Alien 3: Special Edition

I recently rewatched the third film in the Alien series. (Q: Should we just call it a trilogy and disregard the later films? Even when they're okay (Alien Resurrection, AvP) they fall so far short of the first two films that it just makes one vaguely sad.) In particular, I watched the 2003 Special Edition.

Now, I've always been someone who felt that Alien 3 got a bit of a raw deal. Yes, certainly, it falls short of the incredibly high mark set by the first two films. Alien is a brilliant sci-fi horror film, perhaps the best there's been. It still holds up very well today. (Again, I've said it before, but wow did Ridley Scott have a could few years there between Alien and Blade Runner.) Aliens dates from before James Cameron became a world-swallowing ego (or anyway, from before that world-swallowing ego of his destroyed his art) and is a brilliant sci-fi action/suspense film. Each is an almost perfect example of the heights the form can rise to. (That's not to say that you'll necessarily even like either film. I think that these are cases where if you don't care for the genre, that prejudice may be tough for the films to transcend.) Following on the heels of those two home runs, Alien 3 has a tough (impossible?) act to follow.

But David Fincher's film certainly had its moments, and you have to hand it to a film that manages to be significantly darker than two of the darkest sci-fi films ever made. The few quiet moments that Ripley shares with Clemens are rather touching, especially what we know she's been through in the previous two films. The ending is beautifully operatic.

To the problems: in the original version, the prisoners on the planet were rather indistinguishable, and thus we weren't as moved as perhaps we might have been as they one by one (and sometimes in twos and threes!) met their demise. The movie also always felt a little more talky than it probably needed to be. The pacing felt off in the last third, or perhaps even the last half. The 2003 Special Edition includes more moments of development of the various prisoners, and it makes a world of difference in how we relate to those characters. This is a significant improvement. Sadly, the inclusion of so much more character development tends to exacerbate the pacing problems present in the original version, and the film feels much longer than its 145 minutes. (There are quite a few differences, even in plot details, in this version. But I'll keep from being spoilerish, and leave those for the interested to discover.)

In the end, it's still worth seeing, and it certainly is the point at which the series should have ended, but even I must admit it fails to match up to the first two.