Alien Quadrilogy Retrospective: Alien 3 (1992)
Some people just can’t catch a break. Just take Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), a character with perhaps the most tortured arc in sci-fi history. The last survivor of a vast mining craft that she blew up in an attempt to eradicate a deadly alien creature. Stuck in cryosleep for 57 years. Rescued and awoken only to find that her daughter has died of old age and her employers are ready to haul her over the coals for destroying their expensive ship. Sent out to the far reaches of space again to tackle a swarm of her old foe. Battling an Alien Queen and becoming surrogate mother to an orphaned little girl. Last-gasp survival and cryosleep once again… What more could screenwriters possibly put this hero through?
Even more fraught is the backstory of Alien 3, a threequel that from all available evidence sounds like a movie that didn’t want to get made. Yet after the critical, commercial, and Oscar-nominated success of James Cameron’s Aliens, another instalment was inevitable. The problem was, Ripley’s arc had reached a natural conclusion, so how could Fox and Brandywine Productions come up with a new story that wasn’t simply a rehash of the previous movies?
So began the arduous task of willing Alien 3 into existence, a creative process that passed through the hands of multiple screenwriters before the finished film arrived at our theatres in 1991, largely unwanted and unloved.
The problem from the get-go was that nobody could settle on a consistent idea of what the story would be – not the suits at Fox or the producers at Brandywine, who had done a great job of guiding the first two movies to major success. The headache persisted all the way up to a very mis-leading teaser trailer that declared: “On Earth, everyone can hear you scream.”
The threat of vicious Xenomorphs reaching our home planet was the underlying threat of Alien and Aliens, personified by agents of the sinister Weyland-Yutani company working to make it happen: Ash in Ridley Scott’s original and slimy executive Burke in the second. Yet while seeing Xenos running around Times Square always seemed like a logical dramatic endgame for the series, producers and screenwriters have so far been reluctant to make that leap.
As for Alien 3, David Giler and Walter Hill of Brandywine were more interested in delving into the machinations of the Weyland-Yutani corporation and drafted William Gibson to have a first crack at a script, working from their initial treatment. Gibson certainly had pedigree – the cyberpunk author had burst onto the sci-fi literature scene in 1984 with the publication of his acclaimed novel Neuromancer.
Promoting Hicks (Michael Biehn’s character from Aliens) to the lead protagonist and relegating Ripley to barely a cameo, Gibson’s screenplay leaned heavily into a Cold War allegory as the Sulaco is picked up by soldiers from a Marxist colony before the action kicks off in a space station shopping mall called Anchorpoint. As always, Weyland-Yutani are the real baddies with secret plans to use the Xenos as a deadly army. One of Gibson’s more interesting ideas expanded on the concept of Ovomorphing that was teased in the original film – that in the absence of an Alien Queen, warriors could alter the DNA of human victims and continue the existence of the species. This idea would be picked up again in Alien Resurrection with the gloopy Xeno-humanoid hybrid and again with the creepy Neomorphs in Alien Covenant.
Gibson jokingly synopsized his script as: “Space commies hijack alien eggs – big problems in Mallworld.” Renny Harlin, offered the gig on the strength of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Warrior, wasn’t keen on the concept, arguing that the next movie should raise the stakes by either visiting the Xenomorphs’ home planet or stage an invasion of Earth. Producers also weren’t sold on Gibson’s work, concerned that it didn’t significantly expand in new directions after the careful world-building of the first two movies.
Gibson refused to go through re-writes with Harlin and departed the project. Next up was Harlin’s pick, Eric Red, a screenwriter who had success with The Hitcher and Near Dark. He half-assed his version of the screenplay during a few months in 1989, setting the action in a biodome in space designed to look like an all-American town.
Killing off Hicks and Ripley, Red introduced an entirely new set of characters and a variety of original ideas for the Xenomorphs, including hybrids born of chickens and cats. The finished script was rejected on sight and Sigourney Weaver described it as “absolutely dreadful,” while Red cited studio interference and disowned his work as “utter crap.”
The next writer to have a stab at it was David Twohy, who would later find great sleeper success writing and directing Pitch Black, the movie that launched Vin Diesel as an action star. At that point, however, Twohy only had Critters 2: The Main Course and Warlock under his belt, and his brief was to take his cue from Gibson’s screenplay.
