The somnolent vessel drifts through the black sprawl of space bestrewn with so many stars amid all that nothingness. Inside, tucked away in placid sleep, are Ellen Ripley—who has now twice vanquished the xenomorphs—trustable Corporal Hicks, the young girl Newt, and scraps of the benevolent android Bishop. Life here exists in stasis, but not for long: Surreptitiously sneaked onboard is an intruder with long, spindly legs like fingers and acid for blood, and it’s looking for a host to have its baby. Fire in the ship. Emergency. The ship spits out a shuttle, which comes hurtling from the vast sky onto a dirty, rusty, hulking prison rock now decommissioned but still housing a few vestigial hardcore criminals—murderers, rapists, child molesters, the unredeemed—and the skeleton of a foundry. Ripley is taken in by the violent men, brought back to life, has her head shaved. (Lice.) Our little crawling friend joins the party, too. Soon there’s screaming and running and blood, and Ripley once again must battle the monster from space.
David Fincher has disowned his feature debut, so hellacious was Alien 3’s production—and so bastardized the end result after producers ravaged the film, as producers are wont to do when they’re given a bold work from a director with vision. “I had to work on it for two years,” Fincher said at a BFI appearance in 2009. “Got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me. To this day, no one hates it more than me.” He went on: “I’d always thought, ‘Well, surely you don’t want to have the 20th Century Fox logo over a shitty movie.’ And they were like, ‘Well, as long as it opens.’ So I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: ‘You have to get what you need to get out of it.’” One sympathizes with Fincher. The theatrical version that was released in 1992 is heavily truncated, only semi-coherent, with more than a half hour of footage expunged and some nonsensical changes made, such as making the alien—originally born from a dead ox—now the parasitic progeny of a dog. The film was unceremoniously ruined. No one was happy—not Fincher, not critics, not fans, and certainly not the producers once they saw the paltry box office returns.
But the “Assembly Cut” of Alien 3—first released on DVD in 2003, then with the reinstated footage corrected on Blu-ray in 2010, now streaming on HBO Max—is a staggering achievement made with abashed conviction by a Hollywood neophyte whose background was in music videos. It’s a mean, nasty film in which the beloved supporting characters from Aliens are disposed in the opening credits, and Newt, the little girl who becomes something like Ripley’s adopted daughter, gets dissected on a cold slab in the bowels of the huge complex of metal and lead inhabited by violent criminals who have found God but retain the temptation of lunacy which got them banished here. It’s one of Hollywood’s most brutal scenes, unrepentant for its refusal to provide fan service; we see the surgical tools all clean and shiny, and we feel the chilly air as we look at that young girl lying there in unending stillness. In flashes both fleeting and likely to remain permanently in your mind, Fincher shows us the tools glinting red with the innocent girl’s blood and glimpses of poor Newt, her skin a chilly blue pallor, her chest cracked open with drastic crunching sounds, and Ripley watching through red-rimmed, tear-glazed eyes. We feel awful for Ripley.
Much of Alien 3—indeed, many of the best parts, as the scenes centered on the alien killing people are rather bland in their methods of generating thrills—is dedicated to Ripley and the double-Y chromosomes interacting. The cast is a great bevy of American and British actors, many of the latter with faces familiar to fans of UK television. There’s the disgraced and benevolent doctor Jonathan Clemens (Charles Dance, who was also in the great Last Action Hero that year, another unfortunate bomb), whose tragic past influences his soft-spoken malaise, a somber quietude severely contrasted with the swift, savage violence of his doom. De facto leader and spiritual sage Leonard Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) tries to keep the men under control, and proves an unlikely ally. The pompous and stubbornly standoffish warden Harold Andrews (British character actor Brian Glover, best known by Americans as the raconteur in An American Werewolf in London) refuses to listen to Ripley about the double-mouthed guest.
Significant for the Assembly Cut is the expansion of the deranged Walter Golic (Paul McGann), who’s vital to the film’s last third, whereas he just kind of disappears in the theatrical version. He thinks the xenomorph is a “dragon” to worship. And, of course, there’s the alien, played by effects wizard Tom Woodruff, Jr., who won an Oscar the same year for Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her, and was also nominated for his work here. The Alien films don’t work on creature kills alone: they’re rooted in the relationship of their characters—heterogeneous yet not incongruous in the first two films, slightly less so here. The characters aren’t as distinctly eccentric as in the prior films (blue-collar working-class folk in Alien, space soldiers in Aliens), but some of them—the ones not intended simply as meat—are still cleverly defined and compelling when compared with the supporting players of most major IP blockbusters. Among this motley crew of doomed criminals, there are some distinctive personalities.
The film, like its predecessors, has a rapturous and unique visual language reflecting the indelible style of its maker with desolation in its color palette and inky pervasive shadows, the hellish hues of fire. Consider the elegiac and hauntingly gorgeous funeral scene, in which Hicks’ and Newt’s bodies are thrown into the lustrous fiery molten metal burning so beautifully. Fincher, cinematographer Alex Thomson, and editor Terry Rawlings (who cut the original Alien) layer grieving, contemplative faces across the widescreen frame while cross-cutting to the alien bursting in intervals out of the ox corpse.
Alien 3 has the most despondent ending of the series, as Lance Henriksen’s nefarious company man shows up to save not Ripley but the beast growing inside her, the potential for a cruel corporate-owned future gestating in her chest. Ripley can only take a plunge, ending the alien race, ending herself, and ostensibly ending the series—though that last part would, of course, prove unfortunately untrue. FL
