’d be saying, “Don’t blame that s**t on me, I didn’t write that dumbass scene!”
And the idiocy continues. Ripley climbs out of the pit, Dillon stays in. Once at the top, Ripley calls down for him to climb up, he says no cuz he’s gotta hold the alien down there. She says, “What about me?” He says, “God will take care of you now, sister.” And at 1:39:38, Ripley shouts “Nooo!!!”
We like to giggle at Mark Hamill’s “Nooo!!!” in the The Empire Strikes Back,” but to me, this one is far worse. Luke Skywalker was responding to a reality check that totally changed everything about how he viewed the universe and his place in it. That’s worth a “Nooo!” I think. But what is Ripley responding to? The fact that Dillon will not be around to help her commit suicide. I have to echo what I asked earlier: Why does she need Dillon’s to commit suicide? The pit he’s in is gonna be filled with molten lead. Does she not know that she can just plop herself in at will as soon as it starts filling the pit? She can commit suicide in a far more painless way by herself than the initial method she wanted Dillon to use. So what’s she moaning about?
The alien charges at Dillon. Dillon keeps his bravado up quite well for quite having his face ripped off and his guts torn out. Morse pours the lead, and soon the pit is filled with ooey-gooey magma-hot lead. It makes so much steam you can’t see s**t that’s happening.
With the triumphant music blaring, Morse lets out a hearty victory whoop. The inmates of Fury 161 don’t get to watch movies, I guess, because if Morse had seen the first two, he’d know that it ain’t over yet. The CGI alien bursts out of the lead and begins climbing the ladders and pipeworks after Ripley. Ripley flees while Morse yells at her to hit the sprinklers to douse the alien. She does. In slo-mo, the alien cracks, hisses, and explodes, presumably sending acid everywhere, but we see no sign of it.
Ripley barely catches her breath before the company men arrive on scene. In the theater, I found this more interesting than the alien’s demise. How is this gonna play out? She finally meets this ambiguous company (they have a bioweapons division, but that’s all we find out about them. What else do they do/provide?) who has done nasty things to her. But they are her only chance of getting the alien out of her. What’s gonna happen?
Lance Henrickson appears. He was the silhouetted-from-behind guy earlier. He tells Ripley that he is the flesh and blood creator of the Bishop robots, and that he wants to remove and kill Ripley’s alien. Ripley isn’t believing it at first, but begins to wonder. She asks what guarantee she has that he will indeed kill the alien and not keep it for the company. He says he just has to trust him. She says no. She closes the gate between them. Because IITS, one the company men shoots Morse in the knee, sending blood everywhere. Seeing Morse lying there writhing in pain, she asks Morse to help her. Morse is a go-getter, a bullet in the knee doesn’t seem to bother him too much upon hearing Ripley’s request.
Aaron, recognizing that he’s been duped, smashes Bishop in the head with a pipe, dislodging Bishop’s ear. So he is a robot after all. **shrug** Not that it means anything. The company men shoot Aaron to pieces. Dropping the pretense of wanting to save Ripley, Bishop begins yelling that “it’s a magnificent specimen,” etc. Why he thinks that’s gonna work now, I have no idea.
Ripley moves to the edge of the pit, which is now glowing yellow with the heat, and falls backwards into it.
In the theater, this kicked my ass. I felt my heart and stomach drop. Ripley dies!
Today, I totally applaud the idea of having her die to conclude the trilogy. A happy ending to the Alien trilogy would’ve been like a happy ending to Hamlet. Forget it! The three Alien stories are never happy at all. They’re horrifying, claustrophobic, desparate, grim, and depressing. Never happy. So a happy ending would’ve blown all that.
However, while I applaud the idea, I cannot applaud the execution. On the Director’s Cut, it went slightly different. On that cut, Ripley simply plunges into the lead, arms splayed out for Christ imagery (derisive snort again. Does that sort of thing actually work on anybody?), and the fall takes seconds. For the theater cut, she pitches off the ledge in semi-slo-mo, then we go to a super-slo-mo close up of Ripley as the alien bursts out of her chest. The matting-in of Ripley in front of the background of molten lead is hugely distracting. Bishop’s “NOOOOOOOO!!!!!” is irritating. She clutches the alien as we go to a long shot of Ripley falling into the pit that is suddenly far bigger than it was before (or maybe the fall was farther than it was before). I’m serious, by the time she enter the lead, she is a tiny thing on the screen. And of course, during all this, coda music blares. The whole suicide is about 25 seconds long.
