The Movie that Hates it’s Audience by Gaz Mallon

Let’s be clear, I love Alien 3 Assembly Cut – I really do. Yes, it’s not a good as Alien or Aliens in any objective way but I find the commitment to utter bleakness very seductive. I like it because no Hollywood executive would dare make a movie this ruthless as the third film in a franchise. Part of that has to do with the fact that there isn’t any more adult/horror orientated franchises that move the culture in the way the Alien franchise did, but another part is due to the clear homogenisation of storytelling in Hollywood built from the bones of the MCU – the idea that ten B grade movies over 10 years is better than two masterpieces and a flop over 13 years.

And Alien 3 absolutely was a flop, but not necessarily because it didn’t make it’s budget back (it made profit). It was a flop because it’s the lackluster result of a hyped marketing machine. As director David Fincher has said, the studio was selling a release date, not a movie. The theatrical result is indeed a choppy experience with an under-cooked middle act, followed by truncated finale that feels muddled and less than the sum of its parts, but once you peer past the obvious flaws, you can’t help but feel there is real potential somewhere hidden off screen.

Of course, no studio pays fifty million dollars for potential. Thankfully the Assembly Cut has somewhat restored some of that potential - enough of it for me to finally say ‘Yes! I knew it!’ Finally we have some complexity added to the middle act. Now we can more appreciate the performance of Paul McGann, whose character gets an opportunity to release the dreaded creature of the title after its initial capture, a fun and infuriating plot twist that adds a bit of narrative color to a theatrical cut that desperately needed it.

Contempt for audience expectations is something I support in small doses. It’s what makes filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Gaspar Noe, Lars von Trier, and Lynn Ramsay stand out. There’s no way Kubrick thinks you’ll actually enjoy Clockwork Orange as a pleasurable experience in the moment. There’s no chance Von Trier thinks you’ll just love Antichrist’s third act, but having some slight amount of contempt for what the audience expects to see is how they keep creating challenging viewing experiences.

For all the flaws of Alien 3: Assembly Cut, one of the great parts is its willingness to not give you what you want, and instead give you something challenging. After Aliens (1986), you simply don’t expect both husband and daughter figure to Ripley, Hicks and Newt, to be killed during the opening credits. I mean, after Aliens and the love expressed for those 2 characters, killing them off without even a decent explanation is utterly ridiculous. To do this to an expectant audience in 1992 is box office suicide – the film hasn’t even started! By the first half an hour, Ripley is watching disgraced Dr. Clemens (Charles Dance) do an autopsy on Newt to the horror of all of us, cutting her open with a gluttony of sound effects to intensify the experience. It’s both a terrible decision and also one that allows the most interesting part of the movie to take place: the isolation of Ellen Ripley.

Our favourite heroine is rendered alone by a planet populated only by male prisoners, murders and rapists, whilst her greatest foe, the Alien queen, rests snugly in her chest waiting for its moment. The film’s elements are completely at odds with the needs of our leading woman. Alien 3’s key narrative components (all male cast, forced pregnancy, shaved heads) are an attempt to turn cinema’s strongest female character into a typical weak gender role. It’s will is to turn Ripley’s story into a gender nightmare, the whole plot becoming one of an expectant mother trapped in hell itself.

What protected her in Aliens was weaponry. Rarely are guns so intimately connected to the iconography of a woman than they were in Aliens. You could show a stranger the outline of a pulse rifle and chances are they would recognise it as part of the DNA of that movie. The pulse rifle, the flamethrower are symbols of Ripley’s protective motherly instinct – without them, she remains firmly in the world of Alien (1979), with helpless dread as the primary emotion. Before the opening credits of Alien 3, she’s still a subversion of gender stereotypes, a woman able to utilise modern destructive tech to clear her path. But by the end of the opening credits of Alien 3, it’s becomes clear – there are no guns. She’s robbed of something that kept her surrogate family safe.

After the excessive bullet play of Aliens, the reveal that there’s no guns of any kind is something that genuinely depresses audiences of this movie– the literal symbology of the previous movie, the path-clearing instruments of the prior sci-fi classic, aren’t limited, they’re completely removed. And with it goes our ability to enjoy Alien 3 in the same way as it’s predecessor, which is a huge part of why Alien 3 is such a hard movie for people to warm to. It’s only interested in cooling you down. It’s not interested in pleasing you the way James Cameron did. And it’s asking you to deal with all that before the opening credits finish.

There’s a lot to be said about David Fincher’s bravery in committing wholesale to the defeatist and despairing tone – the film isn’t interested in supplying you hope. Even worse – the major hope of the characters involved, religion, is exclusively used as a symptom of foolery. Only an idiot would think God, if she exists, would care about the prisoners of Fiorina 161. With hope in short supply, even the briefest moment of human pleasure for Ripley, sleeping with facility doctor Clemens, is swiftly robbed from her when the Alien kills him in the infirmary, leaving her alone to suffer more loss, but not before leaving us with the films most iconic frame:

If the symbol of Aliens is the pulse rifle, then the symbol of Alien 3 must be Ripley’s bald head. Which tells you what you need to know about Alien 3’s experience – foregoing the military fetish for the basic human body. Not even the hair on you head to keep you warm at night.

And yet the real trick is, for all of Alien 3’s despair, the film stops short of nihilism. While Fincher’s early work can play with nihilism, its rare he ever gives into it completely. Death is the answer in Alien 3 but Ripley decides so on her own terms even when survival is a possibility, albeit with consequences. The theme of motherhood returns as she gives birth to life that can only destroy other life. The choice is still hers.

Film Critic Gaz Mallon co-hosts the Real Movies Fake History podcast and writes extensively on new movies here.

For more cinematic ramblings, you can also follow Gaz on Letterboxd