RETRO REVIEW: Alien 3 (1992)

Directed by David Fincher.

Written by David Giler, Walter Hill & Larry Ferguson.

Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance and Lance Henriksen.

R, 115 minutes (theatrical), 144 minutes (special edition).

 If you were to judge Alien 3 from its first thirty seconds, no one would begrudge you for getting excited. The 20^th Century Fox fanfare plays over the normal logo, just as any viewer has been primed to expect, but, just as it gets to the final notes, something unexpected happens. The music stops at one note, then keeps it going, screaming at us as if the conductor had just seized up and died in the middle of a recording session and the musicians kept playing for an uncomfortable period of time before the screen fades into the blank emptiness of space.

Following in the footsteps of Aliens, the advertisements of which claimed it could “stop your heart,” its own sequel, Alien 3, runs on life support. I won’t go as far as saying Alien 3 is a bad movie by any means. On the contrary, I think it’s pretty solid, but it does make some seemingly questionable creative decisions. The first, most glaring of these is the removal of two major characters, Hicks and, most importantly, Newt, before the end of the main titles. The surrogate mother-daughter relationship between the two served as the emotional backbone of Aliens, and killing them off seems at first glance like nothing more than a slap in the face to the fans of the series, and can’t help but render Ripley’s struggle to save her at the end of Aliens meaningless.

On second glance, however, Alien 3 reveals itself as both a perversion of the atmospheric terror found in Alien, and the pulse-pounding action thrill-ride that characterized Aliens. It doesn’t quite reach its potential setting us down this path, and its historically troubled production may have something to do with that, but I believe that if this stood as the finale to the Alien film series, which it obviously was meant to be, it would be regarded in a better light today.

The film picks up immediately where the second one left off, with Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Hicks, Newt and the trusty android, Bishop, resting peacefully in cryogenic sleep, their vessel drifting aimlessly in space. After a facehugger, having stowed away on the vessel, wreaks havoc, the ship crashes on a prison planet populated solely by men. Ripley is the only human survivor of the crash. Alive to navigate a treacherous prison, things get a little hairy for everyone involved when a xenomorph is let loose on the facility.

The first thing a viewer might notice is the dramatic change in tone. There was really no way of trying to follow the second film’s intense action sequences without inviting diminishing returns, so the stakes have been brought down to something perversely less exciting. After surviving the crash, Ripley is in a nihilistic funk that doesn’t really lift until she assumes the goal of eradicating the universe of the xenomorph once and for all (or at least, we can imply as much looking at these three movies in a vacuum). The movie really falls on Weaver’s shoulders and she carries the whole thing off very well.

Weaver is doubly a saving grace, too, because the supporting characters, by their very nature as convicted thieves and rapists, are inherently unlikable. Some of the actors convey their characters with a grace that suggests something more three-dimensional (Charles Dance of Game of Thrones fame and Charles S. Dutton), but that’s only the case because the script gives them more to do. We don’t really care for their redemption like we should, given the intriguing religious lifestyle these men try to lead as repentance for their lives, and what the alien could represent to a god-fearing man (an earlier draft, featuring the supporting characters as monks rather than prisoners, reportedly delved further into such a dilemma).

As a full-on drama tinged with a nihilistically bleak tone to fit its main character’s grief, Alien 3 is perhaps the strangest capper to a trilogy of popular films ever made. It’s not very scary, despite some gruesome death scenes. It’s not action-packed either, outside of a fantastic sequence where Ripley and the prisoners attempt to trap the xenomoprh. It’s a low-key slow burn drama that just happens to be set on another planet featuring an unstoppable, alien killing machine.

Despite the finality with which Alien 3 closes, it’s ironic that another sequel would come along and render this ending almost meaningless as well. Regardless, just as Alien 3 did to Aliens, Alien: Resurrection does to Alien 3. We’ll be dealing with that one next time.

*There are two versions of this movie, a 115-minute theatrical cut and a 144-minute assembly cut. The latter is by far the superior version.

 If you enjoyed N. Demmy’s piece, you can find his latest work right HERE and his earlier articles and reviews over HERE.

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