With the Soviet Union falling apart, the Cold War allegory was ditched, Ripley brought back in as the hero, and Twohy changed the location to one that would ultimately appear in the finished movie: A prison planet. Sigourney Weaver was offered $4 million to return for a third time plus percentage points and she also had one stipulation: that the screenplay cut down on the firepower that had been such a big focus of the previous film. Weaver is a gun control advocate and she got exactly what she wanted, an Alien movie without any weaponry at all.
Meanwhile, Renny Harlin got fed up and walked away to direct The Adventures of Ford Fairlane with Andrew Dice Clay instead – bad move, because the critically-mauled starring vehicle for the controversial stand-up won Worst Picture at the Razzies and Harlin received a nod for Worst Director. Having said that, it was probably a more fun time than directing Alien 3, as David Fincher would later find out.
The screenwriting merry-go-round hadn’t stopped just yet. Walter Hill was impressed by an unusual film from Down Under called The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey about a group of medieval British miners who tunnel through the Earth and emerge in modern-day New Zealand. He invited the director, Vincent Ward, to helm the new Alien movie.
Ward didn’t like Twohy’s script and hired John Fasano (Another 48 hrs, Tombstone) to flesh out the now-famous “Wooden Planet” screenplay, where Ripley’s escape pod lands on an archaic wooden satellite inhabited by tech-free monks. It was a fascinating idea, something that you might imagine appearing in a Terry Gilliam fantasy, but ultimately the concept was too outlandish and deemed not commercial enough by the studio. It still has its fans today and was ranked as one of the Greatest Movies Never Made… but then again, so was Gibson’s version.
A concept sketch by Mike Worrall of the wooden planet, Arceon
The script also featured Ripley laying down the ultimate sacrifice at the end to kill the Xenomorph, but Fox wanted a revised screenplay where she survived. Weaver refused to participate unless her character died. Fox also pushed Ward to tone down the fantastical elements of Fasano’s screenplay and move towards a more standard industrial facility setting and change the monks into prisoners. The director refused and received his marching orders.
Walter Hill and David Giler then worked on Fasano’s screenplay before hiring Larry Ferguson (Highlander, The Hunt for Red October) as a script doctor, much to Weaver’s dismay – she described Ferguson’s alterations as making Ripley sound like “a pissed off gym teacher.” With the start date for production approaching, Hill and Giler tweaked it some more, essentially mashing together ideas from previous failed scripts. Meanwhile, Fox landed a novice replacement director: David Fincher.
Like Ridley Scott before him, Fincher had made a successful career directing TV commercials and also made high-profile music videos for George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” and Madonna’s “Vogue.” With an impressive portfolio behind him, the next leap was feature films. But with no previous experience helming a major motion picture, the odds were stacked against him when filming began at Pinewood Studios in January 1991 without a functioning screenplay.
Fincher himself plugged away at it with author Rex Pickett (Sideways), but what he had to work with was a mish-mash of ideas, budget cuts, a reduced schedule, and a tense relationship with the studio.
As with the previous movies, Alien 3 was populated by an impressive cast of character actors supporting Sigourney Weaver. Charles Dance, a Shakespearian actor who had made a previous foray into Hollywood fare in The Golden Child, played the prison colony’s doctor masking a dark secret. It was a role that Fincher originally offered to Richard E. Grant. If Grant had taken the role, Alien 3 would have been an unlikely Withnail & I reunion with Paul McGann and Ralph Brown also among the mainly British cast.
Charles Dance in Alien 3
One of Weaver’s few fellow Americans in the principal line-up was Charles S. Dutton as the colony’s formidable born-again leader, clashing with national treasure Brian Glover in several scenes.
Brian Glover in Alien 3
Another notable inclusion was Pete Postlethwaite, who would go on to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for In the Name of the Father in the following year.
As for the film’s solitary Xenomorph, Fincher wanted a more beast-like creature unlike the distinctly humanoid versions seen in the previous instalments. H.R. Giger was approached to come up with a new design, resulting in the “Bambi Burster” alien seen slinking and bounding around on all-fours in the movie.
