Alien³ opens with a crash and never really recovers. David Fincher’s 1992 film kills off two survivors from Aliens in its first minutes, strands Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley on a prison planet, and spends the rest of its 114 minutes trying to find a reason for her to still be there. The answer it lands on is bleak, and the film is often striking. It is also a mess, and the mess is not entirely Fincher’s fault.
Trailer, via Alien Anthology.
The Sulaco Ejects an Escape Pod
The setup is efficient. The Colonial Marine spaceship Sulaco is carrying Ripley, Rebecca “Newt” Jorden, Cpl. Hicks and the damaged android Bishop home to Earth in cryonic stasis. An alien egg hatches on board. A facehugger attacks the crew, a fire starts, and the ship’s computer ejects an escape pod with everyone still in stasis.
The pod crash-lands on Fiorina “Fury” 161, a foundry and maximum-security correctional facility populated by male inmates with a genetic predisposition for antisocial behavior. Ripley wakes to learn she is the sole survivor. Newt and Hicks are dead. The prison has no weapons of any kind, and help is a long time away.
That is a strong premise for a horror film: strip the hero of her guns, her allies and her ship, and drop her among violent men. Fincher, in his feature directorial debut, makes the prison feel genuinely hostile. The inmates are not comic relief. They are dangerous.
Charles S. Dutton as Leonard Dillon
The cast is the film’s best asset. Charles S. Dutton plays Leonard Dillon, the inmates’ spiritual and de facto leader, who tries to keep the peace. He gets the film’s only real moral weight. Charles Dance is Jonathan Clemens, a former inmate now serving as the facility’s doctor, who treats Ripley and forms a bond with her.
more than a little melodramatic
That is Clemens, describing to Ripley why he was originally sent to Fiorina, before the Alien kills him. It is a good line, and Dance sells it. Brian Glover’s warden Harold Andrews believes Ripley’s presence will cause disruption and rejects her claims about the creature, only to be killed by it. Ralph Brown is his assistant Aaron, nicknamed “85” by the prisoners after his IQ score, which annoys him.
Weaver signed on after approving David Twohy’s script, but demanded $4–5 million plus a co-producing credit. She also asked that the action not rely on guns. That request shapes the film more than any other decision. Ripley spends most of Alien³ unarmed, and the film is better for it.
Shooting Without a Script
The production was troubled. Alien³ shot without a script, went through various screenwriters and directors, and eventually landed Fincher after a proposed version with Vincent Ward as director was canceled during pre-production. The credited screenplay is by David Giler, Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson, from Ward’s story.
You can feel the seams. Characters arrive and vanish. The plot moves in lurches. The alien itself, a quadrupedal creature that bursts from inmate Thomas Murphy’s dog Spike, is a genuine departure from the bipedal monster of the first two films, and it works.
But the film keeps losing track of its own ideas. Ripley’s fear that Newt carried an embryo drives an autopsy scene, and the autopsy finds no embryo. So the film spends time on a suspicion it then drops. The gang-rape attempt on Ripley, stopped by Dillon, is a grim beat that the film never really reckons with.
What Fincher Disowned
Fincher has since disowned Alien³, calling it unfaithful to his original vision because of studio interference. That is worth taking seriously, but it does not change what is on screen. The film released by 20th Century Fox on May 22, 1992, underperformed at the American box office and earned over $100 million outside North America. It drew mixed reviews and was regarded as inferior to its predecessors.
It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and seven Saturn Awards. The craft is real. The alien design is memorable, the prison is a fully realized place, and Weaver is committed in a role she had every reason to phone in.
The problem is that Alien³ wants to be a film about faith and sacrifice, and it does not earn that. Dillon’s sermons about the prisoners’ redemption are the closest the film comes to a thesis, and they are delivered with conviction but never tested. The inmates die, and the film treats this as meaningful without doing the work to make it so.
A Bleak Ending That Lands
Alien³ is a film with a great first act, a muddled middle and a bleak ending that lands harder than it should. It is not the disaster its reputation suggests, and it is not the misunderstood masterpiece its defenders claim. It sits in between: a studio film that was taken away from its director and shows it, but also a studio film with real images in it.
The score is 5.9 of 10. That feels right. Alien³ is worth watching once, for Dutton and Dance and for the sight of Fincher learning his craft under impossible conditions. It is not worth watching twice.
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