This is a reprint of my review which was first published on Rotten Tomatoes about 2 years ago. It appears here to mirror a series of reviews I had done for RT entitled 'From Burton to Nolan'.

The Dark Knight (USA, 2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart

The word 'masterpiece' is batted around far too often these days, and with The Dark Knight it's sadly inappropriate. Most of what makes Christopher Nolan a great modern filmmaker is up there on screen, and you cannot fault it for being a blockbuster which is attempting to address such relevant and complicated ideas. But while it is a general success, it is not as disciplined or focussed as Batman Begins and does not reward repeat viewing like The Prestige. It deserves to be celebrated and admired for its intelligence, but one must inevitably acknowledge that it isn't flawless.Having barely put a foot wrong in his previous films, The Dark Knight is the first glimpse of Christopher Nolan ever so slightly losing control. Like Batman Begins the film is a little too long, but it also feels slightly bloated, with much of the dialogue being rushed or mumbled in order to cram in all the ideas. It's almost as though there was enough plot and themes in here for two films, but rather than shoot back-to-back sequels, like The Matrix, Nolan decided to compress them down into one. Considering how mediocre The Matrix sequels were, this was not in itself a bad idea, but we still have to live with the fact that there are too many stories going on.Moreover, the film is edited and structured in a peculiar way. Where Batman Begins progressed in a defined direction, The Dark Knight feels more like a series of philosophical vignettes rather than something more progressive and incremental. The set-pieces are undeniably brilliant, but with the exception of the final sequence with the ships, you could put these set-pieces in almost any order and the film would feel the same. It's not terrible because of it, but it does mean that there is less cumulative tension than there could have been.This feeling of disorder is bolstered by the increased spectacle. Of course, being a blockbuster we don't expect things to be quiet, but there is a feeling watching all the explosions of Nolan pandering to the popcorn crowd just a little too much. In Batman Begins there were two hours of substance and character development, followed by 20 minutes of explosions to make up the trailer. In The Dark Knight, with its themes of escalation and chaos, it seems right that there should be more carnage, up to a point. But the carnage Nolan puts on screen eventually becomes repetitive, and his decision to film some of it in IMAX adds to the impression that he is overcompensating.These criticisms make it seem that Nolan's film is a failure, and when compared to the rest of his output, it is disappointing. But it remains head and shoulders above your average superhero blockbuster. The discipline of the first film has been compromised, but the film retains a desire to explore characters rather than just blow everything up. If nothing else, you have to admire Nolan for being able to take such an ideas-heavy film and sell it to such a wide audience.Thematically, this picks up the reins of the first film, dealing with the idea of understanding one's enemy as the means to defeating them. The difference is that the Joker is not a Nietzschean figure like Ra's al Ghul, someone who becomes evil by believing so strongly that he is doing good. In fighting him Batman still risks becoming like his enemies, but this lack of morality means that the cost to him will be greater. Killing the Joker seems necessary, but it would destroy Batman's moral code and undermine the belief that good can overcome evil in a non-Nietzschean way.The film is quite nihilistic in suggesting that even at its weakest, evil can triumph over good. The Joker's fate at the end remains uncertain, but the revelations surrounding Harvey Dent give a sense of him winning even though his direct influence is curtailed. The Joker's evil is allegorical to terrorism, in that his influence is fragmented and disparate. He does not take power by marching in with an army; he infiltrates, twisting, turning and double-crossing. Dent and Batman are the dove and the hawk trying to uphold rules in the face of chaos, and both are essentially destroyed in the process.The thing which marks out The Dark Knight from Nolan's previous work is that it is relatively conventional in its storytelling. It's ridiculous to call it 'dumbing down', but there is none of the jumping back and forth in time which made The Prestige so gripping. The themes are presented in a much more upfront way, both in the dialogue and the precise mechanics of the moral dilemmas. You could almost accuse Nolan of ramming ideas down the audience's throats, but thankfully the script and the characters are good enough to prevent this.The film has similar character development to Batman Returns, which was criticised for sidelining Batman in favour of the svillains. But that's always been the point. Since Batman is a superhero who uses cunning rather than powers, there has to be a section of the film in which he is the underdog; if nothing else it makes his eventual triumph more powerful and palatable. What makes The Dark Knight clever is that it does all this while withholding the Joker for a long time. Apart from the opening bank raid, the first act largely concerns itself with Lau and the Mob.As with all Nolan films, the performances are really great. Heath Ledger was generally a lightweight, but as the Joker he manages to channel Malcolm McDowell and make him truly terrifying. It's easily his best performance, although like the film it has become a victim of its own hype. Like the Scream killer, it has been so widely parodied that it isn't quite as scary anymore. Christian Bale remains convincing, and as before it is right that he should be a little sidelined so that the great evil is acknowledged.Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are both warm and affable, and the script does allow for more humour this time round - for instance, when Rachel Dawes and Batman land on the car, she turns to him and says, "Let's not do that again". Interestingly enough, the film glosses over the most interesting character development: the individuals closest to Bruce Wayne finding out his identity. This was explored in Batman Returns in some detail, but here there are several conversations between Bruce and Rachel in which she knows he is Batman, which somewhat undercuts the drama.The Dark Knight contains many promising performances, along with stunning visuals from Wally Pfister who gives Gotham a grungy and decaying edge. In the end it struggles to completely control all the rogue elements, but at least Nolan doesn't fall into the same trap as Sam Raimi on Spiderman 3, namely throwing everything at the screen in the hope that some of it will work. If Batman Begins was Nolan's equivalent of Alien, then this is his Aliens: more action-packed and slightly less compelling, but still weighty, intelligent and interesting. One only hopes that Inception will not be his Alien 3.

