The Loneliness of Dying in ‘Alien 3’
Alien is widely regarded as one of the best science fiction/horror movies of all time, if not the best. Aliens is widely regarded as one of the best sequels of all time, if not the best. Already, there’s an incredibly high bar to clear. The third film’s reputation is nowhere near that of the previous two, and that’s a shame given that it’s a legitimately great movie. Where Alien 3 succeeds is in the fact that it is as different from the first two movies as they were from each other. At the same time, there are themes connecting each of them that are only brought to the forefront in what is truly a perfect trilogy capper. Still, they are three films about distinctly different things. The first is about capitalism. The second is about motherhood. And the third is about dying. It is simply and bluntly about death. It is about the intimate awareness of terminal illness and the fact that there is not a thing you can do to change it.
Even though Alien has never exactly been a lighthearted franchise, that’s a rough note to pin a whole film on, I admit. It’s also a poignant one, and kind of beautiful in its stark honesty. Of course, I recognize that Alien 3 loses people on a much more surface level by simply killing off Aliens survivors Newt and Hicks between movies. Alien 3 opens with the escape pod from the Sulaco in Aliens crash-landing on the maximum security prison planet Fiorina-161. Ripley is the only survivor, but in a way, she isn’t, because she’s dying from the moment the film begins. That’s sort of the whole point. This is not Ripley embarking on another grand adventure, with her friends carelessly discarded. This is Ripley’s realization that her friends died carelessly and senselessly and knowing on some level that her internal clock is ticking down and it will not be long before she joins them.
On a more basic level, the fact that Newt and Hicks are gone helps shift the tone to a more isolated horror along the lines of the original Alien. After the second film, and their triumph over the hive and the Queen, Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Hicks could have survived anything. They were unstoppable. The sense of isolation, the grief Ripley feels from having a family she only just found ripped away from her, it’s not only just emotionally devastating, it’s necessary for the kind of story that Alien 3 is telling. Death does not wait for you to be ready, it does not care how much time you think you have left, or what bonds you’ve forged. When it’s the end, it’s the end.
Many have pointed out the parallels between Ripley’s arc in Alien 3 and the AIDS epidemic which was still taking an absolutely horrific toll when the film was released in 1992. Ripley wastes away gradually throughout the film and there’s nothing she can do but accept it. It is, as I said, very much a movie about terminal illness. It is about knowing you are going to die and deciding how to go out. Yet at the same time it ties directly and overtly into the overall themes of capitalist greed that connect these first three movies. The alien itself (Xenomorph, if you prefer) is not really the villain of this trilogy. It never had been. The antagonist had been The Company from that very first film, when a blue-collar crew was sent down under a phony distress signal to pick up a valuable creature at the expense of the crew’s lives. In the second, the marines were the expendable ones, sent in like cannon fodder, and even the survivors’ pods were meant to be sabotaged to look like an accident before Ripley caught wind and intervened. The third centers on the most overlooked population of all: prisoners.
It’s an understatement to say Fury-161 is understaffed. The prisoners have essentially been left to themselves, to run their own little world. They’ve found religion, and even though almost all of them are violent offenders of the worst kind, they’ve managed to reach a kind of peace. That peace is, of course, disrupted by the arrival of Ripley and the new alien. None of them have even seen a woman for as long as they’ve been on this planet. When everything turns to shit, there’s no point in a distress beacon. Alerting The Company will only alert them to the presence of their valued asset, and they will mow down anyone without thinking twice in order to get it.
Ripley is, herself, an alien among the prisoners. As a woman she might as well be a different species. Yet, of all places, this is where she forms her most intimate relationship out of the entire series. It’s fascinating to compare Ripley’s relationship with Clemens, the prison’s doctor, to her flirtatious moments with Hicks in Aliens. It is abundantly clear that she had been building something with Hicks, little moments between the two of them spoke volumes, and there was a level of trust that was crystal clear by the end. In Alien 3, Ripley doesn’t have time to build anything. Even before she knows the truth, that there is an alien gestating inside of her, she is exhausted. Hicks is dead. She is not simply all alone, she is lonely. She decides to have something with Clemens and there’s certainly no argument from him. Even still, things do move to that next phase, to intimacy and trust, and just as they do, that is once again when it is torn away.
There’s another fascinating element at the core of Alien 3 which I think is an ingenious twist for any horror sequel: because Ripley is carrying an alien inside of her — a Queen, no less — the alien won’t kill her. That’s incredible. To me, that’s the core of any final girl, be it Ellen Ripley, Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, Sidney Prescott, etc. boiled down to its most basic element. You can save yourself, but you cannot save anyone around you. That is the thing that all of those returning protagonists throughout horror history have in common. They were survivors, they could save themselves, but that was all they could save. Now, in Alien 3, that’s a central gimmick. Ripley faces off against a monster that will not even attack her.
It also allows for surprisingly tender moments between the two of them afforded by no other entry in the franchise before or since. There’s a scene where Ripley finds the alien in the basement, trying to provoke it into killing her, where there’s just a calm beat as she first sees it and she says, “You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else.” It’s a perfect statement on her exhaustion, her sense of loss, the life she lost to this cycle of horror, but also a backhanded recognition of the franchise’s longevity.
Charles S. Dutton delivers an incredible third act speech that sums up the film as, essentially, “you can die on your feet or you can die on your knees.” Those are the options. A Xenomorph can be destroyed. Corporate greed cannot. As Alien 3 races toward its truly inevitable conclusion, it highlights a theme that I admittedly gravitate toward in all works of fiction, which is the idea that victory does not always mean winning. You cannot destroy an entity like The Company, but if you can look it in the eye and let it know that it doesn’t own you, maybe that’s enough.
