A Subversive Masterpiece

The True Tragedy of the Best Alien Film

Celebrating Beauty (A New Series)

In my abortive career in the film industry, I learned the hard way what an archaic medium film really is. It ignited in me a deep love of the obscure, the overlooked and the unloved in movies that are astonishing, intelligent, and soulful.

Most of these movies fail through bad luck—released at the wrong time, marketing misfires, etc. So I’m going to do my part to correct this injustice, and help such films find (or re-find) the audience they so richly deserve.

The Children’s Apocalypse

The carpets were a bit moldy, and the wallpaper was peeling, but we didn’t care. I was barely out of Jr. High, and I had two kids in tow: my twelve-year-old brother and our neighbor. We’d spent all night watching Alien and Aliens on video tapes rented from the video store—we were supposed to be watching the edited-for-TV versions my Dad had taped off the local independent station earlier in the week, but we knew that if we were going to survive this Saturday afternoon outing, we needed to see the real business. Now we were here, in the old, very traditionally-minded cinema, where they really cared about enforcing the age limits.

We bought tickets to a romantic comedy and then, when the usher’s back was turned, stole across the hall into the big room where the first programmed blockbuster of the summer of 1992 was playing.

We were the only ones in the room.

We got the best seats, front-and-center, and waited with bated breath. The 20th Century Fox fanfare came up, and then got stuck, hanging on a brutal dissonant cord that reached down into my soul like the claw of some ancient demon, and scratched me from the inside.

And everything after that was even more unnerving.

I sat through the closing credits, trying to catch my breath, completely lost in the vision of despair that, somehow, felt like the most moving church service I’d ever been to.

And that was just the start of my relationship with the dark, twisty, mythically complex world of Alien 3, and how it transformed a damn good sci-fi horror series into something that seemed to echo eternity in its journey through the heights and depths of the human soul.

A History of Violence

Alien 3 had a tough job ahead of it. It continues the adventures of Ellen Ripley in her fight against the Xenomorph aliens (which gestate inside a living host after being forcibly implanted through the throat, to be born by bursting out of the host’s chest). In order to keep its audience it had to somehow serve the eclectic audience for creepy science fiction horror (the first film) and balls-out shoot-em-up crowd-pleaser action (the second film).

It was funded and scheduled before a script was ever written, and helmed without a finished script by a director who had studio interference the likes of which not even God has ever seen. The first-time feature director David Fincher (who would go on to helm Fight Club, Se7en, Gone Girl, and House of Cards, among others) would, in an effort to finish the film, ignore notes, steal shots, and ultimately get banned from his own set. The film was edited by the producers in a rush-job to make a theatrical date.

The result? The version that reached theaters was difficult-to-follow, but, like David Lynch’s Dune, felt as if it were skating just on the edge of sublimity.

A decade later, Fincher’s original workprint was reconstructed for home video as Alien 3: The Assembly Cut by editor Terry Rawlings from Fincher’s notes (Fincher was still too angry to participate), restoring a half-hour of footage, an entire subplot, and substantially altering the overall feel of the film. I will be delving into this version of the film.

The Lovecraftian Heritage

The original Alien is a film about the terror of rape, and manages to follow the classic rape-revenge plot as laid out in Wes Craven’s original The Last House on the Left using Lovecraftian symbolism and conventions cribbed from At the Mountains of Madness, all folded into a science fictional haunted house atmosphere in the hopes of slipping under the audience’s skin like a maggot infestation.

It was a spectacular success. The marriage of a sharp script, astonishing production values, H.R. Giger’s nightmarish erotic designs, and an absolutely unflinching and brutal directorial eye made it an instant classic—and almost impossible to follow up.

Shoggoth by Nottsuo
Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

It took seven years before a sequel—Aliens—emerged, despite heavy development the entire time. Writer/Director James Cameron took the Xenomorph monster and used it to tell a story that mashed up Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (the book—the film wouldn’t come around for another decade, and it drew quite a lot from Aliens) with a classic company-town family western where the Xenomorphs play the role of the Company’s heavies.

Cameron carried forward the theme of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s corrupting and suffocating presence, pursuing the opportunity of securing the deadly Xenomorph aliens at any cost (including hundreds of human lives) for their bioweapons division.

The character story follows Ellen Ripley’s confrontation with the loss and PTSD she suffers as a result of the events of Alien. This time she doesn’t merely survive and triumph, she quasi-adopts a young girl who survived the massacre, and faces down a cartoonishly overpowered Xenomorph queen in a mother-vs.-mother battle that left theater crowds (and home video viewers) cheering in their seats. Unlike its predecessor, it ends on an unambiguously happy note, the nightmares banished and normalcy restored for all parties. Our surviving heroes form a new family, symbolizing ultimate hope for the future—as well as the triumph of good over evil.

