Let's get a couple of things straight before we go on. Alien is an era and genre-defining film. There is a good argument it is Scott's most complete work. The foundation stone upon which the whole dank, brooding franchise is built, and still more daring, more livid, graven and seventies (a taut character piece in the shell of a monster movie) than the films that followed. A B-movie in its DNA was mutated into a spare and vicious encounter between life forms that played upon themes of bodily invasion and survival. Darwin in deep space, somewhere near the Outer Core. Here too, for this is Scott's way, was the suggestion of an ancient and vaulted galaxy far beyond the ken of man. Long before the overcooked revelations of Prometheus, the Derelict; the mordant, calcified Space Jockey; indeed the unforgettable, ever-suggestive sum of H.R. Giger's disturbing, silver-green biomechanics — that lurid aesthetic of ribcaged corridors and doorways like gigantic vulva — posited a biology and mythology intertwined and unknowable. More to the point, we didn't want to know — the provenance of such things was left to our dreams.
The film that followed is also superlative. And carried a heavier burden, coming second. Aliens is a defining sequel, perhaps Cameron's finest hour. In the grip of its storytelling, the surge of tension, the outbursts of action, without ever letting an equal dedication to character slacken (one might say, character, action and plot are too entangled to separate), Cameron's approach takes us over the clanking, chain-pulled ascent into the unstoppable plummets of a rollercoaster ride. It is a giddy, thrilling sequel, less timeless than the original, but told with ironclad conviction (see below for a documentary I happened to have made on the subject - Aliens Expanded). There is a engaging richness to that telling, cool moments, groovy lines, gags, Paul Reiser's yuppie sinner in a shiny suit and that navy-blue bodywarmer, a brush of irony at its own exuberant attempts to outdo what Cameron took to terming the "prequel." They are two marvellous films, but not quite cut from the same cloth. But I'm not interested into getting into the whole debate about Alien and Aliens, Scott Vs. Cameron, it was came afterwards that matters here.
For I have this separate, beady obsession with Alien³, the ragged, wounded, much troubled and subsequently disowned second sequel that proved such a galling failure on its delayed arrival in 1991. For many it is still regarded as the ultimate come down. Not least among them is Cameron. Rather cruelly, after a screening Alien³, Weaver took Fincher out to dinner and asked Cameron to join them. Fincher, a beaten man, could barely muster the wherewithal to order, before Cameron let him have it: "YOU KILLED NEWT?"
Yet, somewhere in the blur of its windswept creation, despite (or maybe because of) its unthinkable moves, can be found a remarkable film.
This is history. When it opened on May 22, 1992, the third Alien was met with howls of fury, outrage and bewilderment — this glum and maverick encounter was a betrayal of all we had invested in and cared about. Newt and Hicks dead, after all we had been through together? After all we had endured? There was something mean-spirited about the third film, a buzz-kill to go with a buzz-cut that sheared away Weaver's locks and life-force from Ripley — it wasn't simply that it refused to pander to audience expectations, it was a scorched earth of thrill and catharsis.
Like so many, propelled through the prequels, I was ravenous for a third. The early nineties was an age before the internet squealed with rumours and we could still hold out hope for films, though there had been shadows gathering — the film seemed to be taking forever. What gives, we wondered? There had been a teaser, put out by an over-enthusiastic marketing department at Fox, that promised aliens on Earth. In hindsight - a flat-out cheat. The trailer that came next looking evocative and satisfyingly familiar - another labyrinthine grunge-fest, low on lighting, high on glowering faces. The presence and quantity of the xenomorph remained elusive. We were left to only speculate. Were they holding back the legions?
You could argue, the odd one out of the Quadrilogy is, in fact, Aliens. In the the hands of a bionic entertainer, it is streamlined for thrills and emotional satisfaction though Ripley's redemption into motherhood. Recall that it is the only film in the series written, directed and largely shaped by the hands of one person. If he enjoyed clarifying the biology, Cameron showed less inclination toward the mythology (underlying the film is a meditation on reproduction) — in yet another snit, Giger let it be known his services had not been required. Alien³ in touch and feel, through Fincher's natural disposition for the industrial ferment of Scott's framing, his sense of awful wonder, is the natural sequel to Alien. As a thought experiment, remove Aliens (how!), and you are left with an ethereal, highly visceral, loonily mystical Giger-saturated trilogy that takes Ripley from the first encounter with this dread alien foe, through death and resurrection into a new form of being. Impressive, but way less human. And that is to forgo the trauma she faces in Aliens - a conscious choice to face her fears. Of course, we cannot do without Aliens. I’ve made a documentary to prove that.
