In over a century of cinema, we have seen a wide variety of artistic and technical innovations which have changed the shape (and size) of the silver screen, from the invention of Technicolour and recorded sound to the advent of widescreen and the steadicam. But in terms of the narrative and thematic conventions of the films themselves, several aspects have persisted long after technology has brought them into question. And one of the most persistent of these conventions is the ninety-minute running time.

Ninety minutes is a figure which crops up over and over again in the history of cinema. As silent cinema became a mass medium through the 1910s and 1920s, American distributors selected 90 minutes at the cut-off point for any film being shown in cinemas. If a film were any longer, they reasoned, people would either lose interest and leave, or be put off and not bother to pay in the first place. They stuck so rigidly to this idea that when Metropolis arrived States-side (having already been butchered by the German studios), it was run through projectors at one-and-a-half times the intended speed in certain cities. By the 1950s, trash maestro Roger Corman and his exploitation partners-in-crime were manufacturing 90-minute films for the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, films that were shown in cinemas of endless double bills, designed to do the rounds and then disappear forever.

Nowadays the average film on screen in a multiplex will last the best part of two hours, not including the mind-numbing 20 minutes of adverts and the patronising warnings about piracy. Many films still fall below this running time, and a great many, both arthouse and blockbuster, will beat it. But why does the figure of ninety minutes still hang like a rusty sword of Damacles over the world of filmaking? And what have we lost (or gained) by the now typical disregard for thisconvention?

I count four possible explanations. The first lies in the three-act structure of filmaking, which holds that all films play out (or at least should play out) in three acts: setup, conflict, and resolution. Take Back to the Future as an example - Marty McFly is a teenager living in 1985 (setup); he is transported back to 1955 and cannot return (conflict); he puts things right in the past and finds a way home (resolution). The French writer Yves Lavandier reasoned that in most dramatic works, half the content is taken up with conflict and both setup and resolution take a remaining quarter. We unconsciously expect a certain amount of time to be taken up with each act, and 90 minutes seems a reasonable average to aim for, giving enough scope for storytelling while retaining some form of restrictive discipline.

Regardless of whether Lavandier's maths were right, the three act structure has been called into dispute by a succession of writers and directors. In the last twenty years we have seen films which play with narrative and character identity to such an extent that a simple linear progression of setup-conflict-resolution simply doesn't cut the mustard. Take David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, one of the very best films of the last decade. There is an internal element of the three-act structure - Naomi Watts is an actress in Hollywood (setup); she has a fateful encounter with Rita who has lost her memory (conflict); they sort-of discover who she is (or do they?) (resolution). But this is not an adequate means of summing up an ingeniously complicated plot in which identities change rapidly and time jumps around. Later efforts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Prestige raise similar problems.

The second explanation lies in an argument about discipline. Corman famously quipped that no film should be longer than 90 minutes without special Papal dispensation - something which his errant pupil James Cameron swiftly ignored. We can all cite examples of films which are too long - Titanic, Out of Africa and of course Heaven's Gate - but it is extremely rare, if not unheard of, to criticise a film for being too short. If a film is long, it is often seen as indulgent, pretentious or desperately worthy - Mark Kermode once referred to The Deer Hunter (182 mins) as "a cinematic dick-measuring contest". Short films have an in-built modesty to them, a modesty which plays into the film's hands if its story or ideas are remarkably well-told.

This sounds convincing, but one should not simply assume that "short is good, long is bad", to paraphrase the sheep in Animal Farm. While many films are too long, some of the best ever made are well in excess of 90 minutes and most of them justify that length. Imagine trying to cut down Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon to half its length; all the painterly quality which is essential to its success and its unique status would be lost. Both The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile thrive on being slow-burners, giving the necessary time for the drama and spiritual insight to emerge naturally, rather than being forced upon an audience. On the other hand, there are a great many short films that are terrible - look at the Troma stable, or its modern equivalent, Asylum Films. Or if you want something a bit more mainstream, I give you Disaster Movie and its associates.

A third explanation as to the value of 90 minutes comes down, rather cynically, to money. Making short films is quick and cheap - it takes less time to write the script, the production costs are lower, and you don't have to spend months locked in an editing suite trying to piece together different scenes from miles of exposed film (or gigabytes of digital footage). In the days of grindhouse and drive-ins, keeping the films short was the only way in which the individual outlets could make money; the double bills had to run to 3 hours, and had to be changed over rapidly in time for the next lot of paying punters to get their few bucks' worth. Working off a low budget focusses screenwriters and filmakers, getting them to say the most they can in the most concise possible way.

