Alien 3

THE FIRST SCENE OF DAVID FINCHER’S first feature film is a rape scene. Released in 1992, Alien 3 opens immediately after the events of 1986’s Aliens, with Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in cryosleep aboard the spacecraft Sulaco alongside her fellow survivors from the previous franchise entry. In a close-up, before the geography of the space has been clearly established, a facehugger awakens, extending its long fingerlike tendrils before clamping onto the glass of Ripley’s pod, and—as will eventually become clear—implanting a xenomorph queen into the chest of this sleeping beauty. Fincher’s editing is impressionistic, the film’s opening credits interspersed with quick close-up glimpses of rising smoke, red blood spreading across a white sheet, the confusion of the spacecraft’s ringing alarms, and Ripley’s unconscious face thrashing side to side in sensuous slow motion. Though not a flashback, the jagged, almost subliminal edits have the feel of pieced-together fragments of an incompletely remembered trauma.

Alien 3 went through a notoriously convoluted development process in which screenwriters as diverse as David Twohy, Eric Red, cyberpunk author William Gibson, and Sideways novelist Rex Pickett all took cracks at a script eventually credited to series producers Walter Hill and David Giler, and script doctor Larry Ferguson, which was incomplete at the start of production. During postproduction, the project was taken away from Fincher, who, not yet 30 years old, didn’t have final cut. He eventually disavowed the film, whose evidently excised subplots and abruptly truncated character arcs linger like phantom limbs. But Fincher has always been bold and intentional in his credit sequences, and the opening scene of the theatrical release is also the opening scene of the assembly cut Fincher initially submitted (and which has subsequently been released digitally and on disc in lieu of a definitive “director’s cut,” which he was not given license to make at the time and has been uninterested in making since). The cryopod of Alien 3 is, like the panic room of Panic Room (2002), a feminine sanctum that turns out to be permeable; from the beginning of his career, Fincher proved himself a disconcertingly detached anatomist of private hells.

You see this not just in the opening sequence of Alien 3, but in the clinical—in multiple senses—insert close-ups of hypodermic injections, and especially of the cold steel scalpels and bone saws that are used to perform the autopsy of a preteen girl. (This would be Newt, the orphan Ripley saves at the climax of Aliens, immediately and unceremoniously killed offscreen in Alien 3’s most cynical and alienating gesture.) There’s a kinky through line that starts here and runs through the gruesome forensic investigations of Seven (1995), the machine-tooled psychological torment of The Game (1997), the procedurally restaged murders of Zodiac (2007), the sadistic precision of the rape and torture scenes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Fincher zeroes in on pressure points, triggering his audience’s physical squeamishness and emotional vulnerability to calibrate a feeling of bodily violation.

_{Alien³ (1992)}

Despite the many, many creative compromises the young director was forced into, Alien 3 is, when revisited four decades on, recognizably a Fincher film; even more curiously, the franchise’s central metaphors rhyme with what have proven to be his abiding interests. The reproductive logic of the xenomorphs, which involves accessing and creating orifices in unwilling hosts, hinges on penetration and violence. But at its heart, this is a matter of base biology, not so different from the mating cycles of certain insects, a fact underscored by an aesthetic, across the Alien films, that emphasizes animal tactility above all else. To put it precisely: these are the wettest science fiction films ever made. They’re full of bodily fluids—machine-made surfaces are streaked with snail trails, and even the robots are revealed to be gooey inside. The most famous composition in Alien 3, a close two-shot of a menacing xenomorph and a terrified Ripley that rather recalls Persona (1966), is made queasy and visceral simply by the application of a viscous coating to an animatronic prop head.

Each of the first three Alien films was helmed by a different director in dialogue with different genres, from 1979’s first entry, Ridley Scott’s Old Dark House slasher transposed to outer space, to James Cameron’s postcolonial military actioner sequel, to Fincher’s postapocalyptic spectacle. (While the original film came in the wake of the ’70s horror cycle, and the sequel amid the hardbody ’80s, Alien 3, with its plotline about a malevolent corporation’s attempt to control a world-wrecking superweapon being foiled in a molten climax straight out of the Industrial Revolution, catches the same zeitgeist as Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released the previous year.) But despite these evolutions within the franchise, certain visual aspects remain consistent from film to film—and these, too, reveal surprising consonances between the Alien films and the enduring proclivities of David Fincher, established auteur.

