Originally published at The Substream.
What then, Alien3? It is both the best and the worst of the saga, all rolled into one profoundly uncomfortable ball; it is the signature emergence of one of the most talented directors working in Hollywood, and one of the worst sequels ever made. It is, beyond any other considerations, one of the most chancy and unnerving near-misses in the history of genre cinema. That Alien3 does not, in the final analysis, “work,” is unassailably true. That one cannot apparently strike the bottom of its endless canyons and caverns of thought, theme, and imagery – inviting only further contemplation (and obsession?) – is its lasting hallmark.
I have suggested yesterday that the Alien saga is a saga in no real way; prefer, instead, to describe the cycle as an anthology, because each director is far less interested in the narrative continuity that flows from the film before his, than he is in creating his own particular series of spinning images and tones within the Alien universe. That each film features Sigourney Weaver as Ripley is a tenuous thread, as even Ripley is radically re-imagined by each subsequent creative team; that each film foregrounds (to varying extents) the life cycle of the slobbering xenomorph from beyond space might mark these films as science fiction, but does not let us escape the larger truth. The Alien films are sci-fi, certainly; but each one of the four also doggedly, insistently, flies the flag of a whole other genre. And if each film, one through four, shares the sci-fi DNA, then none of them share their sub-genres with each other. Each Alien film stands half in its own strange world.
This is never more apparent than with Alien3, whose other genre is the hardest to parse. That Alien is the horror movie (actually, the haunted house horror movie) is film school 101; we are all fairly clear, too, on Aliens being the war movie. Alien Resurrection, for any of its gaps, makes a plain case to be the fairy tale of the lot (but more on that tomorrow).
Alien3, though, sticks its ground in a sub-genre of science fiction so microscopic that it’s easy to disregard the infrastructure until you think about the director. David Fincher, a man whose later career has brought us serial killers and Facebook, along with the fin de siècle madness in the worldbuilding of Se7en and the 21st century hacker pop of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, took one look at the story of Alien3 – the fall of the angels of Aliens to the hell of Fury 161 – and declared, “it’s the end of the world as we know it: does anyone feel fine?”
Alien3 is the apocalypse movie, and in its tightly-knit image system – a prison, bald monks, no weapons, and a single, ferociously redesigned Beast – tells us a tale of the end of the world in the Alien frame. It could, I can’t help but note, do all of this without Ripley – and in the film’s lengthy, torturous journey to the screen, it nearly did – but Fincher impressed Weaver enough with his plan for the character (“Bald!”) that the star was willing to ante up for another go-around, this time with producerial control. Of the franchise’s many gambles, the genesis of Alien3 was probably the most insane – although the decision-making on the project also paved the way to the future in a number of significant ways. Fincher was the first of the new breed of post-movie-brat directors, who eschewed film school in favour of directing music videos for MTV (this likens him to Ridley Scott, whose legendary pictorial sense was developed directing something like 15,000 television ads). Alien3 was also one of the first Hollywood tentpole properties whose entire production was arranged by working backwards from a release date. They ultimately missed that release date, it must be said, but at least a portion of the future of the film industry was written here.
Delving into the production of Alien3 is, as with Apocalypse Now, marginally more interesting than the finished film itself. Vincent Ward, for example, can be credited as the only filmmaker who ever had a truly firm creative control over the project, however briefly. By the time Fincher came aboard, he was already working with preexisting components; Ward, on the other hand, designed a batshit lunatic entry in the Alien series, taking place on – as the blu-ray special features describe – a kind of Death Star made of wood, populated by Amish people, and into which Ripley and the Alien figure only intermittently, and which may or may not have concluded with a riff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ward was sacked, but so colossal was the pressure to meet the release date that his handwriting remains scribbled all over the finished film. He got a “story by” credit and, surely, tales of Hollywood madness that he can tell his grandchildren.
Alien3 ’s response to another filmmaker, James Cameron, was far more direct. If we are to view the Alien films as an anthology, then it is at least partially to spare us the pain of the “narrative” transition from the second to third films. When viewed against its immediate predecessor – arguably the most outright entertaining entry in the franchise – Alien3 is a cold smack with a frozen block of concrete. As has been one of the running complaints about the third Alien film since its release – and rightly so – the film’s treatment of the emotional throughline of Aliens is so offputting that it nearly becomes an exercise in cruelty. Within moments of its opening, Alien3 nullifies all of the survivors of the second film, save one, thus rendering void all of Ripley’s heroic efforts. Alien3 insists from the outset that heroism is, itself, futile; and given how direct a reversal this sentiment is against the films previous, we feel like the film is little more than a mean joke on the audience’s feelings. But Alien3 saves its greatest depredations for poor, vulnerable Newt. Before the film has reached its half-hour mark, we will see Newt’s pale, naked corpse vivisected, while Ripley loses her mind with grief over the death of the little girl. We can relate. As a sequel to Aliens, Alien3 sucks.
