UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH! It’s sad, but well known rule of fandom that no matter how much you love something, be it a movie, comic, TV show, etc., no matter how rabid or unhealthy (and boy does it sometimes get REAL unhealthy.) that love affair is, it will inevitably fuck you in someway. And I’m talking the hardcore sweaty pound your ass with no lube prison rape type of fucking here. With Star Trek it was (Debatably) movie 5, (or 1, or 7, or 9 or 10, or the reboot, or Voyager, or Enterprise, OR anything that came with TNG like i said, it’s debatable and down to the individual nerd.), with James Cameron’s Terminator franchise it was the unneeded third film (Which IS flawed, but by no means terrible, just useless.), Spider man fans got to suffer through both the disastrous Clone Saga (4+ years of confusing plot twists and tiresome marketing ploys.) AND the heinous One More Day (unless you like whining, selfish character actions, and outright immoral decisions, you probably shouldn’t read comics and just go back to your Jersey Shore DVDs) and us movies lovers have had to to deal with things like Michael Bay. (so clearly our pain is the greatest!) This is getting convoluted, the point is that there is always a point where the great and awesome starts to decompose, leaving so much crap. And boy is there no better word to describe this movie.
Alien 3 is one of those movies that for a long time held a certain infamy in sci fi fandom not just because of how bad it was, but also because of how it (to that point at least) ended the series. Those claiming to like it were either stoned on sight or acknowledged as 12 year olds that just didn’t know any better. Ok, not really but this movie was basically the Highlander 2 of the Alien franchise when it hit, and it’s not hard to see why: On fundamental level, this movie doesn’t, nay outright CAN’T work. Why is that?
A lot of that has to do with the studio seeing dollar signs in the wake of Aliens buying them all new yachts, they wanted more and they wanted it now. However, this time there wasn’t the amazing story of the young talent out of obscurity like the first two films. This time there wasn’t the good idea spark to drive the story, there wasn’t a story at all. This was a studio rushing to get another sequel out to pay for the helipad add on they wanted for their yachts. How naked was this cash grab? They didn’t have a script, hadn’t confirmed that SIgourney Weaver was returning, they had no director, or really anything other than a vague idea probably written on a cocktail napkin; but they put out a trailer, with a proposed release date. I mentioned Aliens had a troubled production due to James Cameron’s frustrations working with a non-american crew for the first time, but that was a four second slap fight compared to what happened to this movie’s PRE-PRODUCTION alone. There are so many reject scripts for this that some of them have actually been turn into other movies. You want an example? Pitch Black. Yes, writer director David Twohy took a script he was hired to write for this sequel, re-dressed and tweaked it, and thus we had Pitch Black. People like Near Dark co-writer Eric Red wrote a few drafts, acclaimed sci fi author William Gibson wrote a few drafts, there were drafts that had Ripley, drafts that didn’t, drafts that had Hicks and Bishop going to the xenomorph home world, some that focused on entirely new characters, and I’m sure there’s probably a trashed draft of just the words ‘fuck you!’ written over and over by some poor writer having to go back and rewrite his script again because the studio couldn’t make up its mind. They also hired directors, as in plural because both quit at some point, and again, THEY STILL HAD NO SOLID SCRIPT! Ok, that’s not quite true of second director Vincent Ward. He had an idea that the studio apparently at some point liked, and to be fair, a fair amount of the plot elements from it remain in the final film. However, at some point while they were dealing with him, and they were starting to build sets by this point, the studio wanted all kinds of changes and thus in frustration Ward quit and they had to find someone else to handle this crazy train that was fast derailing. That was David Fincher. Fincher, if you haven’t heard, is a truly amazing talent and is one of the best filmmakers we have currently working in the world with amazing works like Se7en, Fight Club and The Social Network. This was his feature film debut, and why he still makes films baffles me. The studio was hounding him the whole time, they were always asking for changes, to get the film finished faster despite that, and they were sending producers in to reinforce these other things, all because they needed the neon lit helipad for their... ok, I’m done with the yacht metaphor, but the point is they weren’t out to make a film, they were out to make a profit. As you can imagine, David Fincher’s job was nothing short an act of masochism just by showing up for work everyday having to deal with the new notes from the producers. And what was the result? A domestic gross that only gave them five million dollars in profit, and the only big money coming from overseas to make up for it. Those that want comparison: Alien grossed around 70 million in pure profit DOMESTICALLY and Aliens grossed about the same, despite the budget being twice the size of movie one. That’s BEFORE you add the overseas numbers to get HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS.
