"Game", "Fight Club", "Gone Girl").
"Alien 3", despite belonging to a long-standing franchise - quite, I would even say, a very Fincher film. The new director turned the series on the old path of atmospheric, chamber cinema. But if Ridley Scott, in fact, filmed a monster-movie, then Fincher alien nightmares and deadly mysteries of the Universe are not so interesting - he is primarily interested in people.
The future master of a psychological thriller takes up business - and conducts an interesting experiment. A rescue capsule brings the lyceum and Ripley to the prison planet, where the few prisoners convicted of particularly serious crimes have united in a religious community. For years, these people have managed to restrain aggression and perverted tendencies, to cultivate humility; but first they are tempted in the person of a woman, and then Death herself, embodied in a disgusting alien monster. What's going on with these people? How do they perceive what is happening? Did their religion change them, or did they remain rapists, scoundrels, psychopaths?
And each character unfolds in its own way. For some, religion helps to remain a person, and someone’s mind, “heated” by mystical moods, is already ready to take the Alien for a deity. Someone falls into demonic courage and throws himself at a monster with bare hands, and someone at the last moment does not dare to sacrifice himself to save others, cowardly and doomed running away from the monster. Everyone goes from a shaking alarmist to a berserker ready to sell his life. Or vice versa – from a dispassionate and unperturbed person, to a beast mad with fear.
In “Alien 3” there is no division into invulnerable main characters and “red shirts”, serving as consumables. Fincher mocked the viewer enough: here we presented the character, revealed his character - but this character is already fluttering in the teeth of the monster. An alien is inescapable, like Death itself, everything is fair - it can only be defeated together. And Ripley is here, despite his special status in the plot, almost gone into himself and his doom man. It is already very difficult for her to believe that the struggle for survival still makes sense.
A little about the film's flaws. First of all, it was a bit hurtful, though, when David Fincher "killed" Hicks and Newt. It felt like a kind of under-the-belt blow to me. Maybe it was necessary to kill Ripley morally, but I think that the military and the little girl just did not fit into the concept of the film, destroying the “tightness” of the situation. The director needed two "aliens" - a woman who personified life, and a xenomorph who personified death. Unnecessary characters Fincher bluntly "leaked" - as an artist, had the right, but still hurtful. Well, from petty faults - Sigourney Weaver shaved head categorically does not go, like any woman, imho. This is my personal preference.
Bottom line: despite the fact that David Fincher already in this, the first directorial experience fully showed his “author’s handwriting”, greatly changing the entourage of the series and freely treating the characters of the previous part, he managed to create a real, canonical “Alien 3”. Moreover, he managed to return the series to the mainstream of atmospheric horror - that is, to return to its origins. A great film, which will especially appeal to those who found the second part too “bad”. That’s only to the first part, he probably does not reach – the mystical sensation and romance of meeting with the unknown that arose on board the alien ship, you can not experience again. At least in the Alien movies. However, Alien 3 is a film about something else.
9 out of 10
Original