Oh, yuck.
From the very get go, this movie has a yuckie factor that will have you pulling your chairs up onto your seats.
Ripley is back. Bishop is back. And the alien is back.
Did I say that Aliens are just like Alien, only different?
Shoot, I said that too soon. Alien? is just like Aliens, only different. Here’s now.
Alien? opens with a face sucker look on the ship, after Ripley, Hicks, Bishop and Newt escaped in Aliens. Also with them is a face sucker. Now, something causes the ship’s autopilot to go on alert and to jettison the sleeping pods.
With the face sucker.
Newt died. Hicks, well, of course he died. Bishop is still busted up something fierce.
Where do the pods land? An all-male prison colony planet. Fury 161. Perrrrrrrrfect.
Oh, and the face sucker? It latches onto a dog. Ta da — a slightly different species of alien, one crossed with a dog instead of a human, and one that is decidedly more canine in shape and characteristics.
In other words, a cool new alien.
The visuals in this movie are not as good as in the first two movies. It does have the cool factory feel, giving it a nice steampunk theme and feel. Not as good, but it certainly could be worse. Nowhere near as grand, nowhere near as awesome, but it’s OK.
The other new visual is close shaven Ripley. I gotta say, Sigourney Weaver, with her buzz cut and lack of breasts, could easy pass for a man. I wonder what she thinks of this.
Weaver is good in this movie. Weaver, though, can only do so much. The story here is good, but not of the same caliber as the first two. It’s just different, and a wee bit inferior. I reading some of the background on Wikipedia, it’s pretty clear why — the story went through some pretty serious rewrites, some pretty serious changes in concepts, and some pretty serious fluctuation in levels of expected participation form Weaver.
I cant even imagine how hard it must be to write a screenplay and see it all the way through to being an actual movie. I don’t even take ownership of PowerPoint slides I make, so it’s a real stretch to see taking ownership of a story when so many others, as in this case, play with it, tinker with it, modify it. I suppose the saving grace to this all was that Weaver did sign on to do it, she did sign on to play a major / lead role, and the story was worked around her.
Ripley is still dealing with her mother issues. The loss of Newt is a hit to her psyche, and it is something that carries on throughout this movie.
There are a couple of good supporting characters and good supporting actors in this. Yes, being a men’s prison, it’s all men. Duh. Charles Dutton plays the preacher, Dillon, a great character and a great performance by him. Ironic that he plays a prisoner, you know, being as he actually did two stints in prison, one for manslaughter and one for weapons. You’d probably recognize him from the TV series Roc, but if you’re lucky, you’d also recognize him form season 2 of Sleeper Cell.
Religion plays an important role in the prison. It’s all men, and the believers (an apocalyptic, society-sucks kind of religion) are trying to do their best to be the best they can be — given that they are all pretty hard core criminals. Hard core criminals, trying to be monks. And Dillon is the key to that. Ripley, Weaver, is a big disruption to the status quo, as is the alien.
The other notable character is Clemens. The doctor. The former inmate. He was one of them, and now he kind of isn’t. But he still kind of is. It’s an interesting idea, that you can leave but really you can’t. It ties in pretty well to the salvation and redemption concepts of the film and of Dillon. A nice compliment.
Oh, and the alien. It’s pretty notable, too. I love this one, I really do. It’s fantastic to see it come right up to Ripley and seemingly sniff her. Beautiful creature. It’s an awesome killing creature, if I can say that.
Some day, I’d like to see the other version of this. When they released the 9-disc quadrilogy set in 2003, they added in all of the extras for this tale. And that includes a couple of interesting extras, it seems. There’s a bunch more on the religious stuff, and there’s apparently a scene wherein the prisoners actually catch the alien for a while. That I’d like to see.
And if you think the maternal issues are over in this movie, they aren’t. For a film that features just one woman, there’s Momma issues still. Ripley doesn’t have gas, and she’s not pregnant. She’s got one inside of her – a Momma alien, no less. And because she uses the scanner from the escape pod to find it, that fact is transmitted back to the company, which definitely wants it and her alive. It’d been a boon for their bio-warfare efforts.
Her time as a human mother has ended, but she might just like on as an alien mother.
It’s a bit sad to see the fatalist turn in Ripley after she learns this. It’s bad enough thinking you’re going to die, and that everyone around you is going to die. It’s something altogether different to know that you need to kill the alien and yourself. That doing the right thing means wiping out the alien and yourself, all for the betterment of your species. She stops running, and starts seeking out the alien — going on the offense when no one else in her species could or should dare such a thing.
This movie is good, but not as good as the first two. If you take the time to see the first two — and I think you should — make time to see this one afterward.
