selenak

Now I've rewatched Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection as well, or rather, watched the Special Editions for the first time. If I had to sum these films up in one sentence, I'd say "flawed but interesting". Certainly more original than the sequels in most other franchises.

Alien³'s flaws and strengths are closely intertwined. All those people responsible for the script and David Fincher obviously were on a "you think Alien was bleak? We'll show you bleak!" mindtrack. Equally obvious is the desire of the film to set itself apart from Aliens. Instead of big, big guns and other big machines, you have a penal colony with nearly no weapons at all and only the slightest bit of technology actually working. Instead of marines with standard Action Movie snappy dialogue, you have a bunch of prisoners who also happen to be religious fanatics. Instead of a Queen and dozens and dozens of Aliens, we're back to just one Alien. (Methinks that of his two predecessors, Fincher preferred Scott.) And as for Ripley-as-a-mother, well, that's where the film really gets nasty, and robbing her of Newt in the opening minutes is just the beginning.

All of which works well, in parts. The big problem is that while Cameron deflated the threat of the original Alien(s), he came up with a scary monster of his own, the Queen. And Scott's singular Alien worked so well because we saw so little of it, and because the seven crew members of the Nostromo were each established as distinguishable individuals. When they got taken out by the Alien, we could tell, and we cared. The penal colonists are for the most part as much types as the Marines were, there are too many of them to tell them apart (it really works just for the doctor, the preacher and the Renfield wannabe). We see too much of the single Alien for it to be the mystery and threat the original creature was, and it's not the intelligent mother creature the Queen was, either. In a way, this combines the worst of two worlds.

There are some wonderful and/or horrifying images, more so in the Special Edition: the unconscious Ripley as Charles Dance's character finds her, looking strangely like a dark Greek Bronze statue on a beach, or a mermaid; the autopsy of Newt, which looks like a pre-run for Se7en, with Sigourney Weaver's face displaying Ripley's intense suffering and loss combined with the determination to see this through, as she has to be sure; and of course the sequence which Joss Whedon must have really liked, Ripley's dive into infinity to save the world.

One of our critics said that Ripley in Alien³ was St. Joan, and the appellation seems apt; her shorn head evokes the Joan of silent movie years, and while this is actually the only movie of the four where Ripley has sex with someone (off-screen), it is also Ripley at her most asexual. Not a heroine as in the two previous films, a martyr (see butterfly's Buffy and Frodo discussion for the difference). The challenge for every martyr, as T.S. Eliot has it in his Becket drama, is not to die for his own glory or satisfaction, and so Ripley, while suspecting early on and ever more strongly what has happened to her, must endure until she has tried her best (in vain, since this isn't Eliot but Fincher) to save the others, she must be tempted (and I must salute Lance Henricksen here - his short appearance as Human!Bishop is extremely powerful, as he exudes a seductive warmth and charisma while conveying that every word he speaks is a lie) and remain strong in the face of temptation. Only then can she die.

Letting her be infected by the Alien was an idea that made dark sense - it is the worst thing you could do to her, and it is a supremely vicious reply to Cameron's presentation of Ripley as a mother. In Alien Ripley was part of a (none too friendly) team and lost all of her crewmates; in Aliens she was the outsider but formed ties and in the end a nuclear family with Newt and Hicks; in Alien³, she is well and truly isolated from the human world, cut off for good, and connected to the Aliens instead. In the special edition, the burial of Newt is cut with the emerging of the Alien from an animal carcass; this, the film implies, is the only child Ripley will ever have. Flawed as Fincher's movie is, there is something deeply admirable its courage to go for broke with the tragedy. As I wrote in my reply to someone's observation on Aliens yesterday - when you are in a Cameron movie, you can be reasonably sure that neither the maternal heroine nor the cute kid are going to die. (No guarantees for anyone else, but then anyone else doesn't get the same emotional identification.) In a Fincher movie, though? No guarantees at all. Au contraire, it's more likely that the worst thing which can happen to your hero(ine) does happen. Not a comfortable movie, at all, and definitely inferior to its two predecessors from a craftsman pov; but I do not regret it was made. I'm a European, after all; we have a thing for tragedies.

