‘Alien 3’ Was Not What Anyone Expected — But Its Reputation Is Finally Starting To Turn

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The ad wizards who wrote that copy were certainly onto something when they created this memorable tagline, but Decider’s “Take Two” series was specifically formulated in a laboratory by the world’s foremost pop culture scientists to provide a second chance for movies that made a less than stellar first impression upon their original release.

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The run-up to Alien3 was a rocky one and its rejection by popular audiences and fans was uniform, swift, brutal. I remember reading John H. Richardson’s piece in the May 1992 Premiere Magazine documenting the bad time Sigourney Weaver had on set, declaring her trust in first-time feature-director David Fincher destroyed when, without warning, he dumped a bucket of baby crickets on her to simulate an infestation of parasitic lice, the rationale for the cast’s shaved heads. More recently, in private conversation, Fincher shared with me how much of his frustration was with how this decision — to have everyone shorn — made it difficult to visually distinguish several of the characters from the other. The script was unfinished as the film, one of the most anticipated of the season and securing the Memorial Day 1992 pole position as a consequence, started shooting. As was co-producer Walter Hill’s habit, new pages would be produced daily to the consternation, again, of cast and young director. Complicating things further, what became the final script would be a chimera stitched together from treatments by a collection of writers with its most brilliant central conceit — a wooden planet constructed and inhabited by a luddite monastic order (as imagined by visionary Kiwi director Vincent Ward), transformed in the eleventh hour to an industrial prison planet. Hints of crazed religiosity linger.

You can find it, the oppressive religion of Alien3, in the male (“all double-Y chromos”) sexual hysteria around a woman “parading around” a planet inhabited by twenty-five custodial remnants of a prison colony once thousands strong. They are the dregs of the dreg, looked over by pocket martinet Andrews (Brain Glover), strutting around with mentally-limited toady Francis Aaron (Ralph Brown) dubbed “85” by his peers after presumptions of his IQ. The real leader of the men, however, is messianic prisoner Dillon (Charles Dutton) who keeps the carnal impulses of the men more or less in check with stirring monologues delivered in the style of Jonathan Edwards to provide the metaphysical echo to the literal fire and brimstone of both the planet’s name (“Fiorina 161” an auditory homonym suggesting a fusion of “fire” and “fury”) and its function as a giant forge for the extraction of precious metals for the Weyland-Yutani corporation. When Ripley approaches him at a dining hall to thank him for a eulogy he’s delivered for her adopted daughter Newt and friend Marine Cpl. Hicks, Dillon warns her that she doesn’t want to know him as he’s a “murderer and rapist of women.” Ripley says “well, I guess I must make you nervous” and sits down at his table. It’s the defining moment for the Ripley character across four films, one of the true, unquestioned feminist action movie icons in American film who began her life in Dan O’Bannon’s Alien script as a man. When casual wonks declare Walter Hill a man’s director, they neglect to mention, among at least a dozen other examples, his primary role in the rebirth of Ripley as a woman. 

The main reason Alien3 went over like a led balloon at the box office has to do with a few things common now, decidedly less common thirty years ago. Anticipation for a follow-up to James Cameron’s blockbuster Aliens had fans buzzing about the possibilities of not just an increase of Giger’s xenomorphic metaphors, but a magnification of them in factors suggested by the “cubed” coda to its title. (I have always thought it was funny how the singular “alien” cubed is only one alien, one to the power of three is still, after all, only one.) Many thought the monsters would make it to Earth at last (screenwriter Eric Red’s treatment opened in a middle-American corn field) and all believed the breakout hero of Cameron’s film, Michael Biehn’s hard-on-the-outside/soft-in-the-middle heartthrob, would make a heroic return. If not him, a newly-restored Bishop (Lance Henriksen) the android and if not either of them, at least the little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn) who functionally-replaces the never-seen daughter Ripley outlives back home. Fan culture, not yet metastasized by an easy means of connection through the still science-fictional Internet, had already written a film in its head and Alien3 and its shepherds Hill and David Giler, had no intention of following any tired conceptions of the continuing story. What they wanted was a way to end the series with a noble, dignified outcome for Ripley.

