Alien³ - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Alien³ or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Alien³

[gerald]

The Alien Quadrilogy DVD boxset has pre-feature introductions by the directors of their respective contributions to the franchise for the Special Editions except David Fincher. The film famously went through a difficult production which included severe script issues, being massively over budget, re-shoots not to mention the lack of creative control given to Fincher, so he declined to be involved in any way. Fincher is also missing from the 'director's commentary track' on the Alien³ feature, with several cast and crew members filling his place and acknowledging Fincher's difficulties.

[liam]

H.R. Giger, the original designer of the first Xenomorph, was shafted in favor of Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis' designs. This didn't stop Giger from faxing his designs to his client, David Fincher, and paying for all expenses himself, even after Fincher withdrew from the project. Several of Giger's ideas made it to the screen, though he later sued the production over crediting him only for the original Alien designs, but not the film's new designs (he missed out on an Oscar nomination for Best Special Effects due to this). He received a full credit on the home release.

[chad]

The famous tagline of the original Alien (1979) was "In space, no one can hear you scream." When this movie, in planning stages, was to be set on Earth, a proposed tagline was "On Earth, everyone can hear you scream."

[tammy]

In Aliens, Bishop quotes the Asimovian First Law of Robotics. In Alien³, when he tells Ripley to disconnect him because he could be repaired, but would never be top of the line again, he is actually in violation of the Third Law, A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

[bryan]

The film spent over a year in editing.

[cassandra]

10,000 gallons of black paint were used to simulate the hot molten lead that is poured over the Alien during the finale.

[tom]

To create a convincing corpse of the character of Newt, the filmmakers created life-size mannequins using the molds of Carrie Henn from Aliens (1986). Those molds had been made to create a puppet of Henn for Sigourney Weaver to carry around.

[kristen]

Most of the controversial decisions for which director David Fincher was heavily criticized (an Alien egg mysteriously being aboard the Sulaco; Newt, Hicks and Bishop all dying during the opening scene) actually originated in Vincent Ward's and John Fasano's earlier draft of the script. It contains an overlooked Alien egg hatching aboard the Sulaco (not explained how it got there) and a subsequent infestation of the ship by Aliens (not explained either) who kill Bishop and Hicks. The ship awakens Ripley and Newt just in time to escape in an EEV, which crashes into a sea. Ripley is saved but Newt supposedly drowns, as her body isn't found. Ward's motivations for killing off the others was to get Ripley "into the mindset of someone suffering from loss and their subsequent quest for personal redemption". He also wanted to get rid of Newt, as "she kind of annoyed me".

[aaron]

The damages inflicted on Bishop were too severe to have Lance Henriksen work a prosthetic head while hiding under a table/chair/platform, so the filmmakers ended up having the android being played by... an android. A mechanical copy of Henriksen's likeness was used in this movie for the portrayal of the Sulaco-Bishop.

[sandra]

In his video review for the movie, Roger Ebert (who had praised both Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)) gave the movie a "thumbs down" negative review. He criticized it for being dark, depressing, grungy and lacking in high-tension action, especially targeting the repetitious and drawn-out chase scenes near the end. However, he had nothing but praise for the film's bleak futuristic art direction, calling it "the least exciting, but in some ways, the most interesting movie [in the franchise]", and "the best-looking bad movie I have seen in a while".

[wallace]

During some test screenings, many people had to leave the theatre and go to the bathroom due to loud and low frequencies in the sound effects and music.

[liam]

Including the extended and director's cuts of each movie in the series, as well as Ridley Scott's latest Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, this is the only Alien film not to feature victims being cocooned.

[bessie]

(at around 1h 6 mins) This is the first time Slow Motion cameras were used intentionally in an Alien movie, seen when explosives are being set, and one falls. The use of the cameras, which were primitive at the time, resulted in a squashed and blurred image, and stands out against the normal speed recordings. The technique was then later used briefly in the spin off, Prometheus (2012).

[charlie]

Although Ripley's discovery that she carries an Alien embryo suggests that she is the person being facehugged in the opening montage, the final shooting script and comics adaptation confirm that this actually happened to Newt. This is merely hinted at during the opening credits: the facehugger can be seen attacking and cracking Newt's cryotube, and when the scanner shows the facehugger attached to a person, Ripley is shown in a seizure state but she is clearly not being facehugged. An acid burn is later discovered on Newt's tube. After the EEV crashlanded, Newt drowned. She was sadly conscious and cried for help. After she died, the alien embryo crawled out of her mouth and swam to Ripley's tube since it requires a living host to grow properly. It opened Ripley's mouth and forced itself into her throat (explaining why it is sore when she wakes up). Although these scenes were storyboarded, they were never filmed because the effect of the creature switching hosts could not be portrayed realistically. The Theatrical Cut adds more confusion to this backstory since Ripley's cryotube is already inexplicably broken before the ejection, while Newt's later appears intact, begging the question how she could be facehugged and drown while Ripley survived. This is somewhat cleared up in the Extended Cut, where Clemens discovers a half-drowned Ripley on the shore, covered in dirt and lice, implying that water rushing into her broken cryotube woke her up; this also fixes the continuity error in the theatrical cut where Ripley is spotless in the EEV but dirty when Clemens carries her in the infirmary. However, the game Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013) (expansion "Stasis Interrupted") ignores this backstory by revealing that the Facehugger actually attacked Ripley's cryotube and latched onto her face.

[manuel]

Hoping to give the destroyed Bishop a more complex look that could not be done by simple make-up, the final product was done entirely through animatronics, while a playback of Lance Henriksen's voice played to guide Sigourney Weaver.

[kristen]

Charles Dance, Clive Mantle and Deobia Oparei appeared on HBO's Game of Thrones (2011), though none of them share any scenes together.

[wesley]

The alien in this movie differs from its predecessors in that the organic pipes on its back are now missing and it now has a more pronounced set of lips. Also it mostly moves on all four like it's host in this movie, a dog, whilst the Aliens in the first two movies are standing & walking upright like humans. This implies, that xenomorphs dont look and act the same like prior Aliens in the first two movies, because an Alien always is a hybrid lifeform, merging genes from it's own race with genes of the host it grows in. This is vice versa in the fourth installment Alien: Resurrection, where in this case Ripley adopts characteristics from the xenomorph via cloning.

[javier]

Michael Biehn stated in an interview that he was deeply hurt that he wasn't asked to return as Corporal Dwayne Hicks, his character from Aliens (1986), but even more so that the film opened with Hicks immediately being killed off after escaping with the other survivors at the end of the previous movie. He stated that he didn't mind Hicks dying per se, but objected to the careless way that they did it in this film. He therefore refused the studio permission to use a dummy of a corpse in his likeness, but allowed them the use of his photograph. Carrie Henn, on the other hand, was more cool about her character Newt's death, simply stating "Life goes on".

[cassandra]

A cast of Meryl Streep's face was used in a 3D model on a monitor showing the scan of the facehugger on Ripley, as a face cast of Sigourney Weaver had not been made at the time. Coincidentally, Streep was one of the final actresses considered for the role of Ripley in Alien (1979) before Weaver got the part.