Alien 3: What Really Happened?

2. "A Slap In The Face" - The Alien 3 Backlash

And thus, we come to the finished product. Alien 3 released in 1992 to a tepid response from critics, and a sizeable backlash from fans. Its reputation has only grown more divisive as the years have rolled on, with director James Cameron calling the film a "slap in the face" (via The Playlist), while others involved in the franchise have also spoken less than enthusiastically about the threequel.

In truth, for all that Alien 3 has benefitted from a burgeoning eagerness amongst fans to reappraise it in the years since its release, it could never recover from its opening sequence, which elected to not only kill off Hicks, but also the 12-year-old Newt. Yes, the Alien series had gone to dark territory before, but it felt like an especially cruel move - one that robbed Ripley and her allies of the happy ending they sorely deserved.

It mattered not that Alien 3 possessed some frankly brilliant visuals, or even that the film took the franchise in some interesting directions. That opening scene killed most of the enthusiasm from fans and laid bare the inadequacies of the film's production.

Of course, Alien 3's inability to satisfy large swathes of moviegoers, is best typified by Fincher himself. The director all but disowned the film after its release, confessing to The Guardian in 2009 that "no one hated it more" than himself.

More importantly, the effect of having so many people involved in the franchise come out and criticise the film has only encouraged the fascination regarding the lost versions of Alien 3. It would be one thing for just the fans to come out and despise it, but when you have creatives who worked on the series airing those same grievances, that anger is almost legitimised - hence the attention being paid to William Gibson's original script.