25th Anniversary: Alien 3 - the theatrical cut vs. the assembly cut
Monday, May 22, 2017 at 3:15PM Tim here. With Alien: Covenant opening to #1 over the weekend, it's fortuitous timing that today marks the 25th anniversary of Alien3. The 1992 sci-fi thriller is probably best-known today for two reasons: introducing music video director David Fincher to the world of theatrical features, and knocking all the shine off of the Alien franchise for the first time (and alas! not the last).
Underperforming at the box office, and outright flopping with critics, Alien³ has never since recovered its reputation; if time has been kind to it, it's only because at least we can now say, "well, at least it's not as bad as Alien: Resurrection"...
I'm not here to tell you that's an unfair fate for the movie. It might well be less flagrantly awful than Resurrection (then again, it's also less colorful), but compared to the peaks of Alien and Aliens, it's easy to be disappointed by just about everything Alien³ does. And whatever interest might accrue to the film for being the debut of a future beloved director is squelched by Fincher's vocal disappointment with the project and his consistent attempts to distance himself from the film and the franchise ever since.
All that being said, I've actually come here to tell you that the movie is better than you might remember, or than you've probably heard. It just depends on which version of the movie we're talking about. Alien³ was released to theaters in 1992 in a 114-minute version, completed well after Fincher abandoned the project. It's a smudge of a movie, dropping Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley into an all-male prison planet that it barely defines, dropping a killer alien monster in a few minutes later, and stumbling its way into a reasonably well-choreographed chase scene after a whole bunch of somewhat pointless individual scenes.
The interesting part comes eleven years later. In preparing a big fancy box set of what it insisted in calling the "Alien Quadrilogy," 20th Century Fox invited the four directors of the four Alien films to prepare director's cuts of the films (or simply to re-issue an existing director's cut, for James Cameron's Aliens). Fincher refused to have any part of it, leaving the studio to hunt elsewhere for an alternate version of the movie. They found it in the form of Fincher's workprint, the complete (but unpolished) edit of the movie that the director presented to the studio as his last step before bailing out. A coat of color-correction later, as well as tightening the sound mix and finishing up some visual effects, and Fox was able to release the workprint on DVD in 2003 as an "assembly cut."
Lo and behold, this much longer version (37 minutes over the theatrical cut) largely manages to save the movie; even more so if we're talking about the 2010 Blu-ray version, which has the cast come back to overdub some inaudible dialogue. It's not that the assembly cut of Alien³ is somehow a fundamentally different movie than the theatrical cut. It's the same movie done much, much better.
The biggest difference between the two versions is that the longer cut simply gives the movie breathing room: one of the big complaints (and rightfully so) when Alien³ first came out was that the planet where Ripley met the prisoners and encountered the alien felt underdeveloped and small, barely more than a refinery with some hallways surrounding it. Most of what is best about the assembly cut is directly related to slowing down the pace and letting us meet the cast and location more thoroughly - in particular, we get so much more Charles Dutton, and it's fantastic.
It's more methodical, with a much more methodical rhythm, one that allows us to make sense of the religious themes spiraling throughout the movie. This was, initially, a vestige of an earlier concept where the film would take place on a monastery planet, and in the theatrical Alien³, it felt inexpertly tacked-on; the assembly cut, without quite erasing the reality that we're watching different screenplay drafts battle for prominence, makes a great deal more sense of the material.
It also lets the film ease more naturally into being a thriller. One of the chief annoyances of the shorter cut is that it charges through the middle part of the film, after the alien is born but before the humans start fighting back, without any sense building menace. It's just one thing and then the next thing, for 40 minutes. The slower cut, with slightly more meaningful looks and pauses and cutaways, lets a sense of foreboding creep in that simply wasn't there before. It's got nothing on the slow crawl through dark spaceships of the first hour of the 1979 Alien, but it at least manages to do right by that forebear.
Not everything about the assembly cut is better than the theatrical cut, sadly. The worst change, easily, is that the alien now bursts out of an ox (a species not even present in the theatrical cut, which speaks to how much less world-building went on there), instead of a dog. Admittedly, the dog lovers in the audience might take exception to my characterization of this moment. Still, the emotional impact of seeing something as familiar and lovable as a pet dog treated so violently simply doesn't compare to the relative indifference of seeing an ox burst open. It's much more in keeping with the subsequent nihilism and cruelty of Fincher's career, too.
The assembly cut is also completely disinterested in fixing the most glaring problem of Alien³, its shabby treatment of the end of Aliens. It remains sour-tasting and nasty how thrilled the third movie was to curb-stomp the familial warmth at the end of the second movie, and Alien³'s autopsy scene of the second movie's sweet little girl remains its most distasteful, unnecessary scene.
All that being said, the assembly cut is vastly preferable to the theatrical cut something like 95% of the time. It's enough to push it from being "the best of the bad Alien movies" to "the worst of the good Alien movies." And as good as good Aliens are, that's still a pretty decent thing to be. So on this, the film's 25th birthday, I'd urge you to check the assembly cut out, if you never have: it makes the film a perfectly worthy entry in a franchise that's still showing life, all these years later.
Reader Comments (9)
The 2003 special edition of Alien 3 is not Fincher's pre-release work print. It's an actual assembly found. Containing footage not seen in the test screened pre-release work print. Which was bootlegged on VHS. Shockingly none of the trims from that version made it to home video as deleted material.
This is all really fascinating. I've only ever seen the theatrical cut, and it's good to know there's a better version. I'm not going to rush to it, but I may give it a go at some point.
I own this and have never watch it - will have to check it out
You summed Alien 3 up perfectly,this cut indeed let's it breathe.
For the life of me, I never understood why the producers of this film didn't go the obvious route with Newt and just set the third installment a few years after Aliens when she's a teenager or something. That way, you have a new, ready-to-go protagonist able to pick up when Sigourney Weaver inevitably walked away from the series. Why did they feel they "had to" immediately continue from the end of Aliens?
I dunno. It just makes way more, at the VERY LEAST, business-sense than jerry-rigging some absurd "resurrection" plot to bring back Ripley.
Robert Hammer your idea is a contemporary one. Always going for the youth audience instead of the adults who made this franchise a thing. Why forsake the star of the series who was a previous Oscar nominee for the last movie for some tart an industry sleaze is banging?
"some tart an industry sleaze is banging"
Um, okay. I guess that's... one way of putting it. Pretty sure it was Weaver who wanted to "forsake" the series, and I think we'd all have preferred it if she stayed dead at the end of the third one instead of doing Resurrection, but whatever. You do you.
Excellent post. I've always wanted to see the Assembly Cut, and your post offers some great insight. Everyone moans about how terrible Alien3 is, but it still upholds a certain level of terror and dread that the newer releases significantly lacked. Alien3 still gave me chills, but the interference from Fox remains very obvious in the final theatrical cut.
SPOILERS!:
The theatrical release is better. (1) It's shorter and doesn't include a lot of the meandering plot lines, making it a faster paced movie and less of a slog to get through. (2) The dog alien idea is better than the ox. (3) Much of the religious subtext is excluded, particularly the suggestion that Ripley's final sacrifice is akin to Jesus on the cross. The Christian subtext of the assembly cut makes me cringe. (4) We see Ripley grab the chest-burster and hold it as she falls into the lava. I can't stand the Jesus Christ pose leap of faith jump in the assembly cut.