Yet, there’s something to it, I can’t deny, even though that “something” is nearly impossible to ferret out in the original version of the film that was released in 1992. In the theatrical cut, Alien3 seems overburdened by the presumed “requirements” of the Alien franchise; it’s gory as fuck (and Fincher introduces “chunky blood” to the landscape in a way that is repellent, even today); it’s ungainly and club-footed in its attempts to “up” the ante for the franchise (why, after all these years, is it called Alien3 ? Nothing got “cubed” on this thing); and, after presenting us with an undifferentiated array of bald Brits who populate the penal colony, Alien3 sends them all into a needless bait-and-chase in the foundry tunnels which is nearly impossible to follow – on account, again, of them all being bald white guys we don’t know. In senseless attempts at franchise continuity there are not one, but two cameos for Bishop, first as a mangled-and-discarded animatronic that remains impressive by today’s standards; and later as the inevitable “I’m not an android – I designed the android!” fan-wank. And, pace Dallas, we once again kill off very important characters at the film’s midpoint – in this case, Andrews and Clemens – but here, unlike in Alien, have conclusively failed to set up any subsidiary characters to fill the void. It all feels like lip-service to the conventions of the franchise, serving no valuable purpose in this Alien film.
And then there’s Ripley, who might, by halfway through the film, wish she’d suffered the same galling fate as the other escapees from the Sulaco. Hicks, at least, never woke up; Ripley wakes up and must endure the ignominy of learning she is carrying an Alien Queen! If imagery of birth, sex, death, motherhood, rape and abortion buzz around the subtext of the Alien films like flies, the subtext is leaden here; the consequences, grave; and the resolution, depressing as fuck. There is nothing, I would say, thematically wrong with whatAlien3 is trying to do – but if the film misses one “Must” that I would say is integral to any summer franchise sequel’s chances of success, it’s in how comprehensively Alien3 fails to be anything like entertaining.
Dark and dour then: so be it. We can’t do anything to thwart Alien3 ’s box office fate at this point, twenty years (nearly to the day!) later; we can, however, dig deeper into the film, and extract the riches that, surprisingly, remain there. The first step is always to disregard the theatrical cut in favour of the “extended edition,” which was first trotted out on the 2003 DVD set (and further enhanced on the blu-ray with a complete sound mix and even some re-recorded lines). 45 minutes longer, the extended edition is a substantially different picture, thinning out the flaws described above and beefing up Alien3 ’s many strengths. The brooding, melancholic mood is forcibly detailed; Fincher’s hand dishes out visuals that are precise, pictorial, and haunting; and the interplay of all those faceless Brits reassembles itself as a garden of more complete, rewarding performances. Charles Dance remains a favourite as Clemens, but the Eighth Doctor – Paul McGann – gives what turns out to be a fascinating performance as the crazed Golic, a turn which barely exists in the theatrical film. Even the Alien seems more like a character in the extended cut of the film; it has a revulsion/fascination relationship with Ripley that sends chills down the spine, and if it – like everyone else – is reduced to meaningless comic bookery in the action climax, then one cannot argue with Fincher’s fetishistic presentation of H.R. Giger’s Ferrari-like, tailpipe-free rethink of his original creature design. The other Alien films were content to cut around the monster; Fincher dotes on it like a schoolboy fixated on a Raquel Welch poster.
The extended edition is not a director’s cut – Fincher never had the chance to shoot a director’s cut, so there can never be one – and as a film, it ultimately belly-ups in largely the same way the theatrical film did. On top of that, the film is still just so goddamned depressing. But I’ll take depressing and substantial over depressing and thin any day. The extended cut of Alien3 is handsomely made and resolutely badass; if it’s still a failure, it’s a far more absorbing and insightful failure than most successes. One cannot even claim that Alien3 does not play fair: it might slaughter the survivors of Aliens, but then, it slaughters everyone else too, as its apocalypse lays waste to the world. Only cruel, brilliant Morse survives – Fincher’s Ideal Man – and then disappears into the two hundred year black hole of static and memory that connects Alien3 to its wonky, reverse-thrusting follow-up, Alien Resurrection. Ripley’s final transmission from the original film is echoed as the universe fades to black, and we’re out.
“We all sat there and decided to make a china cup, a beautiful, delicate china cup. You can’t tell me we should have made a beer mug,” Fincher said in Premiere Magazine in 1992, shortly before Alien3 ’s release. Premiere was in a golden age back then, and its coverage of Fincher, and Alien3, remains a personal fave among their years of writing about difficult directors tackling difficult projects. Fincher was responding to Fox’s ongoing pressure to make the movie more generic, more like Aliens, less like what it was. His words are, in one line, the most complete précis for the entire torturous life of Alien3 , from inception to finished film. Alien3 is a project that veritably reeks – of missed chances, significant ambition, smothering groupthink, and lingering, tantalizing memory.
Don’t forget to witness the resurrection. Tomorrow I have a look at Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s final entry (for one more day) in the Alien franchise.
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