Following up this sequel proved more difficult still. The project took (again) seven years to reach the screen, and the pressure to follow Aliens up with something new provoked one disastrous (and, I daresay, stupid) script after another. After a development hell the likes of which few films ever emerge from, three of these scripts were cobbled together willy-nilly into something that managed to break new ground and bring Ripley’s story arc to a startling close, but at the expense of audience goodwill.

The Monstrous Rebirth

I’m about to spoil the whole plot for you, but it won’t affect the experience of watching the film. This is not a movie that depends on plot twists for its potency.

Alien 3 opens with a nightmare. The sleeper ship returning Ripley and friends suffers a Xenomorph-induced fire in flight. The sleeper pods are jettisoned, and all survivors but Ripley—including her new adoptive daughter—are killed in the ensuing crash. Ripley survives to find herself on a penal-colony-cum-leadworks populated by the worst-of-the-worst: serial killers, serial rapists, child molesters, and sadists, all of whom have found a way to channel their monstrous instincts into a fervent apocalyptic fundamentalist Christianity premised on celibacy and ruthless community discipline.

As Ripley struggles to stay safe surrounded by hypersexual brutes who haven’t seen a woman in years, a new Xenomorph is quietly picking off prisoners.

The prison warden is, predictably, unimpressed with Ripley’s warnings until he learns the hard way that she’s right. Since the facility is a prison, it has no weapons of any kind, so Ripley and the remaining inmates work out a scheme to trap the Xenomorph in a toxic waste bin.

The plan works, but at a terrible cost in prisoner lives. Unfortunately, an inmate named Golic—who had previously narrowly escaped the Xenomorph—has come to believe that it is the Dragon of Revelation, and that it has called him to be its personal John the Baptist. This conviction earns him the straight-jacket treatment, but he manages escape and frees the Xenomorph. In the ensuing rampage, the beast comes face-to-face with Ripley in one of the most famous shots in the history of cinema.

And it doesn’t kill her.

Ripley, who has been having nausea and chest pain throughout the film, suspects that she is carrying another alien embryo. Her dread is confirmed when a scan of her chest reveals not just an alien, but a juvenile alien queen.

The scan is automatically relayed to Weyland-Yutani, which dispatches a team of commandos and scientists to secure Ripley and harvest the embryo.

With time ticking down, Ripley rallies the prisoners into a suicide mission to corner the Xenomorph in a giant mold and douse it with molten lead.

As the Company’s troops search the complex, the motley crew successfully executes their plan, each one dying in the process, excepting Ripley and two others.

When Ripley is located, she is offered the chance at a new life, and the promise that the company won’t be preserving the embryo. Believing this promise to be a lie, and that the future existence of humanity in the face of an unopposable predator rests on her, Ripley casts herself, cruciform, into the molten lead below. The threat of the Xenomorphs has ended.

Dreams, Tragedy, and Betrayal

The death of Newt (Ripley’s adoptive daughter from Aliens) and Hicks (the marine with whom she had a burgeoning romance) gut-kicked the audience with betrayal—a testament to how successfully Cameron subverted and denatured one of the most effective horror stories ever told. And yet, in that subversion, Cameron set in motion two fundamental story forces that required that any continuation of Ripley’s story would end in tragedy.

First, by setting the precedent for genre subversion, the series structurally demanded another such turn. If Ripley were to wind up in the same situation as she was in Alien, that would turn what was a very special franchise into a series of alternating retreads. If she were to repeat Aliens, it would be the same problem, but with a different target audience. In either case, for her to have personal stakes, she would have to somehow be separated from Newt and Hicks—they would either have to die or they would have to be the “princesses in the tower” that Ripley must save, or the story wouldn’t work. For the stakes to be compelling, the genre and format had to change again.

Second, and perhaps more interesting, the arc of Ripley from Alien to Aliens unintentionally tapped into a very old mythic archetype. In Alien she’s a Maiden under threat (both sexual and otherwise), desperate to preserve her bodily sanctity. In Aliens, she’s a Mother building and protecting a family. To complete the arc, she would, in Alien 3, need to become the Crone—the wise woman who lives by her own rules, who is suspected-but-revered by the village, and whose experience and canniness are the salvation of her people.

For Ripley to live, not only did Newt and Hicks have to die, but so did the dreams of Ripley’s younger self—and so Fincher (and ultimate story architect Vincent Ward) made her the wise Crone in a Gothic Horror tale, surrounded by medieval monks who’d just as soon burn the witch as tolerate the threat she represented to their way of life.

Blake’s Gothic Savior

One of the early defining works of Gothic horror is Frankenstein, a work preoccupied with the glory and horror of childbirth. It is appropriate, then, that Alien 3, in plunging into the Gothic drama, takes the childbirth motif and runs it out of the park.

