After a decade of making commercials for brands like Nike and Budweiser, and directing music videos for pop stars such as George Michael and Madonna, David Fincher was picked by 20th Century Fox to direct Alien 3, the newest instalment of one of the biggest and most acclaimed franchises around at the time. Certainly, for any young director, getting into bed with the big studio and their prized possession would be a daunting prospect, but it would be hard not to jump at the chance to instantly join the ranks of Ridley Scott and James Cameron with your first feature film.
Unfortunately, for Fincher, the production was plagued with problems. Long before he was attached as a third-choice director, several scripts had been commissioned and rejected already, with the final product being a mish-mash of the best ideas from some of the rejected scripts along with various recommendations from the studio. After filming had begun the studio began interfering again, telling the director how he could and could not shoot the movie. Though I'm sure he was forced to make some concessions, Fincher reportedly would often ignore direct orders to not shoot a certain scene in a certain location, and the filmed result would end up in the movie anyway.
Despite small victories such as these, Fincher was fed up by the time filming had come to an end, and walked away from the movie before post-production began. Apparently, the experience left such a bad taste in the director's mouth, that he wanted nothing at all to do with the finished product, short of removing his name from the credits, and even turned down an olive branch from the studio to put together a “director's cut” with the DVD release years later, such as Ridley Scott and James Cameron had already done.
Consequently, what the viewer is presented with on the Alien 3 deluxe DVD, is a choice between the theatrical version and what's been called the “assembly cut”. This is the studios attempt to include more of Fincher's vision in the narrative of the film, and utilizes a lot of scenes that were different or not at all used in the theatrical version—for example, there's a scene where the alien emerges from a dead ox, rather than the rottweiler seen in theatres. 20th Century Fox seems to be acknowledging with this cut, and given Fincher's rise in status as a director, that a better film might have been realized if the studio hadn't meddled with the product, and trusted their director to do his job.
Whatever the case, no one seems to have wanted to spend too much money on this new cut of the film. It was clearly more cost effective to include a disclaimer with the DVD package, warning of poor audio quality which makes subtitles necessary in some parts, as well as really unfinished special effects in most of the new scenes. When the alien comes out of the ox, for example, the CGI looks like something you might have seen in a bad episode of The X-Files. Also in this new cut, there's no baby alien popping out of Ripley's chest when she finally throws herself into the furnace, as there was in the theatrical version, indicating that the appearance of the alien baby—which Ripley almost seems to cradle as she descends into the fire—was another studio recommendation.
Regardless of which version you watch, the movie turns out to be exactly what's implied by the existence of the assembly cut: a film which might have been a lot better, but a film nonetheless. The look of the movie is great, for one, with a rusty industrial prison setting serving as the backdrop for the all too familiar plot of the Alien films: a group of humans being hunted and picked off one by one by pitiless alien creatures. The feeling of the film is apocalyptic and Fincher with his cinematographer Alex Thomon capture this well, seeming to highlight the rusty orange and green palette with the dull light of a dying star, and shade it with the darkest parts of hell. Fincher also displays a bit of flair, mounting several frantic upside-down alien POV shots, that effectively ramp up the action, as well as the iconic two-shot close-up of Ripley's encounter with the alien, an image which, apart from headlining this article, has also come to represent the series as a whole.
Part of the appeal of this franchise is the way in which, though weak and greedy as we humans may be, with both the good and the bad easily outmatched by the cold instincts of the alien beast, the tenacity of human survival is always able to win the day, though just barely. In Alien 3, humanity is represented by prisoners, whom the audience may assume are a bunch of murderers and rapists, the lowest form of human life; but compared to the acidic heart of the Xenomorph they face, their inherent humanity shines brighter than their own dark hearts, and we cheer them on all the same.
The characterizations in the film are decent, if a little worn. You've got the incompetent warden, along with his idiot number two; there's a soulful doctor, who harbors a dark past and also provides Ripley with what I'm pretty sure is the only sex she gets in the entire series; you've got your lunatic prisoners and your mean, gruff bastards; you've got the preacher: a prisoner himself with an angry disposition and a desperate need for redemption; and finally, it wouldn't be a proper Alien movie without the involvement of the ominous "Company", who's sinister machinations to use the Xenomorphs as biological weapons are one of the overall conflicts of the series.
Ripley, of course, is the one the audience really cares about, and her death at the end of this film, sacrificing herself to kill the alien queen growing inside of her, is an appropriate ending to the trilogy. The films wouldn't work without Ripley's relentless determination to survive, which is why she had to be cloned back into existence for the fourth movie—a film which, like the Ripley clones themselves, should never have been produced.
Any problems with Alien 3, however, seem to derive from the script, which was pieced together to reflect studio notes and suggestions, rather than any creative spirit which might re-invigorate the franchise. For example, the beginning of the film is a serious downer for anyone who enjoyed James Cameron's Aliens. At the end of that movie, our hero Ripley has barely escaped the alien planet with a few survivors in tow. Lt. Hicks is badly injured, and their android Bishop has been ripped in half, but Ripley risked everything to save the small child Newt from a fate worse then death, and had succeeded against all odds. Before the credits roll, the audience beholds the satisfying sight of all three survivors convalescing within their hyper-sleep pods, on a peaceful journey home.
Nope.
During the opening credits of Alien 3, no less, we see the sleep chambers being bled into by one of the alien facehuggers. The escape pod itself, due to a fire caused by the facehugger, crashes into a prison planet, of all places. So, just as the opening credits are finishing, both Hicks and Newt are dead, and Ripley is washing up on the shore of a dead planet inhabited entirely by murderous prisoners who haven't seen a woman in years. A bleak return to the series, to be sure, especially considering Hicks and Newt were written out largely for technical reasons, rather creative ones. The actress who played Newt had grown too much since the last film, and I suppose the studios thought it easier to kill her off rather than replace her; and Michael Biehn, the actor who portrayed Hicks, was feuding with the studio over contracts and compensations, and even charged the studio a large sum just to use his likeness on a computer screen for the film—so he wasn't coming back either.
Regardless of these and other difficulties, Alien 3 succeeds in not being a terrible end to a trilogy, and in retrospect, has improved in comparison to Alien: Resurrection, not to mention the piss-poor Alien Vs Predator movies of the past decade. Though it might have been a better film, it also could have been worse, and Fincher is largely to thank for whatever positive contribution Alien 3 has made to the sci-fi cannon of the 20th Century.
