Production for Alien 3 was significantly messier than the one from the first two films, with several rewrites by about ten different screenwriters, a reluctant star asking for her character to be killed, extensive reshoots, behind the scenes fighting and tight deadlines. It was all very troublesome because 20th Century Fox had no idea of what they wanted this third movie to be like, all the executives knew was that Alien could potentially be a franchise and wanted more sequels to be made.
Eventually they settled with a young director named David Fincher. Fincher recalls that there was no finished script and that Walter Hill and David Giler (producers of the Alien franchise) kept sending new pages everyday as the budget was drying up. With such a nightmarish production, Fincher tried to do the best with what he could and has since disowned the film. Fans and critics agree that the film should better be forgotten.
How does the movie hold up today? Is it underrated or still bad? We will see.
Right after the events of Aliens (1986), Ripley finds herself crashing on Fiorina "Fury" 161, a correctional facility that also works as a foundry and even a sort of temple as the inmate's are monk-like (a leftover from one of the earlier scripts). Inside, Ripley is in great danger from the inmates and is helped by Dillon, a spiritual leader, to survive in the mortal place. When Ripley finds out that a facehugger infiltrated the facilities, she (along with the prisoners and wardens) must face the alien menace once more.
Hardly a classic, the film is a mixed bag of interesting components and a severely faulty story and ideas thrown in. There's a good movie hidden underneath all the deviations and dull aspects of the film.
Fincher does a typically great job at directing, with creative and heavily expressive compositions, transitions, dissolves, lighting and camera movements that enrich its cinematic language in ways not often seen in franchise sequels. The narrative tone overall is almost pitch perfect, but not as great as in Aliens. Fincher's craftsmanship and filmmaking talent really shine in the Assembly Cut of this picture.
The sets and production design are top notch, continuing with the rusty and corroded industrial setting but emphasizing the deteriorating aspect more than before. The film returns to the claustrophobic horror atmosphere of the first film, or at least intends to, as it's less effective because of the incredibly high production values instead of the low budget and often hidden detailed sets seen in the original that really managed to feel like a real and repetitive location those characters moved around in. The location in Alien 3 is the opposite of the Nostromo in the original, it's too big and spacious, rarely managing to reach the same level of enclosure from the first film, a strange thing because it's main location is literally a prison.
The xenomorphs overall feel less threatening and their appearances have less tension and shock than in any previous outing. I know that it's hard to keep surprising audiences with the same monster but there's almost no real feeling of danger when the creatures show up, a very fatal flaw to have in an Alien movie.
Few moments stick out after watching it, the climax had the potential to be suspenseful but a lot of the shoddy special effects kind of knock it down a few pegs. The image of the xenomorph salivating as a distressed Ripley cringes away from it it's the only great shot in the entire film, perhaps it's one of the most iconic fragments in the franchise, so there's a lot of merit to it.
The premise of the movie might have had potential, in the sense that the original idea was to make Ripley go through hell once more, to bring her down from her heroic role in Aliens and put her in a dirty hole with sleazy characters and more hazards. Not a horrible concept but don't you think she has had enough? I think she suffered the right amount in the previous movies to justify her status as an admirable heroine, there was no real need to bring her down other than for cheap thrills and fake misery porn, which this film could potentially be classified as considering it's tone and relentless search to make Ripley suffer to unreal levels. It's needlessly desolate and unrealistically mean, like a teenager's juvenile and angsty conception of hardship and harshness.
Close up shots of Ripley are prominent and constant throughout the picture, she also goes through a visual transformation and ends up looking like Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Fincher's way of shooting her, focusing on her affection and anguished mental state gives away his intentions regarding the suffering and following sanctification of his female character, as close ups were also prominently and systematically used in the classic silent film, a link is created between the two films through Fincher’s formal approach to shooting the film and the thematic similarities within the story as well.
Maybe Fincher thought it would be the only way Ripley could be canonized in a hypothetical cinematic pantheon (?), but it didn't have to come at the price of artificially bringing down an established heroine. More than deeply sorrowful, she just seems desperate and fed up with the increasingly harsher situations she finds herself in throughout these movies, to the point of being physically and mentally sick, exhausted and weakened, maybe even coming off as feeble, like Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s film. Weaver still delivers a fantastic performance as Ripley but there's not much she can do to carry the picture.
Fincher has never been known for his female characters as he has been more concerned with criticizing men than developing women, or simply doing much with them. Even though Fincher barely touched the script, there's something missing and dreadfully wrong about the movie, something that you can't point out exactly but that you can feel.
The Assembly Cut is a much more compelling narrative and arrives at a certain level of epic and grandiose science fiction storytelling Fincher was aiming at, adding more flesh to the film and properly setting up the plot with very engaging introductory scenes. It might be a bit too long for my taste, but it's hard not to admire the director's vision at least on an elemental level. The creators had ambition and were trying to do something that would break the mold, as the previous two Alien movies did. The director just needed a finished script to work with.
While undeniably flawed, the film is far from awful and has elements to offer to the franchise. If there's any version I would recommend, I guess that would be the Assembly Cut, it's perhaps overlong but it has a more coherent and effective way of telling the story.
Looking past the (sometimes) drab special effects, the pacing issues and the questionable intentions, the film is a moderately entertaining horror thriller with a science fiction angle. Alien 3 is non-commercial and isn't afraid to desecrate established characters, for better or for worse. If only a capable screenwriter with a fixed and inventive vision would have handled it, it could have been great.
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