A Beautiful Mess: Alien 3

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2013)

Over the years I've kind of felt like this movie's Attorney, I recently noticed the long stretch of negative reviews from here to youtube treating this movie like an STD or something so I thought I'd come to its rescue because it is Far from a bad movie and it does Far more right than it does wrong. So where do I begin...Alien 3 is what we call a beautiful mess, its beautiful but its a mess.
So let me attempt appeal to the jury of haters by shedding light on this movie's hellish production. The movie was abused at the birth of its concept to the adolescence of its choppy final edit. Fox studios went off on a node cycling and terminating through eight directors, pitching stupid concepts and premises from cow aliens to armies of queen aliens fighting armies of powerloaders. Huge sets were built and torn down when the script changed. Since Fox officials and producers couldn't settle their creative differences on a decent plot they ordered filming commence without a script even being composed, probably one the most insane filmmaking decisions in history. David Fincher (Se7en,Fight Club, Girl With the dragon tattoo remake, the social network) yea that talented guy, this was his film debut as a movie director and Fox had him writing the script while filming. The list of doomings goes on. The insanity of making the film and fighting with Giler at Pinewood must have been traumatic for Fincher because he refuses to talk about the experience and has since isolated himself from having anything to do with the project, one can only speculate what kind of antics Fox kept him from disclosing, in the end it was Fox who treated the film as an article of commerce prior its release. The movie was edited with a few deep abrasions after going millions over budget (the team behind the assembly cut had said how they had found whole entire rooms full of discarded alien 3 footage from script rewrites and filmmaking insanity.)
The controversy of what's good and bad with the film is nauseating and for the most part the opinions are mixed, either you absolutely love this film or infinitely hate the seed that spawned its existence. The film has quite a few continuity errors starting right in the very beginning, pointing out "the magic egg," a bad screen writer put it there, it honestly appears on the sulacco for no reason. The movie also makes a (debatably)brave move to arbitrarily kill Newt, and Hicks off screen and recycle Bishop, the reason why a lot of attached Aliens fans curse this movie.
Alien 3 is dark, beautifully dark, from the twin sunned trashy refinery wasteland that is the prison complex to the golden brown tunnels, low camera angles, and Elliot Goldenthal's beautiful score is all part of Fincher's style that aesthetically and artistically is done so well, its a void of embellished depression. The scene where Ripley discovers the alien queen on the cat scan was a truly amazing scene Sigourney Weaver's acting was superb and so was Charles Dutton and the rest of the cast. Bald Ripley was interesting to see, a kind of a cancer/aids metaphor. The killing of Newt and Hicks (though I'd like to imagine them in this movie alive) tones out the mood of the film and adds some hard hitting drama, I guess people must have forget that the entire chemistry of the first alien is dark as hell why complain about that here. It goes back to the essence of the first film. Aside from the guy in the suit the alien is composed of some rod puppetry optically composited into the film not cgi, a few scenes in particular just look awesome but I do admit one or two of alien effects didn't look so great in the Pete Postlewaite chase scene. I recall this got an Oscar nomination for best visuals, yet everyone ironically complains about them? For some Alien 3 just puts you in a place you really don't want to be in, having the disturbing opportunity to actually see an alien eat a guys chest out or being reminded that rusty prisons in deep space make cancer metaphors suck even more. But for others its cinematically awesome especially if you're an alien fan. For me this one is a love hate relationship, I absolutely love the movie and everything that it is, but I absolutely hate the fact that its production left it unfinished and Newt, Hicks and Bishop not being present but yet I love how their deaths tone out the film, but then I think of the atrocity it spawned after that was alien resurrection. Many people who watch the assembly cut end up liking it better but really the special edition just drags on and is notably spliced with old footage filled with unfinished affects, and a dead bull.
"If we failed to do one thing in this film, and we failed to do many things, it was to take people out of their everyday lives. It's not a scary scare movie but a queasy scare movie and I think people resent that. Actually, my dentist, as he was drilling my teeth, was giving me his thesis on the things wrong with this film and he said, 'When you go out of this movie you haven't gotten away from Aids, you haven't gotten away from race riots, you haven't gotten away from fear of other cultures.' We tried to make a movie about now and I just think in terms of the world box office we may have chosen wrong  You know, if I make 10 shitty movies, I'll deserve the flak and if I go on to make 10 great ones, this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece." David Fincher, The Independent, 1992.
Ironic right. The film just sits on a weird fulcrum of emotions.