In Space, No One Can Hear You Wonder Why David Fincher Is So Weird About Jesus

WordPress has a plugin that scores each post title per some algorithm of clickability. On a hundred-point scale, that one got a 69.

Nice.

Anyway, I burned through the Alien movies the other day. Which is to say, the Ripley films. I skipped the first one entirely, because honestly it’s always bored me. Amazon only had the theatrical cut of Aliens, so that was like getting half an hour of my life back. That wasn’t a shot at anything; if I’d had the special ed on deck, I would have watched it and been occupied for that additional time.

That second film was much better than the first, and was made much better in the director’s edition. It’s also very Terminator-esque. Michael Biehn plays wingman to an unexpectedly up-to-the-challenge boss lady. Listening to it though, all I could hear was the Enterprise and Reliant hunting one another through Star Trek II. Seriously, some of the music was damn near identical. I did some looking and apparently that’s a well-known thing.

Then David Fincher comes along with Alien 3 and things get dumb again. I’d somehow completely blocked out that this alien comes from a dog. But even before then, Fincher murders a little girl. They say ‘drowned in hibernation’, but they show her in that opening pan, absolutely not dying in her sleep. Anyway I gave this one half an hour, but just couldn’t do it.

Fincher’s Jesus fetish was obvious in Superman Returns, and you could see him going there with X-Men 1/2. But I hadn’t realized his fixation went that far back. Casting Ellen Ripley as Jesus was a very progressive move, but it just comes off as an obnoxiously preachy end to a story already driven by born-again zealots. Her self-sacrifice to save the wretches is derivative and not particularly enjoyable to watch.

Now it’s the fourth film that gets the most shit, and it’s certainly the shallowest and popcorniest of the bunch. But the whole thing could be fixed with a different ending. Change just five minutes and Resurrection could challenge Aliens for the title.

First when they come upon the cloning room, lose the cylinders. 1-7 should be laid out on tables, strapped down and very obviously killed. That’s what Ripley should see- her future at the hands of people. And in that moment, seeing herself on table after table, she turns. We see it in her face. Second, the whole live-birth thing is just garbage and the hybrid alien is so goofy-looking that it’s barely creepy, much less terrifying. Instead, have the queen recognize herself within Ripley and give her an egg. When Ripley rejoins the crew, SHE’S the alien queen and they find out, one at a time. The movies go back to the old-school vibe of “everyone dies but Ripley”. And when her ship lands, the movie ends with her stepping out of the hatch onto the Earth, with a queen egg in her hand and an alien protector at her side.

That ending would have kicked ass. Dispense with the garbage of that freaky skinjob being the next evolutionary step of the alien, and have Ripley be that next step. She’s clearly got some hybrid action going on- she’s the supersoldier the military wanted, they just didn’t know it. When she sees herself murdered seven times, boom.