That all seems fine, and there are many examples of great low-budget filmaking still going on in Europe, America and elsewhere, from the latest Ryan Reynolds thriller Buried to horror efforts like [REC] and Paranormal Activity. But most of the films which gain wide release are multi-million dollar blockbusters, with budgets of typically more than $100m and a running time of well over 90 minutes. If the 90 minute rule was so reliable, why has it become the trend to make movies by throwing huge amounts of money at them and to hell with the length? The role of producers has changed as well - instead of standing over directors with a big stick asking them to cut it down, the likes of Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer are more concerned nowadays with demographic targeting, demanding that directors deliver a product that will sell regardless of its eventual length.

The fourth and final explanation is probably the most unfair to us punters - limited attention span. Forget all the articles about ADHD or people talking on phones in the cinema - people, or at least certain kinds of people, are very impatient and can very quickly get bored. Although this may seem like a modern phenomenon, it's one thing that hasn't changed from the silent era. We will still fall asleep in films or walk out of them if they go on too long to sustain our attention, and if a film is deliberately billed as a certain length, we probably won't go. Ninety minutes in this context is a happy medium between being bored out of your skull and not getting your money's worth.

But again, here's a problem. If most people won't pay to sit through films which are more than 90 minutes long, how does one explain the huge box office takings for Avatar (162 mins) or the Star Wars prequels (136 mins, 142 mins and 140 mins respectively)? The answer is not a matter of length, and certainly not one of depth. It is a matter of hype; these are event movies, films which exist to be seen at a certain time to separate the in-crowd from the out-crowd. They are films to be watched as an experience, as an "I was there" moment - e.g. "I was there when everyone realised that The Phantom Menace was one of the worst films ever made!" As for keeping their attention, most mega-length, mega-budget movies are packed with action spectacle and technically outstanding set-pieces, designed to keep 14-year-old boys happy and oblivious to their very thin (or non-existent) plot.

In short, there is no one reason why 90 minutes is (or at least was) a touchstone in filmaking. Each explanation has its flaws, and they don't form a coherent thesis when meshed together. But looking around at the erratic quality of filmaking we see today, from Hollywood and elsewhere, maybe certain elements of this rule could be reintroduced and lead to artistic and commercial reinvention further down the line.

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

Aliens (USA, 1986)
Directed by James Cameron
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Lance Henrikson

Making a good sequel is not an exact science, and every rule that governs such activity has a number of notable exceptions. Don’t change the director? The Empire Strikes Back. Don’t remake the first film with more money? Evil Dead 2. Don’t add an irritating sidekick? Lethal Weapon 2, and so on.

Aliens rebels against another of these rules, namely: don’t crank up the action in a bid for mainstream appeal. Having demonstrated in The Terminator that he could combine compelling science fiction with nail-biting special effects, James Cameron was perfectly poised to carry Ridley Scott’s story forward and retune it to the 1980s blockbuster crowd. Whilst neither as frightening nor as rewarding as the original, it remains an intriguing and intelligent action movie, which still looks great nearly 25 years on.Cameron’s decision to shift the Alien series from horror to action might seem disconcerting without prior knowledge of the finished product. Action movies have become so associated with moronic dialogue and pointless violence that it is easy to forget the intelligence and innovation the likes of Cameron and John McTiernan brought to the genre. As Dan O’Bannon later confessed, turning the story into an action movie was probably the only way to go. Without this shift, Alien could have become little more than the next Hallowe’en, spawning a series of derivative and increasingly un-scary horror sequels.It would be equally wrong to presume that the emphasis on spectacle and mainstream appeal means that the world of Ripley et al is any less cohesive or structured. Like the first film, Aliens takes its time in the first 45 minutes; it doesn’t just canter through the back-story so we can get Ripley back on the alien planet. This section contains some of the most emotional scenes in the film, as Ripley is stripped of her command and discovers that her daughter on Earth has died. Sigourney Weaver’s performance is every bit as good as in the original, bringing a quiet strength to a world of macho posturing and zingers.Purely on a design level, Aliens is distinctive and eye-catching, creating an atmosphere of terror similar in places to that of John Carpenter. Much of the film was shot in a derelict power station, giving the colony a cold, eerie feel, somewhere between a Egyptian tomb and the Antarctic base in The Thing. The scenes in the alien nest are very scary, with the carpet of alien eggs, the minimal score and the endless corridors of alien matter which separate Newt and Ripley. Much of the nest set was later reused as the site of Axis Chemicals in Tim Burton’s Batman, and one could argue that the marines’ ground vehicle foreshadows certain elements of the Batmobile.

