Torn apart on first release, Alien 3 has stood the test of time, now standing as the most underrated and misunderstood installment of the beleaguered franchise.
Even if production went smoothly, odds were not on Alien 3’s side. Following Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, two genre-defining classics, was always going to be a monumental task where the most likely scenario was diminishing returns.
Though a young David Fincher was eventually attached, numerous issues – including rewrites, studio meddling, and total lack of focus – burned through the sci-fi movie’s chances like acidic blood, leaving all sorts of burn marks.
In 1992, Alien 3 burst into cinemas to a resounding sense of disappointment that’s permeated since (its current Rotten Tomatoes score stands at just 45%, the lowest of the canon Alien movies).
The picture eschews the mayhem of Aliens for the sullen steel walls of the weaponless prison planet Fiorina 161, where Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley crash lands years after going into cryo-sleep with Newt and Riggs. They died in transit, and Bishop was heavily damaged during an on-board fire.
Alien’s grubbiness persists, but without the same level of atmosphere that Scott harnessed on the Nostromo. Fiorina 161’s all-male population are a damn sight less likeable than Dallas, Kane, Parker, Brett, and Lambert – although, Ash would be right at home, honestly.
But somewhere amid this scrapheap of half-baked ideas and frustration, Alien 3 ended up becoming something that’s beyond the sum of its parts. Ripley confronts the end of her story exactly where she’s been since the chestburster scene with John Hurt: locked in a cage with nowhere to hide and only her instincts to survive.
She finds allies, particularly in disgraced chief medical officer Clemens and Leonard, the leader of the prisoners. With their help, she’s able to convince everyone in the remote hellhole to make a stand against the Xenomorph that’s picking them off.
Ripley managed to avoid death once with limited tools and resources, and she’ll do it again, because that’s what needs to happen. Finality hangs over Alien 3 like the Reaper’s scythe, swinging closer and closer through the film.
Then, the plot twist: the Xenomorph corners Ripley, and lets her live. Let it not be forgotten that one of the most decried Alien films gave us the single most memorable shot in the whole Alien timeline.
The creature crawling right up to Weaver is spectacular filmmaking, oozing tension and pathos from every pore. This is the thing the entire franchise pivoted on up to this point – a species that breeds through invading your body, and the woman forced to shoulder and protect others from that trauma.
(I’m of the belief everything that makes Alien 3 decent comes from Fincher and Weaver. They should be prouder of this film, but I digress.)
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Ripley holds the newborn alien from the dead facehugger found on her escape pod, and she’s hosting a queen, since they incinerated the other on LV-426 in Aliens. Weyland-Yutani continue to puppeteer her fate (and she probably still hasn’t been paid for those hours on the Nostromo.)
It’s all so grimly poetic. Twice Ripley has avoided impregnation by these things, but they get her in the end, and she’s wound up surrounded on all sides by violent men. Alien 3 sees the depraved truth of Alien – the sexual violence and nihilistic understanding that we’re just capitalistic resource to corporations – and refuses to shy away.
Aliens, pure thrills though it is, sold us a lie. You don’t wriggle away from these systems. There’s no nuking them from orbit. They will usually catch up to you, and when they do, you have to fight using whatever you have to hand.
In a small sliver of luck – if you can call it that — Ripley finds some backing in Fiorina’s population. People who’ve been completely swept aside by society because of their crimes. The prisoners, among them genuine screen legends Paul McGann and Pete Postlethwaite, present a muddled metaphor.
On one hand, you have true outcasts and pariahs, those who nobody wants to help, proving they’re capable of doing something meaningful. On the other, they’re rapists and mass-murderers, and sympathizing with them is a struggle.
But they work as an extension of the brutalist ideals. This is where the story ends, somewhere forgotten and meaningless. In space, no one can hear you scream; on Fiorina, they just pretend not to. Leonard makes his case to God by sacrificing himself to kill the Xenomorph.
One down, one to go. Weyland-Yutani sends a human representative, Bishop II, to plead with Ripley. Their negotiations are short, as Ripley finally destroys Weyland’s chances of controlling her.
It’s a breathtaking sequence, bleak and miserable and devoid of comfort. That’s Alien, though. That’s what this franchise is. Ugly, disquieting, mesmerizing in its understanding of the forces that bind us and keep us tied up, unable to change course.
Death is the one true escape, and even if Alien 3 was resoundingly great, I’m not sure if we’d be able to stomach that.
Alien: Romulus continues the saga in theaters August 16. For more, check out our look at how Alien’s ending was changed or learn about the Romulus age rating.