Alien: Resurrection: if interviews are anything to go by, it must have been hate at first sight between director Jeunet and Joss Whedon. (I always had the feeling that Angel's "not a eunuch" rant on AtS must be a paraphrase on how Joss reacts if someone brings up that particular collaboration, or lack of same.*g*) Still, the result is worth watching, and though it lacks the perfection of Cameron's Aliens as a sequel and as a film, I like it better, emotionally. (As I said earlier, my top Alien movie is and will always be Alien.) Let's get out the big complaint first: the general is a card board villain - in fact everyone from the Auriga is. One longs for the warmth and creepiness of Human!Bishop, or the scientific detachment and complete lack of overacting of Ian Holm's Ash. And for the third time in a row, the mercenaries are types (as the marines were, as the prisoners were).

This being said: Ripley not just as a clone but as a human/alien hybrid was inspired. Technically speaking, I suppose we should call her Number Eight; Ellen Ripley died (it's repeated two or three times during the movie). The character played by Sigourney Weaver her is a new being, and a fascinating one. All three previous movies, from the point onwards where Ripley in Alien discovered that the Company regarded the crew of the Nostromo as expendable, made a point about the corruption and selfishness of the human species in its willingness to sell out its own. What humans do in Alien: Resurrection presents the theme's apogee. Not just the growing of Ripley as a clone in order to get at the Alien but the clear view of her as a by product, a scientific curiosity, a lab rat. (When she tells Wren that they won't be able to teach the Alien tricks, he replies "Why not? We're teaching you.") The willingness to use dozens of unconscious colonists as hosts to breed more aliens, which doesn't elicit as much as a blink from any of the scientists involved. The best visualisation of the utter violation of sentient life this behaviour means is the scene where Ripley finds the other clones, the ones preceding her. The emotional horror of this is greater than any of the gore-heavy beheadings and deaths in this movie.

(There is a strong echo of this in BTVS' season 6, where Buffy's resurrection is presented as a similar violation, and in the Slayer backstory as revealed in season 7's Get it Done. The image of the girl which was to become the First Slayer, chained to the ground against her will and impregnated by an alien demon works similarly to cloned, hybrid Ripley, chained or in a straight jacket, with the scientists and military seeing her much as the original Council saw the Slayer - a useful weapon.)

Hybrid Ripley in Alien: Resurrection is also more sexual than any of the previous presentations of Ripley in the other movies; there is the interesting implication that this is due to her partly alien nature. Now if this were used to give Ripley a romance with any of the new people, it would weaken her character, but it isn't. She effortlessly turns Johner's crude come-on back on him in the basketball scene and humiliates him, and while there is some subtext and a definite element of flirtation in her relationship with the android Call, there is an equally strong motherly element. (Oedipal implications left, right and center? Yup, this would definitely be a Joss Whedon script.)

Of course, Ripley's true romance never was with any other human. It was with her nemesis, the Alien, which now has become part of herself and carries something of her own humanity. (Not necessarily a good thing, being partly human, given what a lot of the humans in the Alien movies are like.) Death, if you allow the cheeky quotation, is her art. In Alien³ it came as a shock to the original Ripley to find that the Alien no longer wants to kill her; in Alien: Resurrection the hybrid Ripley is no longer surprised. The scene with her enveloped by Alien bodies carries a compelling and disturbing mixture of womb and sex associations. Fear (a theme in all movies), a very dark eroticism (Scott) and the maternal (Cameron) have become irrevocably mixed, and so they are in the scenes between Ripley and the most human-looking of all Aliens, who is the Queen's son but her son as well. Looking like a skull and an embryo at the same time, the creature has Ripley's own dark eyes, looking at her hopelessly hurt and confused, holding her gaze as she kills it. Neither Jeunet nor Joss get any plus points for giving us a third version of the sucked-out-by-vacuum demise, but this one at least has a quite different emotional subtext (as opposed to the repletion in Aliens), with the pain in Ripley's and even in Cal's eyes matching the look in the Alien's.

minum_calibre recced this wonderful story, which is so many things: a season 6 BTVS AU, and I usually don't go much for a AUs. This one does everything right, presenting alternatives that aren't just "fix-its" for things the author doesn't like in the canon but events which could have happened equally well. It's a story about Buffy and Faith, and Faith and Buffy, with the dynamic between them right, and neither of them bashed (nor is any other character); about Slayers and death and life as gifts.

In other news, the imcomparable Timov has arrived at