Retrospective Review: 'Alien 3'

Today I'm wading the troubled waters of reviewing Alien 3. I will be including some slight spoilers, so you've been forewarned. If you're curious what else I have in store, you can expect a Retrospective Review of Alien: Resurrection, a Throwback Thursday Review of Prometheus, and a review on Alien: Covenant all to be uploaded this week. 

'Alien 3' Review

Nominated For: Best Visual Effects.

Ellen Ripley is once again the sole survivor of this story when a piece of her ship carrying the cryo-sleep chambers mysteriously crash lands on Fiorina 161, a desolate planet housing a maximum security prison. There she encounters pious prisoners and their skeptical sentries, whom she must convince to trust in her regarding the potential alien contagion. It's fairly well known that Alien 3 had an especially troubled production process. The fact it would have to follow up sci-fi classics Alien and Aliens was a daunting task in-of-itself, but somehow good did indeed come from Alien 3.

Thanks to the middling movie, David Fincher was enveloped into the filmmaking community after successfully supervising a series of successful music videos. Fincher has since gone on to craft a number of wellregarded works I hope to review in the near future such as Fight Club, Se7en, and The Social Network. Unfortunately, Alien 3 wasn't the feature film directorial debut Fincher or any person would imagine it to have been considering Fincher had little-to-no control over the project.

While I've reviewed other films where studios intervened on behalf of making a profit like Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, or Fantastic Four (2015), Alien 3 is different in the sense that it's difficult to trace what decisions stemmed from where. Normally I'm able to have some reasonable idea where certain ideas originated (typically from either the writer or director), but Alien 3's a different case altogether. Some information has gone public such as Sigourney Weaver bearing her Academy Award nomination for her performance in Aliens as creative leverage and early drafts of alternate versions of the project but no real explanation behind everything that happened. It's probably most simply explained by the fact the studio interfered and that's that. Therefore, I'll be dissecting pieces of the film but won't really be able to properly credit any specific individual(s) so this review may be a little jumbled and hard to follow.

Alien 3's script is credited to David Giler, Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson in the screenplay division with a story supposedly molded by Vincent Ward. It's impossible to tell how much control these individuals really had over the script though. To briefly take a detour from all the behind the scenes drama, I've got to admit that there are some interesting ideas buried underneath the script. The idea that an alien's chemistry changes based off the organism it's birthed from opens the door to infinitesimal possibilities (ie. when the alien emerges from the dog/ox depending on what version you watch). The sudden and immediate death/deactivation of your favorite surviving Aliens characters may boil your blood and Weaver's anti-arms insistence doesn't really make much sense considering Ripley's in a maximum security prison, but these creative choices raise the stakes and make the situation even more terrifying.

Of course somehow an alien is involved, because otherwise the title couldn't bear the Alien Anthology monicker, but it makes absolutely no sense when you sit back and think about Alien 3 as a successor to Aliens. I find it incredibly impossible to believe that Ripley wouldn't have thoroughly examined the ship for any semblance of alien life after defeating the alien queen and going back into cryo-sleep. Also, the characters in Alien 3 are mainly morose and sink into the solemn setting. I legitimately can't remember or really distinguish any of the characters other than Ripley, Dillon, and Clemens and I watched Alien 3 only last night. Alien 3 is a film devoid of joy or hope, which actually sort of works with the foreboding backdrop but doesn't allow for a particularly enjoyable or even nerve-racking experience. If you're not invested in the hollow personas running about on screen, it's difficult to latch onto the story even with Ripley at its center. Even the cinematography from Alex Thomson is bleak and unforgiving.

Elsewhere, the special effects in Alien 3 are absolutely atrocious. When the Xenomorph is prancing about the prison, the puppet never meshes in with his corresponding background due to poor green-screen work and it actually looks worse than any effect from Alien or Aliens. The practical costumed Xenomorph seems like a better alternative now, when you view how well that iteration help up in the preceding chapters. Alien 3's score composed by Elliot Goldenthal feels far removed from the story being told. The compositions could potentially stand apart from the film, but the end result is a little jarring when the two are pieced together.

The performances on the other hand are unfortunately as jumbled as the film itself. Sigourney Weaver paints Ripley in an unsettled frantic state, pursuing the Xenomorphic paranoia that would logically accompany anyone who had experienced the former film's events. I'm not sure Weaver's capable of a truly bad performance so her portrayal certainly does the film a few favors. I especially like how her arc comes full circle as she's unhinged and distressed that the one thing that's taken everything away from her is inside her. The fact the soon-to-be alien queen is the only thing keeping the Xenomorph from munching her down is one of the fascinating concepts at the surface of the film and I like how that enables a complex characterization for Weaver to work with. Charles Dance and Charles S. Dutton each offer appropriate attributes to the compassionate chief medical officer Jonathan Clemens and devout religious leader Leonard Dillon but the remaining ensemble's littered actors portraying disposable detainees. 

In conclusion, Alien 3 could have turned out far worse but is a disappointing continuation of Ripley's story due to the lack of any distinctive creative voice. Even with titillating ideas buried underneath the surface, Alien 3 found itself befoul of a parasitic relationship more dangerous than the titular beast; money hungry studio heads.

Film Assessment: C-