Imagine this: the next Indiana Jones movie lands him on the
drear far side of the moon.
There are no
ancient ruins, no Nazis or any other bad guys, no sacred artifacts. Also, he’s
lost his whip and hat in the explosive landing.
The movie is just him sitting around waiting to die.
Preposterous, you
say? No one would make a movie like that
and expect to get an audience?
The makers of Alien³ did. Director David Fincher did (he went on to do Social Network, Fight Club and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, so his life isn't all bad).
Don’t blame Fincher for the movie, either; the poor bastard was writing
the script as he filmed it, since the original, insanely enough, was vetoed while
the film was in pre-production. He
later disavowed the finished product, as well he should have.
The
younger me went to see the movie, charged and eager to see more ass-kicking by
Sigourney Weaver, who had entered the pantheon of great movie action heroines (there
are only a few) with Aliens.
The
audience around me was charged as well; the strong woman was back in our lives.
And then
the movie did something I’ve seldom seen in a theater.
It
allowed an entire audience to deflate in five minutes.
It begins
with Ripley’s spaceship crashing on a planet with a penal colony. Everyone else on board—including the sweet
little girl we were rooting for all through Aliens—dies. Yup, Newt is dead. Geez.
And the film
is nothing but Ripley fighting and interacting with ordinary and unwashed
prisoners; she even has utterly meaningless sex with one of them.
Oh yeah, and some Aliens show up to kill them all.
And at
the end—Ripley dies. Yeah, she dies, too. Giving birth to an
Alien.
In other
words, the filmmakers thought it would be a great idea to have an established
heroic protagonist killed off by an enemy who triumphs at the end. No wonder it bombed--talk about nihilistic.
Imagine Jaws
with a downer ending where the shark eats Roy Scheider. E.T. gunned down by the FBI before he reaches
his ship. Bella and Edward breaking up at
the end of Breaking Dawn (actually, that last one isn’t a bad idea; the
actors did in real life, after all).
Ripley
came back as a clone in Alien Resurrection—presumably just so they could
get a little more juice out of the franchise—but despite a sleek new
physicality, this Ripley was a washout, dish-pan-dowdy, dull and more sappy
than ever, this time shedding crocodile tears over an Alien infant (!) And in neither of the latter movies was she allowed to be
“in charge” of anything. Resurrection also bombed.
I realize I’m
talking about movies made in the ‘90s, but I have a point.
The greatest
sci-fi heroine ever was allowed to appear in only two movies showing her
ascending strength and vitality, and then she spent two more in movie hell, a
washed-up ghost of her former self.
Has there ever
been a comparable heroine in action/fantasy movies, indeed in any genre, since then?
We’ve had jokes
foisted on us—the whole pantheon (all two of them) of the Lara Croft movies. We’ve had kick-ass women in film flops—Suckerpunch, Sin City. We’ve had nothing
close to Ripley, ever.
Were the
filmmakers that scared of making another movie with a strong female lead that
they trashed the character? Looks that
way. And they’ve never taken a chance on
another.
Oh, we’ve had
plenty of brunette sole survivors of horror films. The Alien prequel, Prometheus, has one.
Neve Campbell in the Scream series comes close to the track record. But she's no Ripley. No way.
I sigh over
that.
Then I get on with my life,
expecting that the all-male action film Expendables
2, coming soon to a theater near me, will be kick-ass.
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