The interesting thing is that Alien³'s flaws are the sum of overthink not complacency or even studio indifference - quite the opposite. But there was also discord, mayhem in the shooting, calamitous u-turns and reversals, scripts and radical ideas embraced then scotched in panic, while producer heavy-handedness and insecurity set the climate. The calamity that became of the release version of Alien³ was less a lesson in studio myopia than a folly entrapped in a desperate attempt to match the powers of the two previous films. All the creative parties involved, Fox's hierarchy (led chiefly on the ground by John Landau and from above by CEO Joe Roth), producers Walter Hill, David Giler and Gordon Carroll (collectively, the series's production house Brandywine), the increasingly influential Sigourney Weaver (what part Ripley play being one of the key questions), were not prepared to let it be formulaic, to restock the cast with victims and let it re-run some variation on Aliens. Indeed the intent was not to simply give the audience exactly what they wanted. Which is why beneath the skin of a hobbled film something fascinating lurks. A more coherent, enticing, bizarre film that would be revealed in essence by the later Assembly Cut.
First though, it's worthwhile getting our heads around the creative whirlpool into which Ripley and surrogate family were thrown after the events of Aliens. This has been raked over many times, and with startling honesty (even if Fincher remains schtum). The biting Making Of documentary from the Quadrilogy, directed by Charles de Lazurika, ran by the more than appropriate title Wreckage and Rape.
Take this as a montage, hurling us through the flurry of concept, debate and doubt in the pursuit of a third classic. Aliens had made money (though it would take the threat of legal pliers to prise out a fair share for profit participants Sigourney Weaver, Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd and Brandywine). It was the fifth highest grosser in a year in which Top Gun was top gun. The critics were onboard. "No self-conscious old movie references," clamoured Newsweek. "Just back-to-basics good storytelling." A take that is a little one-dimensional, but we get the point. Cameron had delivered a new emotional energy to the series. The intensity was second-to-none. At the end, we were spent but euphoric. Even a genre-averse Academy deigned to nominate Weaver for Best Actress (though she lost to Marlee Matlin and the soggy worthiness of Children of a Lesser God). The stage was set for another entry. The studio now eager. There would be none of the dallying that had resulted in a seven-year gap between Alien and Aliens (elaborated into a in-joke by Cameron when Ripley discovers she has been asleep for 57 years between films). But Cameron had moved on, down into The Abyss (and thereby hangs a tale), before the sizzle and triumph of T2. And Scott was long gone for now.
So the responsibility for the third film fell back to the camp of Hill, Giler and Carroll at Brandywine, who announced that they intended to have the film ready for the spring of 1990. Smart, resilient, talented Hollywood salts, Hill and Giler especially were fully cognisant of the value of what had come before. Indeed, they had contributed their fair share to Alien's dry, roughneck sensibility by stripping out the B-movie bluster of Dan O'Bannon's original script. Ash was theirs, as were those tight, memorable names: Ripley, Dallas, Kane, Lambert... They brought the sting of realism. They had come up with the idea of marines for the sequel, and dragging Ripley back out into space (never set it on Earth!). They could see how the two films were intimately related yet self-contained. The Alien universe presented a chronology but it wasn't a continuing story, a saga like Star Wars that laid down track toward cosmic fulfilment. The third film needed its own identity, to forge anew the aesthetic that was so much more than a monster movie, brewing metaphors beneath the clammy surface. In simple terms, an impressive standard had been set in this double-helix of science fiction and horror, behind which lurked a troubling issue. Once Cameron had multiplied the creature and given them a Queen, could you just keep exponentially increasingly their number? Alien: Saturation.
Hill and Giler (Carroll always more present on set) also recognised and took credit for the fact the first two films were launchpads for two of the most significant careers in modern cinema. Through the Alien films, Hill and Giler now saw themselves as kingmakers, progenitors of a new generation in the Hollywood life cycle, and were determined to foster a new talent worthy of the calling. There was a weight now to Alien-making. A significance.
There was also the question of Ripley and Weaver. How crucial was the character? How easy was the actress to work with — she had her own ideas about what was needed, rightly proprietorial over the character. And, more to the point, how expensive?
These were treacherous waters before they even set out.
