Directed by:
David FincherCinematography:
Alex ThomsonComposer:
Elliot GoldenthalCast:
Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Danny Webb, Holt McCallany, Lance Henriksen, Christopher Fairbank (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
When Sigourney Weaver's spacecraft crash-lands on a prison planet, she thinks things are as bad as they're going to get: the inhabitants are murderers, rapists and thieves. But she doesn't know about her craft's stowaway, the only other survivor of the crash: the vicious alien life form that lives to kill! As the body count rises, the desperate humans band together for survival. But with no weapons on the planet, how can they fight? (Home Box Office)
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Reviews (14)
Fincher's feature debut was clearly plagued by the studio's pansy wallet and promotion, which is quite visible even years after the film managed to reclaim its well-deserved reputation. Regardless, this goes hand in hand with the trend for each director to approach it radically differently, which is also done here to great effect. The atmosphere of a penal colony, where nothing works, is definitely something to behold, especially when you look at the local population, who have clearly done a number of unpleasant things in their lives. As an added bonus, there’s also decent Goldenthal music, great camera tricks with the FPS look, and a cut-out Ellen Ripley. 4 ½. (The rest I leave to the possibilities of the expanded edition.)
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As an audio-visually powerful, toned-down, existential drama about seeking forgiveness and God in a God-forsaken place, this movie is excellent, but half way through it’s like out of nowhere Fincher remembers (or more likely the producers forced him to remember) that he is filming the new Alien and not a sci-fi adaptation of something by Dostoyevsky. So, all of a sudden he forgets about everything that came before and then launches into an absolutely regular, uninventive kill-fest that loses all of the atmosphere built up in the first half. And this goes for both the regular version and the director’s cut, which is the better of the two, but just a better version of the same and not “something completely different" as many reviewers suggest.
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The subject is fine, Sigourney Weaver is great as always, the magic with the camera and its lenses in the tunnels of the prison labyrinth is perfect, and the film has Fincher’s typically bold and depressing creative signature. But that somehow doesn’t bring the film to the level of which Fincher is usually capable and which would have helped Alien3 to be as impressive as its predecessor.
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The first one was (and still is) a formidable claustrophobic machine for mining nerve-wracking atmosphere and suspense; the second one is a militant feast in honour of the most terrifying monsters in modern cinematic history that doesn't let us get away from aliens in the right sense of the word. The third one wants to take something from each by using a single bloodthirsty monster and involving a group of seemingly twisted characters, setting the action in the vast, depressing labyrinth of a prison where life as a symbol no longer has any intrinsic value. The cast is once again perfect and the characters are quite diverse, and it’s not possible to guess who will end up as a bloody spot on the wall and with whom the script has longer-term plans. And as for Fincher's debut, it's a well-known fact that the studio tried to repeatedly rape and control his work, which is unfortunately noticeable: the depressive barrage is at times on a similar level to its predecessors, but partly due to the very choice and nature of the setting, where even a brain-dead would get depressed; and on the other hand, it has a rather fading tendency: the performance of the intruder, like in the first one, is based on suggestiveness, but fails to generate intense flamboyance during its advances (also due to his strange digital form), and mostly doesn't even act as a highlight of the film – that would be the skilful subjective camera work, the effective soundtrack and the already mentioned actors, led by the excellent Weaver, who is more dominant from part to part. It's worth watching, it doesn't offend or fail, but it still makes me sad to think that there could have been a pure Fincher version that would have shown his narrative genius and fulfilled the potential of a great subject into something grander and more distinctive.
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The Alien franchise is remarkable for the fact that every director has made his mark on his episode. Scott's imagination and Cameron's belligerence have been replaced by the heavy blanket of depression master David Fincher. Welcome to the bleak world of ex-convicts from which there is no escape. The third episode is not worse than the previous two, it’s just different.
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