<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Alien³
Release Date	May 22, 1992
Genre	Horror Scifi
Director	David Fincher
Screenwriter	Vincent Ward (story) David Giler Walter Hill Larry Ferguson
Stars	Sigourney Weaver Charles S. Dutton Charles Dance Paul McGann Brian Glover Ralph Brown Danny Webb Christopher John Fields Holt McCallany Lance Henriksen
Studio	20th Century Fox Brandywine Productions Ltd.

Alien3, the third of four movies featuring Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley, was directed by David Fincher and released in 1992.

Alien3 picks up Ripley's story right after the events of Aliens. Still in hypersleep after their battle with aliens on the moon LV-426, Ripley and two other survivors—the young girl Newt and Marine Corporal Dwayne Hicks—crashland on a planet, Fiorina (Fury) 161. Fury's only inhabitants are the vicious male convicts of a maximum-security prison, now nominally freed but living as monks in their old cells. Ripley is rescued, while Newt and Hicks are declared dead. Shortly thereafter, an alien egg hatches, managing to impregnate the prison's dog with one of its embryos and unleashing a full-grown alien on the colony.

Alien3 was Fincher's first feature film and its script is considered by many fans to be substantially weaker than its predecessors. Flying in the face of widespread fan expectations that a third Alien movie would take the creatures to Earth, thereby increasing the stakes for Ripley and all of humanity, the film was set instead on a remote and inescapable outpost whose human inhabitants are barely more likable than the thing stalking them. Another critical storytelling mistake lay in the reducing the threat to Ripley and the others, who face a single creature rather than the hundreds used in the second picture. The danger posed by the treacherous Weyland-Yutani Company is similarly held at a distance, and with nobody but prisoner/zealots to protect, Ripley's motivations become less engaging: in earlier movies, she tries to save those she loves, while in Alien3 she is simply out to survive. One element of this narrative set-up does work very effectively, however: as a prison, Fury entirely lacks weapons, guns that would enable Ripley to save herself and the others.

Added to the dangers posed by the prisoners and the alien is the revelation that an alien embryo is also gestating inside Ripley. The embryo is an egg-layer, one that would presumably be able to infect the prisoners. As a result, Ripley chooses to die in the movie's final scenes rather than give birth (as it were) to a new horror. Weaver's performance as Ripley is solid, and at times—particularly during a difficult autopsy scene—she almost manages to save the movie, which otherwise comes off as a pale imitation of the first film, a significant step back dramatically.

Alien3 features Lance Henriksen in a dual role, as the android Bishop and later as a human spokesman for the Company—the person the android was originally modeled on.