By all accounts, Alien 3 was a tortured production. Fox decided on a release date prior to other trivial things like a finalized script or a director, and even constructed sets for story points that were no longer applicable to the final narrative and thus had to be shoehorned into it.
Director David Fincher disowned it and won’t talk at length about it, and Sigourney Weaver (who originally wasn’t even going to be in the movie, only for the studio to decide Ripley was just as important as the titular beasts) had a pretty miserable time, butting heads with the studio throughout, often to side with Fincher. And after all that, it didn’t even really seem to please fans, either. Though over time, it’s gotten reappraised. The AVP movies certainly helped it look better in retrospect.
One would think that the novelization would be spared from all the drama, but no, poor Alan Dean Foster got his fair share of headaches, too. After writing the adaptations for the first two films, it was a no-brainer to have him return, but when he got the screenplay, he was devastated to learn that Newt would be killed immediately. So much so that he even wrote a draft that kept her alive (albeit in a coma so as not to disrupt the rest of the story as written), but the studio refused to allow him to make this change. He was so upset by this and other restrictions that he turned down adapting Alien: Resurrection, only returning to the series for Alien: Covenant in 2017.
The irony, of course, is that the studio ended up changing a lot of the movie after the initial shoot, but it was too late to force Foster or anyone else to work the changes into the novel. So even though the author backed down and kept Newt’s death (and subsequent grisly autopsy), the novel features several changes from the theatrical cut, coming closer to the assembly cut on the Quadrilogy boxed set. If you’ve never seen that version, the book will be revelatory, as it hews closer to what Fincher more or less had shot in the first place (itself a compromise from earlier ideas, such as the planet being made out of wood).
But even if you have watched the assembly cut (which I assume you have; for brevity’s sake I’m only focusing on how the novel differs even from that), Foster’s take has a few key differences that make it a richer story with regards to its characters, adding in backstories for some of the prisoners and extending the dialogue exchanges throughout.
Sure, the studio can pull rank when it comes to changing the fate of one of the series’ most beloved characters, but it couldn’t argue with whatever he came up with for internal monologue by Ripley, Clemens (Charles Dance), Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), etc. None of these added ideas change the story at all, they just give more personality to the characters within it.
First and foremost, he offers a bit of flirting between Ripley and Clemens. While her out-of-nowhere forwardness (“Are you attracted to me?”) is a fun onscreen moment, here, it seems a little more natural. When she first wakes up and demands to see the bodies of her friends, as in the film Clemens notes that she needs clothes because none of the men have seen a woman in quite some time, adding “for that matter neither have I…”
Here, she responds with a little tease about how she doesn’t have to worry about him because he’s a doctor, with Clemens unable to help himself from grinning. There are a couple of other little moments like that sprinkled in prior to their sleeping together, so their coupling feels less out of nowhere and helps make Clemens’ death a little sadder when it happens.
Foster also gives more respect to poor Bishop than he was offered in even the longer assembly cut. In either version of the film, Ripley seems to be treating him like the droid she hated in Aliens’ first half, with none of the “Not bad for a droid” compassion she had for him in its third act. Here, she is a little warmer to him, feeling bad for his mangled state and far more hesitant when he asks to be terminated.
As for the other prisoners, we get to know a little more about them, though not so much that it becomes easier to tell them apart when they’re all running around in the tunnels for the action sequences. The most useful bit of information we get there that was unclear in the film(s) is what Golic and the other two men are doing in the tunnels when they first encounter the Xenomorph.
As the place used to house hundreds of workers and was a fully functioning facility, there were supplies all over the area that were either left behind or squirreled away by enterprising prisoners. With only 25 men there now, they have naturally conserved power, oxygen, etc. by confining themselves to a smaller area of the facility, but go out on these expeditions to find those necessities (food, cigarettes, batteries, etc.) and bring them back.
And then there are all the internal thoughts, which are of course the best parts of any good novelization, as we can almost guarantee they came from the author’s imagination and aren’t just evidence of a reworked film. This is doubly engaging in sequel novels like this because it’s nice to read a character’s reflections on their prior adventures, something the movies themselves rarely offer. That said, “nice” isn’t the word I’d use to describe an absolutely heartbreaking passage that I’ve presented in its entirety below:
Brutal! Especially when you know she dies at the end of the story. On that note, as this is again a pre-reshoot version of the story, Ripley’s sacrifice at the end follows the assembly cut version, not the theatrical take where the alien queen bursts from her chest just before she falls into the lava. But even if it wasn’t, I doubt Foster would spend much time on the gory details.
Throughout the book he skims past the violent parts as much as possible, as if such things didn’t need to be dwelled on. For the most part it’s fine, but it also results in major characters’ demises being almost easy to miss entirely if you’re skimming; when Aaron (aka “85”) dies Foster brushes it off in a quick line in between two others concerning (the very human) Bishop II.
It also offers a better/more logical death for Dillon. In either version of the movie, despite a pact with Ripley to kill her after they kill the alien together, he stays behind at the bottom of the lead chamber to give her a chance to reach the top (why not the other way around? It would be a two birds with one stone kinda deal for him, no?). In the novel, they both get out and the alien is doused with the lead, presumably killing it.
This leads to Ripley asking Dillon to fulfill his promise, only for him to find he can’t do it; a huge change for this “murderer of women.“ But then the Xenomorph reappears, covered in lead but still very much alive, and drags him into the burning pit, at which point the sprinklers are activated and the rest proceeds as it does in the film.
Basically, Foster did the best he could with a very uneven script. With so many drafts flying around (the shooting script was essentially cobbled together from two completely different ideas, and then rewritten further from that) it’s amazing the story even makes sense, but Foster patched even the minor holes and offered the most thorough and complete version of the events as we’ve seen them onscreen.
I don’t think Alien 3 was ever going to be on par with the first two, but had it come out a little closer to what the author presented here, it certainly would have been easier to defend at the time (the bleak fates for all of Aliens’ survivors, including Ripley herself, was never going to go down easy with fans).
As someone who prefers the original to Cameron’s sequel, I will always appreciate that Fincher looked back to Ridley Scott for inspiration, presenting a small crew of humans taking on a single alien without much firepower to defend themselves. It’s the last time an Alien movie was scary, and Foster’s version is even more frightening since it’s easier to tell who is being chased at any given time.
P.S. While the novel is a quick enough read and not hard to find, audiobook fans can enjoy the story from the voice of Bishop himself, as Lance Henriksen narrated an abridged version that’s also easily available.