I hate long suicide scenes. I may be in the minority, but I loved Data’s suicide in Star Trek: Emesis. Very short, no slo-mo, no pre-death speeches.
I do like the idea of her clutching the alien as she falls. The symbolism is while that nobody can defeat the aliens, Ripley can at least fight them to a stalemate.
A long shot of the furnaces of the prison going out, then a from-space shot of the planet as the sun rises. F**K!!! I HATE it when movies blind me like that! Goddamn!
Various shots of the prison being closed down for good, accompanied by the same inspiring music. Sorry, I just ain’t feelin’ it. We only met this prison in this movie, so I don’t particularly feel anything that the doors are being locked, the mess hall is back in order with chairs upside-down on tables, etc.
The company men lead a limping Morse away. He turns for one last look at the place until one of them says to get going. Morse gives a derisive, “F**k you!” And that’s the last line of extant-character-spoken dialogue of the Alien trilogy. Read into that what you will.
Then a panning shot of the Sulaco’s escape pod with Ripley’s staticky audio log from the conclusion of the original movie. Now THIS is how to end the series. The camera freezes on Ripley’s sleep tube as she says, “This is Ripley…last survivor of the Nostromo…signing off.” Beautiful! Perfect way for the series to bow out! Roll credits!
Waitaminit….WTF?!? There’s something else?
Okay. I don’t know whose idea this was, but I fault not only him/her, but everyone else involved for not cussin’ ‘em out for it.
We get computer text printing that reads:
WEYLAND-YUTANI
WORK PRISON FURY 161
CLOSED AND SEALED.
CUSTODIAL PRESENCE TERMINATED.
REMAINING REFINING EQUIPMENT TO BE SOLD AS SCRAP.
The screen goes black for a moment. Then a single line appears:
END OF TRANSMISSION
Then the movie ends for real.
Good God, how idiotic. What does the audience care what happens to the prison facility? “Closed and sealed.” We could already guess that. “Remaining refining equipment to be sold as scrap.” Who cares? “End of transmission” is a cute way of ending the movie, but that and the text preceding are a dumbass way of ending the series, especially after having an excellent ending seconds earlier!
AFTERTHOUGHTS
As I said at the beginning, the movies does plenty right and plenty wrong; and after the near-uniform excellence of the first two, that was bound to disappoint. Today, Alien3’s reputation seems to have improved, but it will probably always be regarded as a bit inferior to the first two.
To me, the movie’s lesser ability to engage me comes from the lack of anyone to care about (incidentally, Lance Henrickson himself voiced the same during the end credits of the commentary track). Nobody in the movie is likable except Ripley and Clemens. Clemens dies halfway through, and Ripley wants to die in the final act and gets her wish. The rest of the cast were pretty monocharacterized. I didn’t care that Morse lived, because there was never any real difference between Morse and any of the other inmates.
But as far as giving closure to the series, this movie does that with a depressing finality that’s emotionally in keeping with the series. The grimness is ever-present in this movie, and Ripley’s suicide was effective on first viewing at creating the intended sadness in the viewer.
Bottom line: I like it enough that I can watch it if it’s on, no sweat. But I dislike it enough that I’m probably not the one who puts it on.
End of dissection. Thank you.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 07/30/2007 12:27:13 PM |
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Greenhornet
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1791 Posts |
Posted - 07/30/2007 : 2:16:36 PM
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-START TRANSMISSION-
Thanks for the review, Food. It was better than watching the movie, especially since I didn't see the whole thing.
-END TRANSMISSION-
"The Queen is testing poisons." CLEOPATRA, 1935 |
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 07/30/2007 : 6:22:38 PM
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Helluva review, Food. Yeah, there are things I would quibble with, but I can't fault ya on the execution. Good, good job.
(Maybe if I butter him up enough, he'll take on Alien Resurrection.) |
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Gristle McThornbody
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
Germany
186 Posts |
Posted - 08/02/2007 : 10:48:02 AM
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Nice review, Food. You managed to nail almost all of my pros/cons with the film.
"Hi, I'm Bob Evil!" |
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Alien3
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