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...Countless fictional innocents have died in countless horror movies but Alien may have been the first one to concentrate so exclusively not on startling sights and violence but on the sweaty, eye-popping reactions of the victims as they were hunted down...

...The battle and death scenes were wrenching but not pornographic...

...The moviemakers—director David Fincher and scriptwriters Walter Hill and David Giler—know that when you deprive an audience of false hopes for the hero, that when you show that he or she must die for some great goal to be realized and that, in a sense, we must root for them to die, you may sadden your audience but you won't depress them...

...Several close-ups, particularly the ones of Veronica Cartwright, were downright sadistic in that the director, Ridley Scott, seemed to be savoring the suffering of people who knew they were going to die...

...Of course, the enraged progenitrix soon confronted Ripley and the two females battled to the death with the adopting parent blowing the birth mother to blazes...

...This is the queasiest Alien of the trilogy but, I must admit, it is also the most powerful...

...Alien3 moves beyond sadism, beyond gallantry in combat, toward a gleeful nihilism...

...But both faces express the suffering and determination of cross bearers...

...In the second installment, Aliens, the tanker's sole survivor, intrepid Ripley, took a little girl, also a sole survivor (of a space colony destroyed by the monsters), under her wing and, while battling to protect the orphan, destroyed a cluster of alien nestlings...

...They're not awaiting or enduring their dooms...

...They are women who have killed and will die for the future of the human race...

...These films have been called haunted-house-in-outer-space movies and so they are, but they also partake of the Lost Patrol syndrome: we are to watch the members of a group die one by one and the pleasure we're supposed to get comes from watching how each victim goes to his or her Maker: the garishness of each death, the gallantry or abject-ness of each victim are what count...

...There's a strong and gratifying feeling of impersonality in this horror movie that keeps it (just barely) from being schlock...

...Therefore, Ripley chooses suicide...

...Our heroine comes through in style...

...It's not just a matter of shaved heads (Ripley gets hers cropped for lice...

...Though I must also note that the few clear glimpses we get of the monster reveal it to be no more frightening than Barney the Dinosaur...

...they're racing toward them with a hellish joy...

...I'm not subtracting an iota of suspense from your viewing if I reveal that Ripley does indeed die at the end, because it's clear from the start of this movie (when she wakes from hypersleep to discover that her soldier-lover and adopted child from Aliens have been killed) that Ripley is doomed and that some portion of her spirit has already acknowledged that doom...

...I think Malcolm Johnson put his finger on this difference in his review for the Hartford Courant when he noted the resemblance of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley to Falconetti, the impersonator of Joan in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc...

...Commonweal...

...But she cannot end her own life until she and the colony's prisoners put an end to the mother alien that implanted the fetus...

...If Aliens was more palatable, it was because its director, James Cameron, mounted it as a conventional war movie in an unconventional setting...

...The convicts who help Ripley battle this last monster are realizing themselves even as they' re slaughtered...

...we can hear the joy of defiance in his voice as well as the terror...

...Now in Alien3, the dominating motifs seem to be surrogate motherhood and abortion...

...Surrogate motherhood as ultimate horror and abortion as ultimate salvation...

...Falconetti's Commonweal countenance was mournful and tender...

...Watching the first Alien, I and perhaps many others felt that we were watching the first horror movie that decisively crossed the line that separates enjoyable fright from relished sadism...

...Weaver's is tough and guarded...

...Riding home in suspended animation from the carnage of Aliens, Ripley's body is used by a stowaway monster as the carrier of a baby alien, and the choices confronting our heroine become clear: she can wait on the penal colony planet where she has crash-landed for her corporation bosses to rescue her, or she can kill herself...

...The monster, as a hostless embryo, lodged itself inside the body of a crewman of an inter-galactic tanker, then tore itself out of the poor fellow's chest upon reaching maturation...

...These guys, murderers and rapists all, have born to lose tattooed, figuratively speaking, across their plug-ugly faces...

...She knows from her experiences in Aliens that the corporation people are power mad and want possesion of a living alien only to use it as a killing machine (though on whom isn't clear since none of the Alien movies has briefed us on the geopolitics of the future...

...The soldiers who fought alongside Ripley arrived expecting combat though they got more than they bargained for...

...And the camera, racing down corridors with pursuers and pursued, makes us share the awful exhilaration of the chase...

...When one criminal, with the monster snapping at his heels, cries out, "This thing is really pissed off...

...Ripley isn't exhilarated but she knows exactly what she's doing and she's too strong to ever come across as a mere victim...

...The real question that is posed by the last half of Alien3 is not whether Ripley will die or not but will she die in a manner that is worthy of all the horrors that have been pursuing her through this gruesome trilogy...

...But there is something about this Alien3 that gives it a gravity, an emotional tug that the other two lacked...

...Must it be this way...

...This was hardly a pleasurable viewing experience...

...So, as in all the Alien films, we are here watching the doomed fight the monstrous...