Ripley carries the fate of the world in her body. Once born her cosmically important “child” will be snatched away by the Great Beast whose tentacles surround the world: the Weyland-Yutani corporation, who will then use that unholy child to rule humanity with an iron fist.

If this is ringing a bell in your head, and you’re an aficionado of either horror, poetry, or religion, it should.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron:”
—Revelation 12:1-5

The woman is generally understood to be the Virgin Mary, and Jesus the child she carries. Alien 3 inverts this, casting Ripley’s involuntary pregnancy as monstrous: she is to be the Mother of a Cthonic Antichrist, unless she herself becomes the Messiah.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun
William Blake, 1810

This has an eerie sympathy with the art and philosophy of William Blake, an English poet from the early nineteenth century who fashioned a new religion from a combination of pagan, gnostic, and Christian sources mixed with a post-scientific take on astrology. At the center of Blake’s religion was the human individual, which existed in constant struggle with the gods, and whose true exemplar, as laid out in his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, was Lucifer (Satan).

Blake’s Enlightenment gospel, which both loathes religion and embraces it, is echoed in the neopagan traditions of Ordo Templo Orientis and Thelema. It is also resonates strongly with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, who’s Ubermench (the ideal state for which humanity should strive), being a fully realized human consciousness, is willing both to conquer and to sacrifice for noble ends…without regard for notoriety.

And, as is appropriate for a film that so strongly echoes Blake, the role of religion here is incredibly complex. On one hand, the religion of the prisoners is a matter of ridicule for the warden, Ripley, and medical officer Clemens. The religion itself has the feel of both cult and cloister, and it is clear that a number of the “Brothers” are interested in the religion only insofar as it earns them credibility in the community.

Yet, as their numbers are winnowed down, we find that their faith enables not just their community solidarity, but genuine love and respect between them, giving them a conduit through which they can synthesize their native rebellious and antisocial tendencies with the nobility they wish they had—and, through this synthesis, they make their nobility real. Like Theoden at Helm’s Deep, they face their end as Viking warriors squaring off against certain doom in a cause that is, nonetheless, worthwhile.

And so Ripley, the Maiden who successfully wins free of violation in Alien, who in Aliens comes into her femininity as an avenging Mother, finally takes her place among the stars as an independent Crone who leads a cadre of criminals to their redemption through heroic sacrifice, and who herself carries the Antichrist, and who dies to prevent its unholy birth and save the world from Evil...

…and whose name will be forever buried in the Company archives, whose heroism will go unremarked, and whose nobility is thus greater and more tragic for the fact that she knows the eternal void into which her sacrifice will slip. The world will go quietly on its way, blissfully unaware that it owes its existence to the solitary act of a solitary woman who, when confronted with the full horror of the universe, stepped with open eyes into the fires of hell.

It’s hard to overstate the sheer brass of such a narrative move. The great religions of history are headed by heroes whose sacrifice demanded notoriety. Their heroes martyr themselves for the cause, so that their fame may resound. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel,” Jesus says; in other words: “Make me famous.”

Alien 3 thus takes the heroic story by the horns and says: “Whether rapist or murderer or victim a commoner, be they even the least and meanest and most hated among the peoples of the world, the noble actions of the individual in the face of a dehumanizing world is a triumph more powerful than all great prophets of history, and more deserving of admiration than all the great men of the ages.”

Final Thoughts

There are enough notable aspects of the production and artistry of Alien 3 that I could write a short book on the topic (this post is actually built on notes for such a book). The performances are subtle and intelligent, delivered by actors who all have since garnered well-deserved notoriety. The music is haunting and gorgeous, a mix of Gregorian chants and soaring brass. The design of the leadworks facility, despite being filmed in dirty yellow tones, is soaring and oppressive and gives the feel of being trapped in a kaleidoscopic Gothic Cathedral.

The story, too, is layered, containing allegories about the then-current AIDS crisis, meditations on the failures and triumphs of feminism, questions about the nature of violence and grace, femininity and masculinity, courage and cowardice, canniness and wisdom, and on whether intelligence is truly as valuable as strength of character. There isn’t a wasted frame, and its sole technical shortcoming were that its ground-breaking rod-puppet effects were shoddily composited because the producers got shirty about the budget.

Its central sin, that of killing off the characters of Newt and Hicks, is (especially in the Assembly Cut) well-earned. If you, the viewer, are willing to go along with the ride, you will find yourself immersed in a phantasmagoria of moral complexity and narrative depth that plumbs the darkest parts of the human experience. It stares deeply into the abyss, and finds the shining light of hope on the far side of nihilism...

…and within the hidden corners of even the most disfigured and discarded human soul.