Rating:
Verdict: Bloated but containing brilliance

Alien Resurrection (USA, 1997)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Brad Dourif

The number of good four-quels can be counted on one hand, if not one finger. Lethal Weapon 4, Die Hard 4, Police Academy 4 – all titles that fill one with an instant sense of dread and disappointment. Near the top of this pile of ever-diminishing returns we find Alien Resurrection, the last and weakest of the Alien films and the most deserving of the phrase ‘flogging a dead horse’ (or should that be xenomorph?).Looking down the cast and crew list, you could be forgiven for expecting a half-decent fourth instalment. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a very likeable director, who had charmed audiences with Delicatessen and dabbled in fantasy filmmaking with The City of Lost Children. The original treatment and screenplay were penned by Joss Whedon, who would later write the cult sci-fi western Firefly and its movie spin-off Serenity. And it co-stars Winona Ryder, who had recently received Oscar nominations for Little Women and The Age of Innocence.

But based upon this pedigree, the kindest thing you can say about Alien Resurrection is that it is less than the sum of its parts. It lacks both the cohesion and sense of terror which previous the instalments displayed in some way, shape or form. When the film attempts to draw on some deeper issues raised by the plot, we don’t get anything like enough time or explanation to merit our patience. The rest of the time, it’s noisy, confusing, and worst of all quite boring.One of the big problems with Alien Resurrection is in the choice of director. Jeunet is a talented filmmaker, but he specialises in quirky, fantastical fables laced with offbeat humour. Here his unbridled imagination has been compressed and dumbed down, giving us a central mismatch between action and quirky comedy. In the midst of trying to set up a dark atmosphere, individual scenes are played for laughs in a way which is neither coherent nor beneficial. Why do we need Sigourney Weaver trouncing Ron Perlman at basketball, or Winona Ryder trying to drink from a mug while wearing boxing gloves?

There have been many instances in which Hollywood executives have hired an arty, ‘outsider’ director to helm a mainstream blockbuster. Think of David Lynch’s Dune, Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic or more successfully Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In most cases (Cuaron excepting), the studio uses a director’s reputation to sell the film but steadfastly overrules their ideas with regard to story or design. Elements of Jeunet’s signature style do survive: the crew of the Betty is a motley bunch of misfits with Heath Robinson technology, as in Delicatessen or Micmacs. But these elements are swamped by a mainstream-orientated blockbuster which struggles to justify its existence, let alone add anything to the series.While Aliens and Alien 3 were on one level action movies, they were intelligent in the way that they co-ordinated the action and balanced explosions with character development (even if, with Alien 3, this happened almost by accident). As a result they didn’t feel like a series of set-pieces being hastily book-ended by half-baked dialogue. Resurrection, meanwhile, is closer in structure to a video game. The plot is a very thin quest to get from A to B by going through a series of levels and avoiding monsters. The final scenes of arriving back on Earth are like the expository, triumphant little bits of video that appear after the final boss has been defeated.

There has always been a debate amongst horror circles about whether it is scarier to show the monster or to withhold it. Alien proved that the latter is generally more successful, and Aliens demonstrated that just because there’s more than one monster doesn’t mean you have to constantly show it on camera. Resurrection disregards both precedents, showing so much of the aliens so early on that by the time we get to the big showdown, they’re no more scary than the sharks in the Jaws sequels.In the moments when it wants to be taken seriously, Resurrection attempts to explore issues surrounding cloning and the possibility of creating human-animal hybrids. It’s tempting to think that this was topical, given that the film was released around the time that Dolly the Sheep was created. But in fact the film is much closer to H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist creates such hybrids through secret vivisection. Brad Dourif’s character is clearly standing in for Moreau, being fascinated by the prospect of indestructible hybrids of humans and aliens.
There are two good scenes in Resurrection which touch on this very area. The first is that of Ripley coming across the previous attempts to clone her; the version Weaver plays is the eighth time the scientists tried it. Most of the attempts are kept suspended behind glass, like the face-huggers in Aliens, but then she comes across a grotesque version of herself being kept on life support. ‘It’ begs Ripley to kill it, and Ripley torches the whole room through tears, just as she torches Dallas’ cocoon in the extended version of Alien.

