It’s often said that the third movie is always the worst, an unwritten rule proven by such disappointing threequels as The Godfather Part III, Spider-Man 3, Little Fockers, The Matrix Revolutions, X-Men: The Last Stand, and countless others. This rule is particularly true for Alien 3, the artistic opposite of its groundbreaking predecessors.
Ridley Scott’s Alien was a taut, suspense-ridden horror masterpiece and James Cameron’s Aliens opened all kinds of doors for female action heroes, both ranking among the greatest movies ever made in their respective genres. Alien 3, on the other hand, was a bitter disappointment.
The Alien threequel was technically David Fincher’s directorial debut, but it doesn’t have any of the distinctively dark characteristics that would go on to define Fincher’s razor-sharp filmmaking. Long before he was given plenty of creative control on projects like Fight Club and Zodiac, Fincher was undermined by 20th Century Fox executives as a director-for-hire. He went on to disown Alien 3, because the studio had meddled in it so much that it no longer resembled his original vision.
The opening scene of Alien 3 killed off every fan-favorite character from Aliens except Ripley and it only got worse from there. The threequel took the action to a prison on a distant planet reserved for criminals so evil that the justice system decided they needed to be removed from Earth entirely. An off-world prison filled with Earth’s most heinous criminals is an interesting concept, but it doesn’t belong in an Alien movie, because it has nothing to do with bloodthirsty killer aliens, which are the basis of the whole franchise. What’s more egregious is that the producers had a much better idea early in development.
The teaser trailers for Alien 3 seemed to set up the franchise’s first foray onto humanity’s home turf. A voiceover declared, “In 1979, we discovered in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.” Based on this teaser, fans were expecting the Alien threequel to feature the xenomorphs’ first trip to Earth. Of course, that storyline never came to fruition, but the existence of this teaser suggests that one of the script drafts did take place on Earth, which would’ve been a much better idea than randomly introducing an off-world prison.
After the first Alien movie revolved around one xenomorph picking off crew members one by one on a spaceship and the second revolved around a hive of dozens that invaded a human colony getting caught in an intense battle with a band of Colonial Marines, Alien 3 could've raised the stakes even further by taking the xenomorphs to Earth (as teased by the trailers) or going the other way and sending humans straight into the lion’s den on the xenomorphs’ homeworld.
Either of these stories would’ve escalated the conflict from the previous movies while retaining their horror-meets-sci-fi-meets-all-out-action spirit. The eventual Alien 3 is more of a generic sci-fi thriller than fans had come to expect from the wholly unique, yet inextricably linked initial two movies. If the threequel had been set on Earth, the production designers could’ve had a field day designing futuristic cities to fit in with the grimy “used future” aesthetic established by Scott in the original 1979 movie. If it had been set on the xenomorphs’ planet, then the production designers could’ve had a field day coming up with new Giger-esque bloodthirsty alien species to populate it.
Rather than placing both Ripley and the aliens in unfamiliar environments, Alien 3 could’ve given one of them an advantage by bringing the action to their home planet. This version of Alien 3 could’ve been a definitive conclusion to the trilogy as opposed to just another Alien movie leaving the door open for more sequels. As much as studio executives might want to keep franchises going on for as long as possible – ideally indefinitely, with no end in sight – stories are much more satisfying when they actually have an ending. As it stands, the Alien franchise is six movies in and it keeps answering questions about the xenomorphs’ origins that nobody asked. Like the similarly beloved Terminator and Die Hard franchises, the Alien series should’ve ended a long time ago.
It’s possible that Alien and Aliens set the bar so high that no version of Alien 3 – even if it had been helmed by Scott or Cameron – would’ve been great enough to satisfy as a grand finale. But instead of just copying what worked about the first two and confronting a cast of human characters with some xenomorphs in a claustrophobic setting, Alien 3 should’ve sunk its teeth deeper into the Alien premise and expanded the worldbuilding by either sending Ripley to the xenomorphs’ homeworld or sending the xenomorphs to Ripley’s homeworld.