So William Gibson as screenwriter makes total sense. The Vancouver-based Gibson was a sci-fi author on the rise, his milieu the prophetic neon-smeared alt-universe enclosed in a digital sphere where crime had sequestered and data become the drug of choice. It was Giler who made the suggestion. He'd read Gibson's vaunted debut Neuromancer while Aliens was making hay at the box office. He could feel a visionary at work in the shimmering dystopia of the cyberpunk (Gibson’s own coinage) universe. Even if it wasn't the same (though they shared a noirish cynicism and technophobic mood, cyberpunk supplied verdant digital simulacra to Alien's bottle-hard, analogue reality), Giler handed the novel to Hill suggesting Gibson could bring a new take to their tactile branch of sci-fi. Hill and Giler passed on a twelve-page treatment they had originated for the third film: The Company, still at the root of the ensuing troubles, was competing with a socialist outfit, with their own ship, for the alien eggs. It was to be set partly on Earth.
Gibson readily accepted the commission. Even if he had never attempted a screenplay in his life, he was an ardent fan of Alien and "its funked-up, dirty kitchen sink spaceship." Scott's look had spilled into his writing. There was a pattern of artists being stirred by the spareness and suggestibility of the original. Gibson was also impressed by how Hill and Giler took to discussing deeper meanings in the films. These were Hollywood meetings unafraid of symbolism. They promoted a third film that might reveal the origins of the creature, and in so doing discover the origin of mankind as well. Ideas Scott had already posited in interview and surely mentioned to the producers. Concepts that would lay dormant until 2012. They also debated those old contradictions that lay at the heart of all sequels — we want it the same but different. They didn't want to throw out what had made the first and second films work so well: a primal confrontation; a battle for survival; eggs, facehugging, chestbursting, fleeing the beast(s) through a Minotaur's maze of metal. There was an urge to go bigger, "opening this thing up", and, as this was the third film (seemingly trilogy's end), go for closure.
We can sense a project already cast into uncertainty. The trick of the first two films was that they never pretended to be anything other than monster movies, but they raised the question of what a monster movie could do or say. But there was ambition at work with Alien³ .
Gibson, an enthusiastic intellectual, happy at his typewriter, got an immediate lesson in the foibles of Hollywood employment. Go ahead and write your script instructed Brandywine, but bear in mind we're not sure about Sigourney. Ripley was a TBC. The Gibson script, which floated around the Internet like the frozen Narcissus, has since been adapted as a comic. It isn't the Holy Grail of missing Alien films. By necessity, Gibson had to hedge his bets. Hicks had Newt head home to Earth to be with her grandparents; and he recover from his acid burns. As was Gibson's style, the story was talky and slow, a mood piece with only a single xenomorph let loose on a space station. He had taken the idea of politics to heart. Ripley meanwhile is in a coma for much of the running time — dependant on negotiations. The die was already cast: this interminable push and pull between forging something new and conforming to what had worked. Brandywine wanted changes; Gibson already itched to be free. Only the sly visual motif of barcodes on the eventual prisoner's necks can be sourced to the first venture.
It also helped no one that Brandywine's chosen heir to take over at the helm was the Finnish director Renny Harlin, tall, blonde and bearded as a viking (and thus far known only for A Nightmare On Elm Street 4), who pressed for action (he leaned more Cameron than Scott). So Gibson's script was thrown out of the airlock. Too stiff, too straight, too clever. Gibson was paid off, and entered the banks of trivia that was accumulate around the sequels like slime.
In Gibson's stead came Eric Red. He had experience in both the movie business and the horror genre, providing decent scripts that cultivated excellent movies in The Hitcher (with Blade Runner's Rutger Hauer) and vampires-in-Texas mood piece Near Dark (including three veterans of Aliens in Jenette Goldstein, Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen). The latter was given a modish shimmer by Kathryn Bigelow, and you feel a credible answer to their Alien problems went begging.
Red began again with the Hill-Giler treatment and the advice that the Weaver-Ripley impulse should be resisted. Negotiations with the actress had reached a prickly impasse (profits from Aliens were still suspiciously elusive), and Brandywine and Fox assembled an argument that she might soon be too old to credibly command an action movie. Red did what he was bid, inventing a new hero, a special ops commando, gender negotiable. There were also xenomorphs who could change their form at will. The rules were slackening; the biology slipping into contrivance. The results were once again met with dismay. Weaver was left fuming.
