The Downward Trend In Quality In The Alien Movies Began With Alien 3

How do you follow a one-two punch like Alien and Aliens? Well, really, you should just leave a good thing alone, especially if you haven't got a great idea for a third movie burning a hole in your pocket. But 20th Century Fox was determined to make more entries in the franchise after the big box office bucks generated by Aliens. From their determination to wring another Ellen Ripley adventure out of the franchise sprung Alien 3, which ended up being the feature-length directorial debut for one David Fincher. Yes, that David Fincher, the guy responsible for The Social Network, one of my favorite movies of all-time.


In Alien 3, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is once again awakened out of cryo-sleep in an unknown location, though this time her pods crash landed on a prison planet. The pods carrying her human pals Hicks and Newt were not able to help them survive the landing (android Bishop has also met a grisly fate), meaning she's the only cast member to carry over from the last movie. She's found herself trapped on a planet where a number of incarcerated men, all of whom have committed violent crimes worthy of lengthy prison sentences, have formed a deep bond with religion in order to make themselves better.

Unbeknownst to both Ellen Ripley and the prisoners, a Xenomorph has snuck inside the compound and has started wrecking the sort of violent havoc only these alien buggers could pull off. As the body count rises, Ripley has to figure out a way to kill these creatures with the help of the numerous prisoners. This entire story is told in an extremely dark fashion both in the tone of the plot itself and in the way its filmed, there's a lot of shadows, dimly lit rooms and even just outright darkness populating the various scenes of Alien 3. It's a grim affair, much more so than even the last two Alien films that had plenty of moments of gruesomeness to their names.

That dark tone and particularly the large-scale commitment to that specific tone is an interesting choice for the film that's probably it's best asset since it's definitely making strides to differentiate itself from its predecessors. The camerawork here is similar a marked departure from past Alien movies, with some of it feeling mildly evocative of camerawork seen in future David Fincher movies, though that's basically it in terms of Alien 3 having any traits that channel Fincher's auteur sensibilities. Everything else here feels more serviceable than anything else and it all feels like it could have come from any number of directors-for-hire.

The cast of prisoners is a notable foible that falls prey to the woes of genericness. Coming off of the last two Alien movies, where even the most one-note members of their large casts of characters came off as recognizable human beings, the myriad of prisoners we see here all feel derivative of one another, there's very little separating them even in terms of basic personalities. Because of that, alien chase scenes that should be intense feel lackluster since the Xenomorphs are just chasing a bunch of disposable individuals who all blend together (the overly obvious CGI in some shots further hurt certain attempts at intensity).

Ellen Ripley also suffers as a character here, getting shunted to the background for too much of the running time and there's not enough for her to do either as a character or even just as an action hero. Sigourney Weaver gets woefully underutilized and that certainly helps Alien 3 feel like both a massive step down in quality from its predecessors and a middling movie in its own right. Even if it was slightly better than I'd heard (and it is fun to see a younger Charles Dance in a key supporting role, that guys always fun to see movies!), Alien 3 was the definitive start of a downward turn in quality for the esteemed franchise.