Alien 3 Review, Part 2

An attack on motherhood and logic

Photo by Diego Marín on Unsplash

Last time, we began with the opening scene, and already, the entire franchise is ruined. In this review, we’ll discuss why. I would recommend reading the previous article for clarity, but for now, I’ll simply list the sequence of events.

The alien queen, somehow, managed to lay an egg inside the room where the cryobeds were kept in spite of the fact that she’d never been outside the hull of the ship. The egg hatched and the parasitic alien damaged Newt’s cryobed, then for no apparent reason, abandoned its attempt to latch onto Newt, and latched onto Ripley instead. But here’s the thing. Ripley’s bed wasn’t damaged in anyway. So, how did it break into the bed? Both the ship and the escape shuttle crash, which is very unlikely, and everyone except Ripley is killed. Because Newt’s bed was damaged, she drowned in her sleep; although, the movie shows the viewer her dead face, and she looks like she died in extraordinary pain. Despite this second crash, the parasitic alien survives and plants another embryo into a nearby dog, even though the previous films show that the parasitic aliens die after planting a single embryo.

 First of all, by killing Newt, we’ve undone Ripley’s progress as a character. She essentially went from a terrified sole survivor in a middle of the road horror flick, to one of cinema’s only true female action stars, then to a surrogate mother for an orphan girl. Killing Newt brought the character back to square one, by making everything she fought for in the second film meaningless. Furthermore — and this is just my opinion — I suspect that killing Newt was some propagandist’s idea of taking a shot at motherhood in general. There seems to be a concerted effort to defeminize Ripley by shaving her head and putting her in the inmates’ clothes. It’s very reminiscent of Moa’s Cultural Revolution where the men and women all wore sexless clothing. Now, the writers might’ve been playing into the Alien Universe’s dystopian elements, but I suspected there was more to it. Plus, the amount of bone crunching and flesh cutting sounds, which take place during Newt’s autopsy later in the film, makes the scene feel less like a medical procedure and more like an act of sacrilege. I couldn’t help but feel like the writers were going out of their way to desecrate the little girl’s body. The fact that they showed Newt screaming in pain when the writers later say she drowned in her sleep adds to this suspicion. I felt like the people who put this movie together wanted to humiliate Ripley and Newt, and taking a shot at their relationship as mother and daughter is the only reason I can think of that might explain why. Granted, this is just my opinion. I can’t prove it. But from a narrative perspective, it removes Ripley’s status as a hero, and returns her to being a victim. We’re back where we started.

The next reason why this destroys the entire franchise is because the core rules holding the universe together are ignored. We’re given no explanation as to how the egg wound up where it did. We don’t know why the parasitic creature stopped trying to enter Newt’s cryobed and chose Ripley instead. We don’t know how it could’ve entered Ripley’s bed without melting the glass or breaking the bed’s seal, and we don’t know how or why the parasitic alien laid two embryos instead of one.

Some might say these are nitpicky plot holes, but when world building, the writer needs to operate within the rules set up by the previous works. Rules are how the writer is supposed to establish the stakes in a story. If the rules regarding what is and isn’t possible within any work of fiction are ignored, then anything can happen, and this eventually leads to a scenario where people can die and come back on a whim. We actually see this nonsense in at least one other Alien film.

To prove my point, let’s say you were trying to make what happened during that credit sequence coherent, so you could add another movie. How would you do it? The queen had to lay the egg out in the hull. So, how do we get the egg from the hull to the room with the cryobeds? Can the egg get up on its own? Did the egg grow legs, walk to the cryobed room, then hang itself? Perhaps, Newt was possessed by the alien queen’s spirit, and moved the egg on her own without realizing it.

 How did the parasitic alien choose Ripley over Newt? Was there something special about Ripley? If so, what? Can that be used in future movies? How? How did the alien detect whatever it was that made Ripley special? How did the alien get inside Ripley’s cryobed? Did it teleport? Can they teleport? If so, how do you incorporate that power into another movie? Was there something special about the parasitic alien who planted two embryos instead of one? If so, what was it? Does the queen have a special egg inside her that she can use to start another colony if she finds herself in trouble?

All these questions must be considered. If the writer ignores these problems, then the audience will suspect the obvious. The writer doesn’t care. This is a popcorn flick, and the writer thinks the viewers are stupid. This will force the viewers to ask one all-important question. If writer doesn’t care, why should I?

The beauty of writing is that you can make almost anything happen, but there has to be a thread of logic to the sequence of events, no matter how thin. The reason for this is simple. The audience has to follow along. Most bad movies are hard to follow because there’s no connecting thread from point A to point B. The audience isn’t going to write the story for the writer, so if they can’t understand what’s happening, they grow bored. To make matters worse, lazy writing creates an impossible situation for anyone who want to add to the story. They now have to take a long list of contrivances and make rules out of them if they are to reestablish the stakes. That or they’ll just pile up more contrivances and hope the viewer doesn’t notice. This is what we see in the next film.

But the problem is the writers of Alien 3, apparently, weren’t worried about logic. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they spat in the face of it. I think they were more concerned with shoehorning messages into the film, more specifically, I think they were trying to undue the surrogate family built by the end of the second movie. They were so eager to do this, that they killed Newt and Hicks as fast as possible, hoping you’d forget about Ripley’s potential future. If they tried to kill them later in the film, the viewer would’ve been even more attached Hicks and Newt, and their deaths would’ve turned from an insult to a tragedy. This also would’ve further endeared the viewers to Ripley, but killing Newt and Hicks wasn’t about Ripley’s growth. It was about making the viewer forget Ripley’s happy ending as fast as possible. I found this very disturbing.

I wish I could say the rest of the movie gets better. Alas, it does not. We’ll cover what happens once Ripley is rescued by the prisoners in the next review.