Cubed

I was going to say we'd never seen any David Fincher, because I forgot about Mank. Well now we've seen Alien³ (1992), his first feature. 

When we left Sigourney Weaver, she was escaping from a xenomorph-infested planet with a damaged android, a surviving soldier, and little girl Newt. This movie starts with a xenomorph showing up on the ship, killing everyone but Weaver. The crew pod gets jettisoned and sent to the nearest inhabited planet.

That is a prison planet, with most of the prisoners gone. It's run by warden Brian Glover. but inmate Charles S. Dutton has become the spiritual leader for the prisoners, now all celibate penitentials. Weaver is woken up by Charles Dance, the medical officer. She finds out that everyone else from the last movie is dead. She insists on autopsying Newt, and is relieved to find out the she is not infected with Xenomorphs. Too bad she didn't know that a face hugger survived and got into a dog, birthing a doggy/xenomorph.

Now, pretty much everyone wants Weaver gone, because she is upsetting the balance of this prison/monastery. When people start dying, they don't put much faith in her explanation. They have contacted Weyland-Yutani, and Weaver tries to convince them that they will only protect the xenomorph. Only Charles Dance seems to believer her, and they are sleeping together.

When the xenomorph attacks a party Weaver is in, she finds that it won't kill her - the famous still of the creature getting right in her face. She realizes that this means she is carrying a chest burster, and worse, it's a queen. But it does give her protection.

There are a lot of cool things going on here. Weaver gets her head shaved right off, and that's a cool look. The range of classic character actors, like Dutton, Dance, Glover, Peter Postlethwaite and even Lance Henriksen is impressive. The setting, the semi-abandoned industrial prison with its band of spiritual murderers and rapists, plus a few bureaucrats and a doctor, is interesting. And Fincher's brutality of killing (and autopsying) Newt is chilling. But I didn't think this one really held together very well. We watched the "Assembly" (longer) cut; maybe the theatrical would have felt tighter.

I also didn't see much of a distinctive "look" - If I didn't know about Fincher, I'd guess he was just some journeyman director. So, not my first or even second favorite Alien movie. And even though Ripley dies at the end, there's still one more.