Enter David Twohy (who would later labour on Waterworld and direct effective clone Pitch Black). He took the treatment and lent into Gibson’s backdrop, a drape of Third World War conflict as The Company (so brazenly, callously capitalist) cross philosophies with a Soviet spacecraft, the xenomorphs now political pawns. The new rubric held potential, and the lead was adaptable to Ripley if so required. The central planet, he posited, would be a prison. That idea would cling on.
By this point, Harlin had grown dispirited by the lacklustre scripts and lack of purpose and departed in the direction of Die Hard 2: Die Harder, a sequel that had fewer doubts about its remit. For a short spell, Harlin became the primo action director in the Hollywood playlist trading Bruce Willis for Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger, before Cutthroat Island sunk his reputation like a lead ball.
The costs were mounting with Brandywine's hesitancy: all of the writers had to be paid off. Harlin too. Time and proud boasts were evaporating as 1988 gave way to 1989 and that promised 1990 release date looked untenable. Then there came a directive from the head of The Company, as in Fox and CEO Joe Roth — as far as he saw it Ripley was essential to any Alien movie. So the contortions took another turn. This was Ripley's game again. Back to the typewriter.
Still, throughout, you can sense the hope, the determination, the will toward something greater in Hill and Giler. In its DNA, the third film was restless but well intentioned. That original theme persisted, that The Company are the primo villains through their malevolent relish to get hold of a specimen.
The return of Weaver brought with it a quiver of new challenges. In truth, these were dormant requirements, a desideratum Weaver had set before Cameron as she circled Aliens, waiting to fully commit. Ripley should aver the use of weapons, she had decided. Ripley should make love to alien; the hows and whys of which were down to Cameron and his creative instincts. And Ripley should perish. Cameron, certain of the direction in which he was headed, circumvented every one of Weaver's demands, persuading the actress down his militarised path, guns to the fore, in which she reviles the alien life-form and lives. Weaver, however, hadn't forgotten where she felt the series need to go. Somewhere strange and melancholic, somewhere arty. An existential horror movie.
What came next was the chance of exactly that. A move toward a thrillingly, out-there Alien movie. The perfect solution, maybe (though it might still have frustrated Aliens zealots). One that seemed to bring all these disparate attitudes together: the action movie, the mythic template, the psychological depths, the contemplation of man's folly, Ripley's ongoing story, science fiction that leans into older genres, something new but the same, a provocative jab to the ribs of commercial convention. Enter Vincent Ward, a young, New Zealand director, untested in Hollywood. Signals had reached Brandywine from the European festival circuit, where Ward's visually striking, medieval fantasy The Navigator (a surreal jink wherein a child flees the Black Death by tunnelling to the present day) was being met with reports that this was the kind of moody-weird-gripping atmosphere that gets you a gig on an Alien movie. Hey presto!
Ward was a daring choice, then the same was true of Scott and Cameron, who both only had one film to their name before venturing to LV-426. What's more, Ward did fit the bill. He had Hill and Giler's X-factor, the chance of reflected glory the comes with finding a wild, new talent. And Ward knew precisely what he wanted. And precisely what he didn't, immediately rejecting the innumerable scripts orbiting the project like abandoned satellites. Partnered with screenwriter John Fasano (a fledgling of a different stripe, who had written Another 48 Hours and directed the tautologically positioned Zombie Nightmare, and may well have been stewing for the director's chair himself), Ward made his pitch — monks in space.
As writer David Thomson appreciated, here was "something startlingly inventive and complete." Ward was sticking to his muddy metier, putting the medieval among the stars. Ripley will crash land, he said, on the small planet known as Arceon (there are hints of Archeaon, a subdivision of bacteria). The planet will turn out to be a fake: an intricate warren-like wooden assembly like Noah's Ark wrapped around some kind of iron core. Beneath its skin was a forgotten satellite, a world turned inside out. Fittingly, Arceon would be populated with a colony of monks who have rejected technology, living to a Middle Age groove of farming food and pacifism, so no weapons. Ripley will bring with her the alien curse like an infection, the Black Death with steel teeth, the Devil incarnate. Religion had crash landed in the franchise. Furthermore, Ripley will be the first sighting of womanhood to hit Arceon for years. New, shape-shifting variations on the xenomorphs will inscribe trails into the wheat fields; the abbot, Brother John, will reveal himself to be another synthetic (there are hints of Prometheus here). The orientation was the hellfire of Hieronymus Bosch with Giger back in the fold.
My former Empire colleague Dan Jolin (easy enough to track him down at @DanJolin on Twitter), wrote a very detailed piece on Ward's intentions, with a wonderful array of could-have-been production art, which is worth seeking out to grasp what Thomson saw as "one of the great unmade projects of our time."