_{Alien³ (1992)}

Scott came to Alien, his second film,after a groundbreaking career in advertising alongside his brother Tony, and used the same elaborate lighting setups to give his early features a sizzle-reel style: silhouetted figures, metallic glints, piercing shafts of illumination catching the moisture from a fog machine or on a hosed-down surface. The advertorial look that the Scott brothers ported into hit movies like Alien and The Hunger (1983) would go on to inform both the blockbuster music videos that sprung up in the ’80s, and the longform work of other music video directors who then made the jump to features. (Take for example, Russell Mulcahy’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” clip and his 1986 Highlander, both of which have that humid, decorative sheen). Fincher, too, got the Alien 3 gig on the strength of iconic music videos employing a “cinematic” vernacular, one made up of flourishes like the blue-steel palette and blown-out windows of his and George Michael’s masterpiece “Freedom ’90,” or the smoke-and-backlighting noir pastiche of Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun.”

It’s striking how many touches in Alien 3—the unmotivated haze shot through with nondiegetic lighting for a three-dimensional atmosphere; the dungeon chains dangling umbilically from unseen ceilings—are familiar from both Scott’s Alienand Fincher’s own short-form work. (There are Alien chains in the vicinity of Steven Tyler in the soundstage performance portions of “Janie’s Got a Gun,” too.) Low-angle shots taking in the vertical scope of the Alien 3 sets recall how Fincher shoots the ballroom, filled with scaffolding, in Paula Abdul’s Bob Fosse homage “Cold Hearted,” and the warehouse of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” which, like Alien 3’s factory, is inspired by the demonic edifices of Metropolis (1927). And the obsolescence of Alien 3’s industrial-dystopian imagery, accented in rusty browns and moldy greens, points forward to the decaying, decadent worlds of Seven and Fight Club (1999), where nothing works the way it is supposed to anymore.

_{Aliens (1986)}

The broken world where Ripley crash-lands is a prison colony turned work camp for men with an extra Y chromosome and a genetic predisposition to violence. Ripley is repeatedly warned not to venture out unaccompanied; when she does, she is nearly gang-raped, overpowered rather than immobilized as she is in the opening credits. Ripley, like her six fellow Nostromo crew members in the original Alien screenplay, was written to be played by an actor of either gender, but with the casting of Weaver she solidified into a final girl, a horror-movie figure untouchable by both men and monsters. Cameron awakened her maternal instincts in Aliens in parallel to those of the xenomorph queen, which that film introduced. (Ripley’s iconic one-liner “Get away from her, you bitch,” to the queen, is spoken in defense of Newt, one Cameron warrior woman to another.) In Alien 3, Ripley’s impregnation is something like an immaculate conception—a metaphor both underscored and garbled by the Christ pose Ripley strikes in her climactic act of self-sacrifice.

But that’s not to say that the chestburster that pops out of her as she dies is a virgin birth: Ripley finally gets a love interest and sexual partner in the form of Charles Dance’s Dr. Clemens. In Alien 3,Ripley is more gendered than ever before, but also less: because of the lice infestation on the prison planet, her head is shaved, resembling Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s chrome dome in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)—or, perhaps, the cropped sideburns and bleached eyebrows of Rooney Mara as the androgynous, bisexual Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as the torments endured by Ripley’s in Alien 3 fall somewhere between the spiritual anguish of the former and the physical brutalization of the latter. In the original Swedish, incidentally, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is titled Men Who Hate Women, which could also be used to title any number of Fincher films from remarkably disparate and distinctive screenwriters, from Fight Club to The Social Network, from his debut franchise threequel Alien 3 up to his forthcoming project The Adventures of Cliff Booth (2026), a spin-off concerning the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) character who is rumored to have murdered his wife. Specifically, by shooting her with a speargun, piercing her torso.