In pursuit of that “good death,” the opening credits tell an expressionistic, wordless tale of a facehugger burning its way into Ripley’s cryo-tube, setting off alarms in the Sulaco ship from Aliens’ escape bay where she’s loaded with Hicks, Newt and Bishop into a pod that’s dispatched at the nearest Company outpost, Fiorina 161. Among the first things said in the film are that everyone except Ripley has died. A fact uncomfortable enough that it’s repeated twice more and then capped by a devastating autopsy of Newt’s corpse so that Ripley can confirm there’s no alien larvae next to the child’s heart; and then in a fiery cremation for which Ripley later tries to thank Dillon. For most people watching Alien3 with a preconceived notion of what they are about to see, the film has already lost them, never to win them back.

I was one of the aggrieved. Alien3 pissed me off mightily when I was 19. Seeing it on opening night, almost dizzy with anticipation, I left disappointed and haunted by the idea that I was missing something. I think what I was missing was enough life experience to know that you very rarely get what you want and the universe doesn’t owe you comfort.  I’m not 19 anymore and this film, this attempt to make an Alien picture into a Carl Dreyer meditation stark and poetic, strikes me now as not irksome so much as exhilarating: artists in Hill and Fincher, however at odds during the course of the making of this film, both dedicated in their separate ways to doing something sober, strange, and singular.

But that scene again: Ripley when she tells Dillon that his warning of what he has done indicates to her that he is afraid of women is the strongest Ripley has ever been. In the course of Alien3, she gets stronger. She falls in love with medical officer Clemens, disgraced for mistakes he made as a junkie and a doctor and exiled here amongst the riff-raff. In a conversation Fincher shoots creeping down an empty scaffold, Clemens tells Ripley “Dillon and the rest of the alternative people, embraced religion as it were five years ago… some sort of apocalyptic, millenarian Chrstian fundamentalist, uh…” but Ripley knows exactly what he means. In 2024, as Evangelicals have gained control of this nation’s Supreme Court, we are closer to sharing Ripley’s wisdom.

As a pop-commentary of the conditions that breed cult-like fundamentalism, Alien3 displays just one of its enduring traits. Ripley, in another show of actualization, tells Clemens she’s lonesome and would like to have sex. When the alien starts to run amuck, she takes command of the men alongside Dillon to make a plan for the alien’s capture and destruction. At the end, she discovers she’s “pregnant” — raped while she was in deep sleep by this thing that has been in her life so long she can’t remember a life without it, and decides to kill herself in molten metal so her body can’t be harvested, its fetal payload exploited. 

Alien3 finds Ripley evolved fully into power. She is a survivor of unspeakable tragedy — aged beyond her years (literally in the sci-fi hibernation and relativity scale) by war and trauma, who is of all things in this film, finally at peace. She is not afraid of men. She mourns openly and freely for the people whom she loves who have died, and she makes the decision at the end about what she will allow her body to do despite the protests of the powerful. She is inconvenient and revels in how she troubles the water. She is unashamed of her carnality and not for a moment in this film is her femininity made to seem un-beautiful or undesirable for all of her hardness. She stands, naked, before Clemens when she demands to see her child’s body and asks if he’s going to clothe her or if she has to walk through the prison nude. Like other women in Hill’s films — Belle Star in The Long Riders, Mercy in The Warriors, and Rachel in Dead for a Dollar — their sexuality is a weapon they wield against the weak: the men. She is the thing to be shamed in Alien3’s colony of religious zealots who are also rapists and murderers and she has never been more inspiring and more relatable. I have to wonder if the 19 year-old version of me was offended by that idea of a powerful, feminine woman, as well. 

One of history’s great cinematic “failures,” Alien3 at the time was compared amongst my small group of film-savvy jackasses to the miserable, howling mistake of Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. That other genre extension/trilogy capper to a beloved series that enraged an audience that, having tasted something new one time decided it was all they ever wanted to eat from that moment and then nothing else forevermore. Both films have since risen in popular estimation, though the Wallace film is now considered nearly an equivalent masterpiece, whereas Alien3 is still passed like a secret to be shared only among trusted friends. Give it another go. Hold Se7en in your mind as you do — that moody noir drenched in wet and filth, marinated in browns and shadow, about loved ones taken unfairly and too soon, and heroes lost and written into someone else’s religious allegory. See in Alien3 all the ways it shares a moral universe with an acknowledged Fincher masterpiece and, perhaps, grant that even if it’s not what anyone expected, it is the product of three artists (Fincher, Weaver and Hill) who are in complete command of the message no matter how garbled its perception has become, tangled as it is by studio and audience expectation. It’s a work of intimidating philosophical prescience and gravity. It takes the series, and Ripley in particular, very seriously. Three decades later, it’s well past time we all considered doing the same.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.