a) Abundance of bald men
Alien
3 had an abundance of bald people as did
Element of Crime including its director Lars Von Trier who appeared in a
scene bald as a hotelier, and a main vicious character is a bald man,
in Element
of Crime it is a brutal police chief Kramer, and in Alien 3, it is the
prison warden
Andrews.
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| Kramer talking to Fisher in Element of Crime |
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| Andrews the prison warden in Alien 3 |
b) Child Killers
The lead character Fisher is hunting a child murderer named Grey, and in Alien 3, a percentage of the prisoners in the film are child killers
The lead character Fisher is hunting a child murderer named Grey, and in Alien 3, a percentage of the prisoners in the film are child killers
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| The bald cultists in Element of Crime |
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| bald prison inmates in Alien 3 |
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| The bald cultists in Element of Crime |
c) Autopsy of a young girl
An autopsy is performed on a young girl who died sufforcation at the hands of the killer Harry Grey in Element of Crime.
The autopsy surgeon's assistant soon falls asleep on a surface covered in surgical tools
In Alien 3, an autopsy is conducted on the body of the character Newt who is revealed to have drowned in her cryotube. Meanwhile Ripley dares not try to say what she's afraid of
that might have killed the girl, claiming that her concerns were about
cholera infection.
Meanwhile Clemens' assistant who is sitting on the staircase starts to yawn perhaps on the verge of falling asleep
 |
| autopsy of a your girl scene in Element of Crime |
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| autopsy of a young girl scene in Element of Crime |
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| The sleeping assistant in Element of Crime |
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| Clemens as he performs the autopsy on the young girl Newt's corpse in Alien 3 |
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| Clemens and Ripley after the autopsy on the young girl Newt's corpse in Alien 3 |
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| The assistant who's yawning and perhaps on the verge of falling asleep in Alien 3 |
d) Loris in a hole to juvenile alien in a hole
At
the end of Element of Crime, Fisher's way out of the world is through
finding a lid with a hole in the ground, perhaps a sewer line, where he
finds a loris, and asks to be woken up from the hypnotic state. While it
would be hard to
connect the two completely, they both appear to be holes in the ground
that and both contain a surrealistic
creature that brings an end to the role of the character looking inside
the hole.
In Alien 3, a prison inmate Murphy shines his light on the young alien hiding in a hole in the floor of an airshaft, he looks in and the young alien spits acid in his face sending the Murphy to his doom torn to pieces by a fan blade.
In Alien 3, a prison inmate Murphy shines his light on the young alien hiding in a hole in the floor of an airshaft, he looks in and the young alien spits acid in his face sending the Murphy to his doom torn to pieces by a fan blade.
 |
| In Element of Crime, Fisher looks into the hole, finding a Loris, he wants to get out of this dreamlike world. The film ends |
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| In Alien 3, Murphy discovers the small alien curled up in the hole in Alien 3, and his life ends |
e) Bishop 2's intentions falling apart like Fisher of "Element of Crime"
The lead character of Element of Crime, the character Fisher is there
to hunt a child killer, but by the end of he has found himself turning
into a child killer despite his best intentions.
Perhaps
that was slightly like the way that in Blade Runner, Deckard intends to
hunt Replicants down and then in the story, whether he was supposed to
be a replicant or not, now he has become one or he has always been one
all the time
Bishop 2 from Alien comes to Ripley seeming to have the best intentions, he intends to have the alien queen removed from her to be killed and then allow her to start a new life.
He claims that he himself is not an android, but the progenitor of Bishop the android.
In denying that he is an android he has perhaps become the strangest android of them all
However he wanted the alien queen specimen to learn from and surely he would have only wanted to create more aliens from it
Perhaps
whoever or whatever he was, with the side of his head opened up, the
big question still arises about whether he is a human or an android even
if some demand that there is no question about whether he was a human
or not because in the script he appears to simply be a human being
mistaken for one of his androids
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| Michael Elphick as Fisher in Element of Crime |
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| Bishop 2 with the side of his head hanging open |
f) Lars von Trier sees the Alien 3 similarities
d.vii.a) Years later Lars Von Trier himself was able to see the similarities
between his Element of Crime and Alien 3, one thing to take notice of
was its cinema photography and indeed this film was made near enough in his style.
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| Bald apocalyptic cultist about to near enough bunjee jump off a crane in a diving ritual |
| ||
d.vii.a) But a beach with an abundance of lamps that might have reminded
some viewers of the lamp bulbs in the beach scenes and also there
were cranes.
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| Lit light bulbs on the ground of the beach |
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| Lit light bulbs along the ground of the beach |
- Lars Von Trier: Of course it would be nice if somebody would use some of these little things that I've been experimenting with. But I'm sure film changes rather quickly. You know I saw Alien 3 recently and it looked exactly like "The Element of Crime" - the locations whatever exactly the same. And I don't know how much ten years or so between. So you know everything changes all the time. And yeah, it would be fine if they used it in changing things.(Lars Von Trier interviewed by Linda Badley soon before September 2006 (Contemporary Film Directors), p162, 2011)
g) Alien Resurrection references Von Trier's work
However,
when it came to making the following film in the Alien series, being Alien Resurrection (released 1997),
Jean-Pierre Jeunet would openly cite Lars Von Trier as one of his
influences for
the movie although Jeunet's movie here would not be the movie that Lars
would be comparing to his own
h) Lars Von Trier was the chestburster
During the scene where Lars Von Trier plays a shaven headed hotel clerk,
in the commentary for the Element of Crime DVD, Lars Von Trier
mockingly claims that this person is an actor who appears in Alien as
the one who comes out of John Hurt's stomach.
- Tom Elling: And who's that
Tomas Gislasen: I don't know. Wow that's scary What's he been in since?
Lars Von Trier: In Alien.
Tomas Gislasen: A promising career
Lars Von Trier: He's the one coming out of John Hurt's stomach. (Element of Crime DVD commentary)
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