The second good scene (relatively speaking) is the birth and death of Ripley’s ‘son’, which conveys the blurring between human and alien and makes all that has gone before seem dryly ironic. Alien 3 explored the idea of the aliens not wanting Ripley to die, but now she is treated as one of their kind. As she slips into the queen’s clutches, their relationship is almost symbiotic, as if one species cannot live without the other. We even feel sorry for the creature as it gets sucked out into space: its death screams almost move us to tears as we feel that twisted maternal bond, and when Ripley says “I’m sorry” we know she means it.But while these scenes make sense as self-contained sections, they are not part of a well thought-out story. In Alien, we are given a creature with a comprehensive alternative ecosystem, with acid for blood and a strong exoskeleton made of silicon. In order for the Dr. Moreau plot to work, there has to be some level of explanation as to how the hybrids can survive and where the systems cross over. Since there isn’t, we are left wondering just how Ripley can have acid for blood without it eating her from the inside out. Or for that matter, how the alien queen managed to acquire a womb but not mammary glands needed to suckle her young.More irritatingly, all the best moments in the film cover ground which has been explored before, so much so that the film should have been called Alien Regurgitation. Even the good moments essentially take all that was scary or interesting about the first three films and reproduce them in a manner which is neither scary nor interesting. A textbook example is the introduction of Leland Orser’s character who has an alien inside of him. He fulfils the John Hurt role from the first film, but without any of the magnetic screen presence of John Hurt, and when the chest-burster scene is restaged, it’s played for goofy laughs rather than deep-seated shocks.

As far as the performances go, it’s a fairly even keel of mediocrity. Sigourney Weaver remains a solid screen presence, but she has very little work with and her performance is largely phoned in. Ron Perlman, who worked with Jeunet on The City of Lost Children, is completely wasted, and Winona Ryder has her moments but little more. Most bizarre of all is Brad Dourif, who delivers a performance every bit as ripe and hammy as his turn in Dune, and with an equally ridiculous haircut.Alien Resurrection is not totally rubbish: even without its two good scenes, it is a damn sight more coherent and enjoyable than the Alien vs. Predator series. But one cannot help feeling that the series deserved to end in a more dignified way than this. It dwarfs in comparison to Event Horizon or even Mimic, has very little to say that is original or interesting, and is executed in a deeply unsatisfying manner. In all it’s a dull and forgettable last instalment, which will leave even Alien completists out in the cold.

Rating: 1.5/5
Verdict: A disappointly dull end to the series

Alien 3 (USA, 1992)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover

Alien 3 is one of the most misunderstood movies of the 1990s. Prompting mixed reviews when first released, it has become a convenient shorthand for badly judged studio interference, a case study for those who continue to argue for director’s vision over studio money-making. Most reviews of Alien 3 heap the blame onto the studios but fail to acknowledge any positive aspects. Whilst it is undoubtedly messy and confusing, there is much about Alien 3 which deserves rehabilitation.The production problems of Alien 3 are very well-known; one might almost call it the definition of development hell. After the success of Aliens, 20th Century Fox commissioned two further sequels, ending up with Ripley leading a full-scale war against aliens who were mass-produced by expatriated Earthlings. This idea was eventually scrapped when Vincent Ward was hired as director. He envisioned a story about a community of monks living on a wooden planet, with Ripley’s battle with the Alien representing a clash between God and the Devil.By the time David Fincher came on board, Ward’s story had been pared down through further rewrites. The monks were now prisoners who had converted to Christianity, and the planet was noticeably un-wooden. Fincher began shooting without a completed script, and when production wrapped his cut was effectively dismembered by the studio. Being a newcomer, Fincher was not given final cut, and therefore had next to no control over the finished product.