Although Aliens earns brownie points for its strong continuity with Alien, several focus points have changed. From a structural point of view, Cameron’s film is much more interested in the hardwire involved. By having the alien planet terrorformed to give it a breathable atmosphere, we don’t have the threat of bullets (or face-huggers) puncturing people’s helmets and suffocating them. Cameron lingers on the shuttles, missiles, guns and ground vehicles which surround the crew of the Sulaco. It doesn’t fetish-ise warfare per se, but you get the distinct impression that someone went to a lot of bother designing this futuristic military (whose grunts, incidentally, talk exactly the same as modern marines).From a character development angle, Ripley’s role follows roughly the same path as the original, in that she starts as an outsider with little respect from the crew, and grows stronger to emerge as the surviving victor. But her inferiority among the team is rooted less in gender politics than in her social status as a former officer. Brett and Parker resented her for being a goody-two-shoes, and were unhappy that a woman was getting more pay than them. The marines hate her because she is complex and stubborn, a big obstacle to their animalistic desire to go in hard and raise hell.

The shift comes in the change of balance between Ripley’s masculine and feminine qualities. For most of the film, Ripley is the most traditionally feminine of the characters. Although she may be less vulnerable than either Lieutenant Gorman or the sleazy Carter J. Burke, she is more passive than the other crew members and only starts to become aggressive as the body count begins to rise. Her relationship with Newt rekindles her maternal side, and in the scene where they are sealed in the medical bay fighting off the face-huggers, she demonstrates that she can be strong-willed and resourceful while retaining her qualities as a woman (and surrogate mother).But all of this becomes more problematic in the final showdown between Ripley and the alien queen. One could argue that Ripley’s fight is textbook maternal instinct, defending her young from predators. But in defeating the queen, Ripley is actually behaving much more like the marines, resorting to brute force before intelligence kicks in. The famous still of Ripley holding the pulse rifle is a classic gung-ho military pose, something which isn’t mitigated by the fact that she is also holding Newt. Her development is more akin to Sarah Connor in the Terminator series: she starts off resourceful yet womanly (remember the sex scene in the first film?), but by the end of the sequel she is a more masculine figure, still harbouring maternal instinct but ultimately driven by adrenaline.There are other little problems with Aliens too. Whether in its original version or the special edition released in the 1990s, the film is too long and feels baggy when it really shouldn’t. Cameron started his career as an apprentice of trash maestro Roger Corman, who believed in making films quickly with short running times. But having gone through a baptism of fire directing Piranha II, Cameron slowly forgot all Corman’s advice. The film is generally well-disciplined, and the editing does sustain tension, but you do find yourself wondering how much time has passed, both in our world and in that on screen.

Aside from its sexual politics, the ending is also quite silly from an angle of pure physics. When the alien was sucked into space in the first film, Ripley was wearing a spacesuit and was therefore safe from suffering the same fate. In this, she manages to survive being exploded simply by clinging on hard until she can reach the button to close the airlock. Normally such James Bond feats of survival are fine if they are in keeping with the tone of the whole film; it makes sense for Bond to survive the fight on the Golden Gate Bridge in A View to A Kill, because he has been so outrageously lucky throughout. But having confounded our expectations and been so realistic up to this point, the ending of Aliens feels like a small slap in the face.Aliens is an exciting and entertaining action film and the best of the Alien sequels. Despite David Fincher’s best efforts in the underappreciated Alien 3, it simply hangs together better and has a more cohesive vision, both visually and thematically. Despite its length and small moments in which it gives in too easily to convention, it manages to sustain tension and terror throughout, and invest us in a number of well-rounded, entertaining characters. Terminator 2 remains his masterpiece, but there is enough of Cameron’s skill and swagger here to give the likes of Die Hard a run for their money.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: 1980s action at its most intelligent