Alien³ (1992)

[Spiegal]

J-Sun that's a very good point actually, I find it easy to see how the killing off of two of the main characters from the previous film who people had grown attached to but therein lies the ultimate justification for her noble sacrifice. She literally has nothing left to lose, nothing to stand between her and eradicating the alien once and for all.

The films follow a pattern of life, the birth of the trilogy, alien and characters. The motherhood and bearing of a child (for the alien and Ripley) and then the closure of death and attonement with the loss of not only you but those around you.

It was a shame that the production was marred by terrible editing but Fincher did an incredible job with it and I wish he knew.

It is a shame that some of the characters aren't quite as fleshed out as the others in the series, but a surprising amount of the characters do have some pretty varied and interesting stories behind them. Clemens (Charles Dance) is a great example, having been a medical student with a great career then blowing it all by accidentally killing people through negligence while he was addicted to morphine. Being sent to the prison as an inmate then staying on as a doctor when he had served his time.

Again with Gollick the madman who releases the Alien, you get these fleeting glimpses of their backgrounds that are never truly revealed, almost as if they have been in so long that their outside lives never really happened at all. Even Aaron and Morse have some pretty great character to them which is made even more prominent in the Assembly Cut.

There are other examples too but I can't emphasise it enough; watch the cleaned up Assembly Cut before condemning this beautiful, gritty and moving piece of sci-fi because I think it would give closure to a lot of misconceptions people have about the film.

Thanks for the replies!

 

[vanwolf]

william gibson's alien 3 script is available online. not enough posts to do a link to it yet

 

[vanwolf]

though i have now

HorrorLair - Alien 3 Script by William Gibson

 

[JoanDrake]

Well it would have been better than Alien3 was, but any story that doesn't go to earth or the Aliens homeworld is a disapointment to me.

Did the Alien have a homeworld? I thought a major plot point was that it was an engineered form of life, made up as a bioweapon by the Faceless Corporation that had put Ash on the ship. The crew were just guinea pigs, their mining mission a sham.

 

[Spiegal]

I prefer the mystique of not knowing where the aliens came from or who created them.

I hate that in Prometheus they ruined the whole mystery of the space jockey. It was portrayed as this unknown alien race, from who knows where leaving its husk on an empty, cold world. It was coolest thing I had seen in sci-fi when I first watched that film. A bizarre alien craft, that had crashed on a distant planet alone for thousands upon thousands of years in the pitch black nothingness. Until one day a crew breaks those eons of silence and stillness to see this creature unlike anything we have ever seen, with no clue what to expect and yet the horror is still to come.

It was so well presented as a creature from another world, not knowing how it acted or what it looked like alive when it looked so truly alien when it was dead.

A truly brilliant sci-fi horror setup until 30 years later Ridley ******* Scott decides to shatter this incredible bit of the story.

I'm sure at his pitch he said something along these lines "Derrrrp let's play out the tired ancient alien bollocks and make it look just like a human! After all, they were the ones who made us!" Contrived, forced, uninspired ******** I say.

That's some imagination you've got there, Ridley. Well done.

BACK ON TOPIC now! I again never want to see the Alien home world, in fact I prefer thinking it may have had a genesis world but not technically a home world. I like the idea that they are parasites that can spread so far that their homeworld may be long dead by now, if it ever existed at all.