FILM / Sigourney's mate worse than death

AT THE end of Alien (1979), Lieutenant Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was left drifting through the universal dark, sleeping the hypersleep of the just. With her on board the space capsule was a cat, Jones. At the end of Aliens (1986), she was back where she started, looking more weary than before. With her this time were: a small girl, a wounded space marine, half an android and no alien. Or so she thought. Back on Earth, Hollywood thought otherwise, and dreamt up Alien3 . That's it: the trilogy is now complete - uneven, incoherent, often unpalatable, but still one of the great achievements in popular cinema. The last part is the worst, no question, but it isn't your average sequel; for these films contained many sequels within themselves, the same old story flicking round time and again, refusing to give up for dead. As each movie came and went, the heart of darkness kept pumping away: The horror] The horror] The horror]

This time it starts with the credits. Slipped in between the names we see slashes of wild movement, the now familiar elements of evil: acid, fire, a hiss like a hot iron, something clamping on to Ripley's face. By the time we get to the name of the director, David Fincher, we know what he does best. He cuts fast and surely, like a surgeon in a hurry, delving towards the warm root of the problem. No wonder he shoots an autopsy so well. I'd heard about the scene and was dreading it, but there's nothing to look away from, unless you count the little two-handed saw shaped like a parsley chopper. Somehow it doesn't look sick; blood coils silently into a dish, no more than that, leaving our imaginations to do their worst. And their worst is their best, to judge by the nervous wailing that rose from the auditorium, dotted with giggles and gulps.

We are helped along by the presence of Ripley. She stands there watching, caught between mourning and fear. Sigourney Weaver is now so rooted in the part that we fall in line behind her, trusting the force of her emotions and allowing her to carry ours as well. In space, everyone can feel her scream. When at the end of Aliens she strapped herself into a walking JCB and stomped into combat with the alien queen, we whooped and hollered her on. Now she has all the cares of the Galaxy on her shoulders, and possibly one inside her; all we can do is sigh, bunch our fists and wish her luck in a hopeless job.

And Alien3 is hopeless, scarfed in a rusty gloom that's light years away from the sheen of a good blockbuster; no wonder that American audiences soon learnt to stay away. It reads like a suicide note, a pulp version of Celine: 'I'd rather be nothing', or 'I need you to kill me . . . I'm dead anyway'. All three movies have been dank and dour, of course, and that is their triumph. After years of brushed chrome and spacious command rooms, along came Alien, and soon the lights were going out all over space. It was the first film to suggest that a spaceship was just that, a ship in space - a wet, primitive hulk, cavernous yet cramped, with all manner of malevolence shivering behind its timbers. The new film keeps up the claustrophobia but turns it inwards, too, putting the squeeze on the souls of the inhabitants and wringing the fight out of them.

Ripley crash-lands on a lump of rock populated by hammy English actors. Poor thing, she really does get all the luck. Years of slaughter behind her, and just when things can't get any worse she meets up with Brian Glover and Charles Dance. One is the jailer and the other the quack, on a colony of maximum- security felons with minimum brains, 'a bunch of lifers who found God at the ass-end of space'. I would have liked more on their grim devotional faith; but all we know is, there's a woman and an alien loose on the planet of the monks, and they can't decide which is worse.

So Ripley has to show them. They don't get long to think about it, anyway. Once again men drop like flies, chivvied and chewed by something that looks like a fly itself, if you add a quiver of extra tentacles and a lack of community care. When Sigourney Weaver first hears of a freak slip in the ventilation shaft (a man just hit the fan, and the screen went red), her face steadies and darkens. It's that Oh-shit look we've seen 20 times before, meaning not only 'it's back' but 'Guess who's going to have to do something about it.' This is the best thing about the film, which initially feels like Alien all over again - back to basics, one woman against the odds. But the odds have shifted, tilting towards evens: the old foes come together for a last fling, and practically fall in love.

Hence the image seen on posters and trailers, Ripley aghast as the alien nears her neck, drooling and nuzzling like the double-jawed, chisel-toothed parody of an infant. If there's one thing worse than being ripped apart, it's being left alive, with a mate worse than death. Ripley spurns all help, and goes alone to meet her oldest acquaintance. 'Where are you when I need you?' she asks. 'Don't be afraid . . . you've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else.' It's perfectly true: these funny and devastating lines remind us that we have never seen her happy, or adored, or free of dread. The alien is all she has, and all she has to kill; Holmes is nothing without Moriarty, Achilles needs Hector more than he ever did Patroclus. Their whole life resides in these few hours of remorseless wrath. What of soul is left, I wonder, when the killing has to stop?

These are grand ways of looking at it, but then the Alien trilogy is grand. Not pretentious and talkative, just laden with images of doom and sexual control, the unstoppably fecund as well as the unbearably blocked. The final part doesn't let us down here, with all its writhing corridors and Satanic furnaces, the odd tongue of flame rasping against Piranesi girders and whale-grey walls. It suffers from poor supporting performances, and a plot that splutters instead of pushing on; but when the chase is on, all is forgiven. Fincher brings on the Steadicam and whips it through tunnels at alien pace, flipping upside down and bulging the walls with wide-angle lenses. You can't tell what the hell is happening, but you know it's hell all right.

I can't give the ending away, but I wish I could. Everything is wrapped up a treat - Fincher can't really tell a tale, but he can wheel on the awe with the best of them. I think he must have been watching Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, which I saw again last month. Both films are graced by actresses with shaven heads and staring eyes, at the furthest reach of their powers; both pound along towards fire and sacrifice, and edit our nerves into thin strips. Dreyer made a masterpiece, Fincher made a mess; but he rounds out a modern myth, and in so doing ensures that, like Lieutenant Ripley, we will never sleep easy again.

Waterland will trouble no one, despite its origins - Graham Swift's bewitching novel - and another good study in twitchy despair from Jeremy Irons. He plays a history teacher in Pittsburgh who shocks and delights the class with tall stories of his youth in the English Fens. Incest, drowning, teenage sex on a train: it's all here, but none of it clings to your mind. The director is Stephen Gyllenhaal, who as in Paris Trout tends to rush and scuffle where he needs to relax; only once do we hold our breath, when a character holds his beneath the long flat waters. A wasted trip into the past. Back to the book.

(Photograph omitted)