There were likely major misgivings among the hierarchy at Fox, but Hill and Giler were, at first, certain they had their film. The story is that Ward was dynamic but not politic (though, the same was equally true of Scott and Cameron). He clung onto his autonomy to the point of arrogance, refusing to compromise. Meetings did not go well. Tensions rose. Giger only lasted a month. Pre-production stratified into us-and-them. Hill and Giler's guidance began to taste to Ward like control. Perhaps, he should have heeded history, the sure knowledge that a tough path can lead in the end to great accomplishment. Alien-making was always a battle. Perhaps, Hill and Giler themselves were weary of conflict being the pre-set for any Alien production and were intent on eliminating the possibility of a long, emotionally exhausting shoot before they set out. Perhaps, they simply got pissed off and fired Ward. He took the money, and left behind a script the producers reputedly liked.
Enter David Fincher — and misery.
Hosting a live Q&A, I once enquired from Charles de Lauzirika what input or interaction had he had, if any, with Fincher. He smiled ruefully. He had tried. He had put in a call, left a message, asked if Fincher might want to make an attempt to fish a coherent film, the one he had in mind, out of the muddied pond of the theatrical version. De Lauzirika was intending to follow his original notes, aiming to land at least in the vicinity of a director's cut. De Lauzirika admitted came home one evening to find a message on his answer phone from Fincher. It was a kind of half-groan, half wail, which semi-cohered into the word 'Fuck...' He never heard from him again. There is something key in his avoidance of reminiscing with any more clarity than that, refusing to be drawn on how much of Alien³ is truly his. During a Bafta on-stage career-retrospective in 2017, Fincher still visibly flinching at its mention, reflected how much he had adored Scott's original before falling foul of a cursed production. With the third film, Fincher was attempting to draw back toward the more singleminded approach of Scott's Alien. He was aiming to de-Cameron the series.
The bones of Ward's treatment are still to be found in the prison planet to come, trading wood for iron and a pestilence of lice. Monks become prisoners, hard-cases, rapists and murderers, who, to quote Ripley, have "found God at the ass-end of the universe." Speeches were retained, themes, the spare gothic rubric of Medievalism mixed with a Dickensian workhouse vibe. The future was just getting shittier. There is still a distinct lack of weapons, but the xenomorph count was now back to the singular, the film aiming at the taut horror principals prescribed by the original. The planet was now called Fiorina 161, better known as Fury.
The latest script (I picture a Frankenstein's monster of paperwork barely lashed together by bloodthirsty staples) resembled the layers of Arceon, weaker material stacked on stronger. Another short-lived writing hire, Larry Ferguson (The Hunt for Red October) gained a credit for whatever he left behind before being dumped at the behest of an appalled Weaver for transforming Ripley into an "uptight camp counsellor". With the weary exasperation of a plumber examining the efforts of a DIY enthusiast, Giler and Hill took over the writing, but even their script, which first flipped monks for inmates, was sent back by an unimpressed Fox. Rex Pickett (later to write the novel Sideways) took a spell at the cursed typewriter (are you keeping count?) before Hill and Giler were brought back again, as stipulated by Weaver, who had finally signed on for a cool $5.5 million and a very clear producer credit.
So you get a picture of the mess Fincher was inheriting; ambition had capsized the boat. Yet still he couldn't resist. Twenty-seven years old, he seemed a more conventional hire: born in Denver and raised in Marin County, he was a movie addict, who through family connections had walked out of school and into ILM just in time to work on Return of the Jedi. But he had deviant genes, his plan of heading to Los Angeles and a directing career was diverted into a career in advertising and music videos (Madonna a key client), which echoed the long way round Scott had taken to the big chair. His reputation was bouncing in Hollywood circles. This guy, they kept saying. He had a taste for the moody and perverse, he wanted to confound audiences not pander. Make them wretched if needs be. And how he adored Alien. Star Wars was a blip on the CV, pay it no heed. He wanted to recapture the chill, violent, redolent charge of Scott's sci-fi aesthetic rather than Cameron's surges of dread and excitement.
Hill and Giler's prime directive was to simplify the Ward approach, or what should more accurately be classified as the Ward-Hill-Giler approach (the monk-prisoner set up). In other words, tame this stricken, schizophrenic beast, bursting with ideas and riddled with doubts. What followed, all the nightmares, betrayals, cursed luck and bottleneck of masters, are not my subject. As I said, it's a story that's been well told. Suffice to say, Fincher was thrown into the whirlpool and nearly drowned. So bruised was he by the experience, he came close to giving up on feature films at the very start.
