Given the nature of our indigenous population, I would suggest clothes

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2013)

Structured as a series of nightmares, the "Alien" franchise sees actress Sigourney Weaver playing Ellen Ripley, a female astronaut who is repeatedly menaced by phallic and vaginal alien creatures. Throughout the series, Ripley bounces from hell to worse, the poor girl persecuted, tormented and subjected to ridiculously extreme ordeals. By the franchise's fourth instalment, Ripley can't even die peacefully; her body is cloned and resurrected for the purpose of torturous marriages with the very alien monsters she seems unable to escape.
Bleak, grimy and hopeless, David Fincher's "Alien 3" is one of the more interesting films in the "Alien" franchise. The film was originally to be based on a script by science fiction author William Gibson, but that screenplay was jettisoned. Another screenplay was written by Vincent Ward, but this was also discarded. Ward's script, oft voted one of the greatest unfilmed scifi screenplays of all time, saw Ripley marooned on wooden Monastery Planet populated by Luddite monks. The monks view Ripley as a sexual temptation sent by God and the alien she brings with her as a manifestation of God's wrath. This script was loosely influenced by the first Dark Horse graphic novels, published in the 1980s, set in the Alien universe ("Alien: Book One"). Those comics began to introduce religious elements into the series, the alien monsters worshipped by cults, viewed as Gods by some, satanic or apocalyptic creatures by others. Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" tries to recapture some of these elements, its heroine a Christian girl who's looking for God but who finds only death, nightmarish monsters and a spiritually vile and/or vacant universe. This unrelenting pessimism – a kind of messed up, corporeal religion in which man's abandoned by God and repeatedly raped by monsters – is the franchise's best quality.
Fincher's "Alien 3" aims for a similar nihilism. It uses elements from Ward's script, but changes the Luddite monastery into a penal colony populated by rapists and murderers who have "found God". Ripley teams up with this band of convicts to defeat her own private little monster, an alien creature which follows her from LV-426, the planet seen in the previous 2 "Alien" films.
It's a good idea, but almost nothing works in Fincher's film. The idea of combining Ward's monks with criminals offers nothing. Better to pick one idea and stick with it. The film's thriller set pieces, horror moments and special effects are also atrocious, as is the film's dialogue, which reeks of bad screen writing. Sigourney Weaver – iconic with her bald, shaven head – sells her lines, but the rest of Fincher's cast play their roles like cartoonish caricatures. Elsewhere Fincher overuses low angle shots, his camera work is poor, the film's big "selflessness" theme is unexplored, most scenes flow awkwardly, the film's climax feels like a poor imitation of "Terminator 2's" climax (Fincher made alterations when he learnt that Cameron's film was also ending with a sacrifice in a cauldron of lava), the shape and size of the film's alien creature is inconsistent throughout, and much of the film spends its time watching characters figure out things the audience already knows.
Still, there are some good things in "Alien 3". The film bravely kills off the cast of "Alien 2" (fans hate this), features an appropriately sickening autopsy on a little girl (the sequence was heavily cut), Fincher's production designers create perhaps the best sets and architectural designs of the franchise, Fincher's cinematography is uniformly excellent and the film ends with a strong scene, Ripley sacrificially falling into a pool of fire as an Alien bursts out of her chest. This sequence was omitted from the "Alien 3: Assembly Cut", as Fincher never liked it and felt the idea was forced upon him by producers.
As is well known, "Alien 3" saw Fincher facing huge pre-production and on-set difficulties. He was hounded by producers, the film's script was incomplete when shooting began, was being re-written daily, and many sequences in the script were reverse engineered to accommodate grand sets which had already been constructed. Fincher would later disown the film. The problems he encountered here would lead to him become a very controlling, methodical director.
7/10 – See "Pandorum" for a slightly better take on the same material. Worth two viewings.