This brings up a point that I’d like to talk about for movies in general, but I’d rather save that for an editorial and just briefly discuss the major bullet points. A lot of the times, hindsight makes us a lot angrier than we should probably be, especially on things like studio decisions that affect entire films. It usually comes up with people that have seen a far superior director’s cut and are raging about why it was changed for theatrical release and all that jazz. And you know what? It makes me angry too, I firmly believe that the studio choice to add a useless voice over to Blade Runner was a terrible idea and probably hurt that movie’s chances to succeed, or that the Love Conquers All Version of Brazil is a boil from the darkest corner of Satan’s ass, but when I really look at some of these things I have to sigh and shake my head because I see that in a way the producers were sort of right. Hollywood is a business, sleek awesome looking movies cost money, and the bigger the production, the bigger the risk. Were these people creatively right? No! These were terrible ideas! But at the same time, were they completely wrong for thinking something might not play well and they may end up in financial ruin? Yes. Hell, Terry Gilliam actually won a campaign to keep the studio from releasing that version of Brazil and his cut STILL flopped on arrival and only became profitable thanks to a cult following of fans that adore it. However, this wasn’t just a studio imposing a change on something part way through, or wanting the ending reshot. (Both of which happened anyway.) This was a studio that was micro managing the thing every step of the way, when they had no idea what they actually wanted to do in the first place.
And it shows in the finished product. I may have rambled about the studio interference but it is at the core of a lot of the problems with this movie. The story is basically non-existent being merely a retread of the first film with a new cast and a different location. The characters, save Ripley, are all thin and flat only ever standing out thanks to the disturbingly high caliber of the actors involved (Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Pete Postlethwaite, Charles S Dutton). The alien really has no menace due to being seen far more than before. The opening is insulting to the fans that grew to love the characters from the previous movies that were killed.
This is all a shame because a lot of the actual components that make up the film are good by themselves. For example, I think some of the sound design is very well done. Elliot Goldenthal’s score is appropriately morose fitting the movie’s attempted tone (and overall feeling it leaves you with so I guess mission accomplished there.) Terry Rawlings returned to edit the movie, and probably needed a stiff drink while doing so, and while the overall film is still a turd, it’s a well put together turd in spots. And Fincher’s choices as a director indicate the talent he later proved in far less torturous productions.
But to me most criminal of all things done in this movie, it’s the ruination of Ripley’s character development from the previous movie. Part of the point of Newt’s character was that she and Ripley were both orphans in a way thanks to the xenomorphs, Ripley because it caused her to be lost in the vacuum of space and Newt because they killed her parents. Through the course of the film they both grow a bond with each other resulting Ripley basically adopting her and because of this they were able to together put the nightmare behind them. It was a good piece of character development because Ripley still had her chances to be badass, but also got to have more depth added with essentially being a single mother by movie’s end. Then in this movie, all that is pretty much ruined by killing newt in the opening credits. Yes, it is carried over sort of by having Ripley mourn her death but it’s basically tossed aside afterwards and Newt may as well have not existed. Hell, Michael Biehn hated the idea of killing everyone right away so much he refused to give them rights to use his likeness unless they paid him just as much for that as he had for being in Aliens.
I get it, it’s meant to take Ripley into a new state of mind and take away everything she had left to make it easier for her to commit suicide to get rid of the xenomorph and thematically for the sake of the film’s apocalyptic theme. That doesn’t change the fact that it comes off as a middle finger to the fans of the franchise that liked the end of the last movie. It makes it hardly worth it to talk about RIpley’s character because all they have her do the whole movie is want to die, and by the end so do a lot of the audience.
This movie isn’t scary it’s just depressing. It had some moments of worth but it never comes together and it does so much about ruining things from the last movie that as a fan I just can’t deal with it. The re-edited version is a bit of an improvement thanks to a couple things but the big problems are still there. The movie is a meandering mess and it should come as no surprise that David Fincher has done everything he can to separate himself from it, refusing any involvement in the DVD special edition. And I honestly can’t recommend this outside general curiosity, and next time things are only going to get worse.
Both versions:
1 out of 5
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