For a small, bitter taste, no more than swig of the indecision that dogged the production, let us turn to to the candid diary of Ralph Brown (reported as of June 2019 in Magicmenagerie's Blog) the stalwart British actor (memorable in Withnail and I, and famed for his brief turn as a roadie in This is Spinal Tap), of which there were a good few among Fury's limited manifest of prisoners. One of the more distinctive flavours of Alien³ is this backbone of salty Brits. Thus far, the only actual British characters were John Hurt's short-lived Kane and Ash, and he turned out to be a goddamned robot. So deft was Ian Holm's performance, at first glance we simply took him for uptight. Goddamned Brit.
Uptight is not a word you would use to describe this lot dumped into the rusted embrace of Fury, iron works turned high security prison. These are Brits made of regional grit and grime. Working class Brits, I have come to adore the incongruity of Brian Glover's Warden Andrews, delivering his lines with the same Yorkshire pragmatism he gave the Tetley Tea adverts.
Brown's diary entry falls beneath the title "Paranoia In Pinewood." His central beef (in among a butcher's counter of catalogued grief) is that his character, Aaron, was no longer as advertised. The role he had auditioned for and been thrilled to gain was the prison's second-in-command, an "everyman yuppie-type" (an echo perhaps of Burke) who lives. Here's the rub, care of the ongoing rewrites, quotidian changes of direction delivered in envelopes silently poked under their dressing room doors by night, he was disheartened to learn he was being transformed into a "thick cowardly type" who dies. He had also gained the nickname "85" referring to his IQ. Brown demands to see Fincher, who sympathises, he hates the rewrites too. Don't worry, he says without conviction, it'll be alright. Did he ever believe that? Was there ever a point this didn't feel like a losing battle? But Brown is not placated. He is bold enough to demand an audience with Hill and Giler, nested in a hotel in Holland Park, churning out new pages by the day, thinking only of getting back to Los Angeles. Brown's agent tells him not to rock the boat — code for "don't upset Walter Hill."
So Brown is granted his audience with Hill, Holland Park way. They have tea. Brown sees that Hill is nervy. The atmosphere is tense. What's wrong, asks Hill? Brown comes clean, he's worried the character is now far from what he and Fincher had conceived. Scenes have already been shot. Aaron, Hill informs him, is due to be a "working class, stupid guy who is funny." Brown can only nod in agreement, his future career flashing before his eyes. Can he not, at least, fight the alien? Something heroic. Miraculously, Hill agrees — somewhere in the middle of the film, during the fire, not at the end. But there was no budging on "85" — Hill liked the gag. "We all gotta serve the movie Ralph," Hill tells him as the actor retreats, lead in his stomach.
Meeting with Fincher the next day, Brown confesses he has sold the director down the river. Given in. For the rest of the shoot he wonders if he is to be cut. His relationship with Weaver deteriorates. He flags. Elsewhere in his candid diary, he recalls a day when, their presence again not required, he and a handful of his fellow actors, dressed in full prison garb, shaved heads, rags, wandered the soundstages of Pinewood. One they found occupied by KLF recording the video for 3am Eternal. They were tipping into the surreal. On the next stage, Kylie was shooting a video. He remembers Fincher telling him he was doing long pans and tracks so "they" couldn't cut into his footage.
And it in that last phrase I detect something stirring. While all around him doubt fed chaos, Fincher did his utmost to insert something of himself - the film he had imagined setting out for Fury. Somewhere in over five years of turmoil, in this warlock's cauldron of overthink, Fincher found something. A keen centre endures. Bleak as death. A deviant after two classics, born in a storm. But a powerful film nevertheless, hinting, grimly, toward what might have been if Fincher's vision, or Ward's, had been allowed to blossom.
Per the many contortions of Alien³-making, Brown was not fired. Indeed, months later he is required to join the lengthy reshoots in Los Angeles (as the film was delayed yet further) and "85" endures until the bitter, reconfigured end, not exactly covered in glory, but allowed an epiphany before his bloody demise — the realisation that The Company is not to be trusted.
To be continued…
By the way: for those curious about my new film Aliens Expanded, head on over to the website below for your chance to buy a four-hour, deep dive into one hell of a sequel.
Go right here: Aliens Expanded