Alien 3 review: is it better than its troubled production?

Alien 3 is a film riddled with issues that stem from a troubled production, and yet I lean toward liking it. Years of rejected scripts and studio interference left their mark on the supporting cast and the action, but the movie's themes, its tone and its portrayal of Ripley still land for me.

Alien 3 (1992), starring Sigourney Weaver and Charles Dance, is the third of the four films built around Ellen Ripley. To understand how it ended up the way it did, you have to start with the success of the film that came before it.

How the success of Aliens led Fox to push for Alien 3

Aliens was a hit with critics and audiences, and on IMDb it scored an 8.4 out of 10, just below the 8.5 for Alien. In an unprecedented turn of events, Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress for her work on it. With that kind of success, Fox almost immediately wanted a third Alien movie.

Brandywine Productions were less enthusiastic. They were concerned that an Alien 3 would be too similar to the first two movies, but Fox insisted and production went ahead. David Giler and Walter Hill, the producers at Brandywine, pitched a version focused almost entirely on Weyland-Yutani, the shady corporation behind the events of the first two films.

In that pitch, the underhanded corporation would face off against a militarily aggressive culture of humans whose rigid socialist ideology had caused them to split from Earth's society. Hicks from Aliens would be the protagonist. Ripley would only cameo before returning in a fourth movie, which would feature an epic battle between the aliens and the people of Earth. Weaver initially liked the Cold War metaphor and agreed to the smaller role. Giler and Hill wanted Ridley Scott to direct, but he was unavailable because of scheduling conflicts.

Production on Alien 3 began in 1987, and the film would not come out until 1992. Five years is a strangely long time, and the reason is that Fox and Brandywine could never agree on a vision. The film went through script after script before it began shooting.

William Gibson's abandoned Alien 3 script

The first teaser for Alien 3 famously said, "On Earth, everyone can hear you scream." But Alien 3 doesn't take place on Earth. So what happened?

In September 1987, William Gibson was approached to write the script. He was known for his work in cyberpunk, and Giler and Hill wanted him to bring some of that flavor. His draft mostly followed their outline. The Sulaco would drift into an area of space controlled by the Union of Progressive Peoples, while Hicks would end up on a research station named Anchor Point, where Weyland-Yutani was developing an alien army. Both areas would be overrun, teasing a fourth movie in which all the humans would have to work together.

The script was very action oriented and featured a large cast, but Giler and Hill were not fond of it. They asked Gibson for serious revisions; he declined and left the project. Nearly 30 years later, in 2019, a full cast audio drama featuring the actors who played Hicks and Bishop was made from Gibson's script, and in 2021 a novel adaptation of the screenplay was written. That is all that came of it.

Eric Red, David Twohy and Vincent Ward's monk planet idea

The next attempt came from Eric Red, who handed in his script in February 1989. In his version, Marines board the Sulaco and find all the survivors of Aliens dead from alien attacks. The battle then moves to a small town inside a biodome in space, where the townspeople fight the aliens. Giler and Hill rejected it for deviating too far from their original vision, and Red left.

After that, David Twohy came up with an idea in which Weyland-Yutani experimented on prisoners in an attempt to breed aliens. The president of Fox did not like the script, and did not like that Ripley was not part of it.

Vincent Ward then delivered a script that closely resembled the final movie. Ripley crashes on a wooden space station run by religious monks who have completely removed themselves from society and do not allow women. The monks see Ripley as the devil and refuse to listen to her when an alien starts to attack. Eventually everyone starts to die, and Ripley sacrifices herself to destroy the alien. Fox wanted Ripley to survive, but Weaver would only do the movie if Ripley died.

Fox initially loved this script and began production assuming it was the final draft. The crew then began to realize what a gargantuan task it would be to build a movie around a wooden space station. Giler and Hill asked Ward to turn the station into an ore refinery and the monks into prisoners. Ward refused and was fired.

Sigourney Weaver's objections and the final Alien 3 script

Larry Ferguson came in next and made the changes Giler and Hill wanted. Sigourney Weaver hated the result, saying Ripley sounded like an angry gym teacher. She also demanded there be no guns in the film because she is strongly against guns.

Giler and Hill got rid of Ferguson and decided to finish the script themselves. Weaver had a clause in her contract that Giler and Hill would have final say on the script. After all those years, Brandywine and Fox finally had a direction they wanted to take.

David Fincher's first film began shooting without a finished script

David Fincher, then a popular director of music promos, was brought on to direct. He had never directed a feature before, and as a big fan of the first Alien he was thrilled to be making the next film in the series. Young and naive, he didn't realize what he was signing up for.

Despite principal photography beginning, there was no completed script. Fincher would be handed new pages on the day of filming and would have to process everything and then shoot it. Eventually he ran out of pages. The crew went to Los Angeles to edit while more pages were written. Fox referred to the filming in Los Angeles as reshoots, but Fincher believed it was simply finishing the rest of the movie.

Why the dog-born alien effects in Alien 3 haven't aged well

One of the biggest narrative decisions was that the alien would come out of a dog rather than a human, which meant it would be more doglike and faster than normal aliens. The effects team took two approaches. For close shots, a classic suit was used. For wider shots, models were puppeted in front of a blue screen by four to six people, depending on the complexity of the shot, and then rotoscoped over the live action.