Ripley and the new Xenomorph
Stop motion animation was considered to bring it to life, and Fincher even suggested dressing up a whippet as an alien to create the desired effect. Eventually, a combination of rod puppets filmed against a blue screen, a classic man in a monster suit, and final touches with early CGI were used for a creature with fluid movements. The Xeno looks pretty decent, but there are moments where it very obviously isn’t in camera with the actors as the live-action scenes are merged with the puppet, making it look less convincing than previous iterations which were kept largely in the shadows.
Thanks to budgetary constraints and a reduced schedule, the production was difficult and Fincher found himself fighting constantly to achieve his vision for the movie, often putting himself and the crew through gruelling 18-hour days. The rush to complete the film within the studio’s demands may have also contributed to an accident with a fiery explosion effect, resulting in one crew member taken to hospital with burns.
David Fincher was outspoken in his criticism of the studio, calling them a “bunch of morons,” and Sigourney Weaver stood up for the director. In a 2006 interview, she said:
What was ironic that Fox chose David Fincher, who was so talented. And from the second he got the job, they undermined him by not giving him what he was asking for. For me, it was a real education in how not to make a movie.
A theatrical cut of Alien 3 running 114 minutes opened in May 1992. It almost tripled its money at the box office but the reception from fans and critics was lukewarm at best, and it’s not hard to see why. Despite the game cast of terrific actors and a typically committed performance by Weaver, it was a bleak, gloomy, and downbeat film that lacked both the scares of Scott’s original and humour, heart, and thrills of Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster.
What was more, it was also a complete bummer, destroying all Ripley’s hard work in the previous film by killing off Hicks and Newt before the action even starts. It never settles on a consistent rhythm, belying its lack of a coherent screenplay, and grimly goes through the motions until Ripley takes her sacrificial plunge into a pool of molten metal at the end.
Fincher has repeatedly bad-mouthed the production over the years and revealed that he was so low about his experience on the film that he almost quit the industry for good, saying he would rather kill himself than make another movie. Understandably, in that frame of mind he refused to cooperate with Fox to put together an extended version for the home media release. Thankfully, he returned with a vengeance to direct Seven and his career went from strength to strength, now widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s most interesting and accomplished filmmakers.
We finally got the “Assembly Cut” in 2003, a 144-minute version that restored around half an hour of footage using Fincher’s notes for reference. It is an improvement over the theatrical release, although not by much. The world-building is much better, especially with exterior shots at the beginning that gives the film a far less claustrophobic feel, and the characters have more space to develop.
Mercifully given the vehement reaction to Hicks and Newt’s fate, it was probably a good job audiences weren’t exposed to shots of their maggoty corpses inside their crashed escape pod. Beyond that, the Assembly Cut falls down in the same ways as the original release.
While it seems clear that Fincher was trying to emulate the tension of Scott’s original, there is more evidence of a problem in the franchise that began creeping in during Aliens. While the Xenomorphs are no doubt a deadly menace, they’re not actively doing anything nefarious until humans stumble upon them and screenwriters continually need to find new ways of putting people in harm’s way. As a result, we get even more characters that only exist as alien fodder, and the rinse-and-repeat death sequences become very repetitive.
Echoing Weaver’s quote, Alien 3 is another cautionary tale of too many cooks involved and studio interference hindering the efforts of a talented director. Perhaps the Alien franchise should have ended on that sour note, especially with Ripley now dead and no clear indication of what another sequel might look like.
But, as we are even more aware nowadays, Hollywood studios are reluctant to let their cash cows die without wringing them out for every last buck of profit first. A month before Alien 3 hit theatres, a French director called Jean-Pierre Jeunet caught people’s attention with a strange black comedy called Delicatessen, a film that proved he was a unique voice with a very singular vision. Maybe one day he’d follow his compatriot Luc Besson stateside.
So there you have it, our retrospective of the depressing mess that is Alien 3. Is it really as bad as people say, and what do you make of the Assembly Cut? Let us know!
Follow us next time for our conclusion to our Alien Quadrilogy series as we take a look at Jeunet’s bizarre Alien Resurrection!