Reading through all this, you would expect Alien 3 to be every bit as dismal as David Lynch’s Dune or Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. In both projects the director’s artistic intentions are in direct conflict with the commercial ambitions of the studio, a conflict which is clearly visible on screen and which produces a film of profound incoherence and annoyance. Just as Dune was attempting to cash in Star Wars, so several scenes in Alien 3 seem to have been shot with a quick buck in mind. The final act, which involves death using molten metal, is clearly derivative of Terminator 2.In fact, the film which Alien 3 most closely resembles is The Exorcist III, William Peter Blatty’s conclusion of The Exorcist triptych which was compromised by studio reshoots. As a result of these reshoots, the same character ended up being played by two different people: Brad Dourif in Blatty’s sections, Jason Miller in the rest. But despite this problem, the film still adds up and Blatty’s vision remains largely intact. In spite of everything, Alien 3 is not a totally derivative cut-and-shut sequel. There is more substance here than we would expect, and much in its visual style which hints at Fincher’s future greatness.

One of the film’s most impressive and startling qualities is its complete and utter nihilism. While neither of the previous films gave you any indication as to who would survive, Alien 3 is incredibly cavalier in its treatment of characters. It makes no bones about who gets killed and how, creating a vein of much-needed unpredictability. Newt, Hicks and Bishop are all dead in the first two minutes, and Charles Dance’s character cops it just when you think he’s known Ripley long enough to live. Ridley Scott’s original was a depiction of blue-collar space, full of dark corridors and grimy machinery. Alien 3 takes this one step further; you really feel, standing in the prison, that you are in the bowels of interstellar existence.Of the three sequels, Fincher’s vision is the closest to Scott’s original. To some extent this is unsurprising, since Cameron’s sequel was a deliberate departure, and Alien Resurrection is a clear example of a director being out of his depth. But there is more similarity than just the dark, grimy visuals. Just as the Nostromo was an interstellar haunted house, so Alien 3 has architecture like a cathedral. The prison has echoey rooms and corridors, which are dimly lit often using candles, and is inhabited by people whose form of Christianity brings out inordinate levels of guilt (or at least self-pity).

Much of Alien 3 is a clouded Christian allegory, an element which survives from Ward’s original concept. Ripley’s arrival ‘from the stars’ to a planet resembling Earth sets her up as a Christ figure. Her presence as a woman amongst an all-male population leads many to view her suspiciously, believing her to be a temptress who will lure the masses away from the righteous path. The warden’s order that she shave her head is an attempt by the powers-that-be to make her blend in, to prevent trouble from occurring. Brian Glover’s character is a modern day Pontius Pilate, desiring order and harmony over doing the right thing.With this allegory in place, the alien becomes the devil figure whom Ripley must defeat, a balance reinforced by Ripley sacrificing herself (in the original cut) to prevent evil spreading through the hands of corrupted men. The twist, however, is that Ripley is carrying this evil inside her; the alien won’t kill her because it recognises the queen growing in her chest. This shifts things closer to Eastern doctrines, in which good and evil are intertwined and one has to cancel out the other. It is a real stretch to compare it to The Last Temptation of Christ, but there is the same hint of a Christ figure having the same desires (and potential for sin) as the rest of us.

In a Guardian article for the 30th anniversary of Alien, David McIntee described the evolution of Ripley as one “from maiden to mother to crone”. The Ripley in Alien 3 is battle-hardened and weary of the world around her. She is more cynical and wracked with guilt, because of what has happened to her friends and because of what she carries. Incubating a queen is the physical expression of a bitter irony: she is giving life to the very thing she has devoted her life to destroying. Her position is ultimately fatalistic: she is fighting a losing battle to keep evil from the world, and her choice to go out fighting is a last desperate bid to aspire such devotion in others.On top of its allegorical connotations, Alien 3 contains a number of visual tricks which supplement its dark mood. Fincher’s decision to shoot the chase scene from the alien’s point of view is ingenious. As the alien scuttles along the ceiling, we become disoriented from seeing the prisoners fleeing upside down, giving us some sense of the blind fear they experience. A lot of the alien CGI is cheap and obvious, but the mechanical sections (including the scene in the nest) are generally well-played.

The weakest parts in Alien 3 are those which play against this dark tone for broader, mainstream appeal. In the midst of a thrilling chase scene, we don’t need characters running into each other in a broadly slapstick manner. Much of the acting is ripe, with Glover over-enunciating every line and many characters being reduced to twitches and other nervous tics. The first 45 minutes, which includes an attempted rape scene, is a complete scramble: it gives us very little clue as to the tone or style of the film, and threatens at points to throw us out of its world completely.Like Event Horizon after it, Alien 3 is a flawed but underrated film with intelligence and insight buried under layers of dumb action and bizarre plot points. It doesn’t stand alone like the previous two films, and it isn’t as consistently scary as one would have hoped. But given the right circumstances and the right amount of patience, the artistic visions of Ward and Fincher begin to bubble to the surface. In the end it is a troubling but strangely rewarding effort, with individual moments of brilliance and much in between to be admired.

Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: Flawed but fascinating