Thirty years later, those rotoscoped shots look awful. I don't blame the effects team, who were limited by the technology of their time, but in hindsight this was not the right way to approach the movie. It is clear as day which shots used a real costume and which used a model, because the real costume still looks as great as ever.

Why David Fincher disowned Alien 3 and the assembly cut

When it came time to wrap up postproduction, Fincher was so fed up that he left the project. He has since gone on to a historic career, directing some of the best movies ever made, but he has always looked down on his first movie and often refuses to talk about it. There is even officially released behind the scenes material in which he criticized Fox. Years later he famously said, "To this day, no one hates it more than me."

Alien 3 is a lesson in how not to approach a film. The studios never stopped interfering, and even during postproduction they kept trimming the movie to shorten its runtime. In 2003, Brandywine tried to create a director's cut. So many scenes had been cut and altered, and with Fincher now regarded as a world class director, Brandywine wanted to give him another chance at his version. He hated the movie so much that he refused to be part of any director's cut.

Without him, a new version titled the assembly cut was put together. This is not like the extended cut of Aliens. The assembly cut is nearly a completely different film, running about 30 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, with changes throughout and plot lines brought back in. Even the alien's birth was changed: in the theatrical cut it comes from a dog, while in the assembly cut it comes from a dead ox. Fans agree the assembly cut is a significantly better version that fleshes out the interesting ideas already present, but it was not what audiences saw in theaters in 1992.

Alien 3's release, box office and reviews

Alien 3 premiered on May 22, 1992. It was somewhat of a box office success, grossing $159 million on a budget of roughly $50 million, but critics and fans alike were very disappointed. It scored 44% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 46% audience score, and 6.4 out of 10 on IMDb, making it the weakest of the first three Alien movies by far.

Thirty three years on, it's an interesting film. Movies with this much studio meddling usually turn out awful, but there's something about Alien 3 that a segment of fans like, and it has grown quite the niche following. I think many people can look at the themes it's trying to explore and appreciate them.

Why some Aliens fans can't accept what Alien 3 did to Newt and Hicks

How much you enjoy Alien 3 depends on how you view it in relation to Aliens. The biggest reason people hate it is what it did to Newt and Hicks. Aliens ended so perfectly: Ripley gets another chance at being a mother, she has potentially found love, and she has gotten rid of the aliens for good. Newt asks Ripley if she can finally dream, and Ripley says yes.

Because of Alien 3, Newt's dreams are interrupted by her drowning, and Hicks's by getting crushed by debris. It doesn't matter how good the movie could have been; some people simply can't look past how it undid the ending of Aliens. It reminds me of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Some people love it and some hate it, but a segment of fans cannot accept how Luke Skywalker was treated, and Aliens fans feel the same way about Newt and Hicks.

On top of that, Alien 3 is a depressing movie without an ounce of the triumphant feeling Aliens had, and its premise makes little sense. The writers have stated that you need to accept that an alien egg somehow ended up on the Sulaco, despite that being impossible based on the events of Aliens.

Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and the ending I appreciate

I don't love how dark and depressing the movie is, but I think they did a great job creating that tone. Sigourney Weaver is a world class actress, and her ability to portray this depression and hopelessness is powerful. Alien 3 is about sacrifice, faith, nihilism and redemption, and many of the scenes where characters have deep conversations are powerful moments, especially the more religious ones.

Despite the film's many shortcomings, Ripley is not one of them. She's as great as ever. After the alien attacks, she takes charge, rallies the prisoners and tries to motivate them. I love the speech where she convinces everyone to join her plan, telling them Weyland-Yutani will kill all of them just to get their hands on the alien.

I think there's something powerful about her death, too. By that point in the story, LV-426 had been nuked and the alien on the prison had been killed. Ripley carries a queen inside her chest, the last alien in existence, and jumps into the fire knowing the entire species will die with her, one last act of defiance against Weyland-Yutani. If Alien Resurrection never existed, this would have been the perfect ending to the series for me.

Alien 3's weak supporting characters and wasted prison premise

What I don't like is mostly the execution and many of the supporting characters. You can tell from how things play out that the production was troubled. Charles Dance's Clemens is one of the more prominent characters and gets significant development for most of the first half. He even sleeps with Ripley, forming a close bond, but then he is killed and his death is never mentioned again. Why devote so much time to a character who dies early and doesn't affect the rest of the story? I can't answer that specifically, but it is likely because the script was altered time and time again.

The movie also wastes its premise. These violent criminals are supposed to be the scum of the earth, and watching them fight an alien sounds like an awesome idea. Instead, the prisoners are religious monks who aren't unique in any way. Unlike the iconic supporting casts of Alien and Aliens, they all blend together, and the only one I remember is Morse, the guy who survives. Knowing what went on behind the scenes, the reason is clear: they were monks in earlier drafts, and when the setting became a prison they kept that religious side.

One of the more praised parts of the film is the sequence where the prisoners shut doors and flood corridors to burn the alien. The alien's point of view shots are cool, but the sequence is confusing. You get no sense of geography, and most of the time I have no clue which prisoner is which. It's a fun scene, but not a well executed one, and the whole movie feels like that.

Alien 3 is a conflicting film, but one I mostly appreciate. Had the series ended here, the Alien trilogy would have been one of my favorite trilogies of all time, even with Alien 3's weaknesses.