As fans of the series know, "Alien 3" was the third installment in what would later round out as quartet of films about Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only crewmember to survive the infestation of the mining vessel Nostromo in Ridley Scott's inaugural 1979 sci-fi thriller "Alien." A key part of this series' fascination lies in its malleability. In contrast to other franchises such as the James Bond films and the "Star Wars" series, the "Alien" films weren't stylistically or thematically uniform. All they had in common were Ripley and the alien, or aliens, and certain images and motifs: eggs, acid, glistening teeth, scuttling tentacles and spindly legs, foggy corridors, desolate planetary landscapes, and battered commercial and military starships that had all the glamour of delivery vans or rusty refinery towers. Beyond that, each film in the series had a distinctive look and pace and rhythm. "Alien" was slow and moody, a true horror film in a nasty seventies vein. The second film in the series, writer-director James Cameron's "Aliens," reconfigured the original's haunted-house-in-space vibe as an adventure film: part war movie, part Western, referencing everything from "Apocalypse Now" and "Zulu" to John Ford and Budd Boetticher. The fourth film, scripted by Joss Whedon and directed by Pierre Jeunet ("Amelie"), is a hybrid of Frankenstein story, pirate adventure and disaster picture, starring a genetically reconstituted Ripley who has alien DNA and, it seems, superpowers.
Fincher's movie was the hardest to pigeonhole, partly because it was a concoction fretted over by many cooks. As conceived by filmmaker Vincent Ward ("The Navigator," "Map of the Human Heart"), who wrote the most buzzed-about early version of the story, it was a quasi-religious parable, set on a wooden planet populated by monks, with Ripley falling out of the sky in tandem with a stowaway xenomorph and battling it, a la Joan of Arc.
Ward's script was not the first attempt to crack the spine of a third "Alien" story, though, nor would it be the last. You can read a rundown of writers who worked on it here; the list includes series coproducers Walter Hill and David Giler. Given its troubled production history, "Alien 3" would seem a small miracle if it were merely watchable. Luckily it's more than that. Weaver gives another richly imagined performance, quite different in tone from the preceding two, and Fincher's direction has passages of eerie, at times nightmarish beauty, and more than a few quasi-experimental touches, including very long dissolves that seem to unify the various characters into a sort of hive-mind.
The end product was set on an all-male prison planet, with inmates and jailers instead of monks, but it retained a bit of Ward's flavor. Everyone was bald thanks to a lice infestation. The sweaty domes, the faintly monastic single-sex casting of the prisoners, the fearful and hateful descriptions of women, and the invocation of religious language and imagery gave the whole thing a Biblical or medieval feel—and as Ripley overcame her depression and near-paralysis over losing her surrogate daughter Newt and maybe-boyfriend Cpl. Hicks in the crash, her possessed, crusading demeanor had echoes of Saint Joan. As Tafoya points out in his video essay, the direction, photography, writing and production design of "Alien 3" reference a tradition of religious art and tales of spiritual torment, even filming the shorn heroine so that she resembles Falconetti, the star of Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc."
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