Beyond that, though, it’s not just the creature that steals the show. As mentioned earlier, Weaver really gives her all here, but she’s complimented by a cast that includes Dutton’s Dillon, Charles Dance’s likeable Clemons, Ralph Brown’s Aaron, Paul McGann’s nutcase Golic, Danny Webb’s surprise hero Morse, and the return of Lance Henriksen as both Bishop and Michael Bishop Weyland, who turns up near the end of the film as Weyland-Yutani’s emissary. Again, in the Assembly Cut, the characters get more breathing room, and that only works in the film’s favor overall as the populace of Fury feels less expendable than they did originally.
Fury, too, feels like a character all its own. Compared to the dark hallways of the Nostromo or the blue hues of Aliens, Alien 3‘s setting is decidedly warm. From the set design of the colony to the brief looks we get of the planet’s surface, Fury stands quite apart from what came before, with dominant oranges and browns and a perpetual layer of smoke, sweat, and grime in nearly every frame that compliments the idea that Ripley is truly being put through Hell. To that end, both visually and thematically, Alien 3 gels together pretty well, and the fact that it even tries to have a different texture and tone than merely retreading ground covered by Alien or Aliens is admirable.
Now, finally swinging back to the end of the film, there’s a lot to love about Alien 3‘s final act if you’re willing to embrace it. Firstly, there’s a great ticking clock to the whole event, which sees Ripley and company attempting to destroy the alien before Weyland-Yutani arrives to capture it. By the end of Alien, Ripley was simply fighting to survive, and by the end of Aliens, she was fighting to protect Newt, but by the end of Alien 3, she’s fighting for so much more, to protect a world – and possibly a universe – at large from a threat it doesn’t know exists, let alone knows who she is, what she’s been through, and that she’s the only thing standing in its way. To her, the company capturing the alien means all that she’s been through would truly be for naught, which lends a lot of weight to how things play out.
Secondly, even the way in which the group battles the creature is unique. There’s no escape plan, no weapons, and no real hope to rely upon, and though everyone involved knows they’re likely going to die, they all end up doing the right thing anyway, even Aaron, who in the end sees that Ripley was right despite simply wanting to take the path of least resistance and loses his life trying to take down Weyland. One by one, people fall, and Ripley only manages to kill the creature at the very last moment, not by blasting it through an airlock and into space like she had done before but by cooling the molten lead covering the Dragon with cool water, forcing it to harden and shatter.
Lastly, we come to Ripley’s end, the aforementioned moment where she gives the middle finger to Weyland-Yutani and makes the ultimate sacrifice by leaping into the furnace. Although the theatrical cut arguably cheapens this moment by throwing in a last minute jumpscare as the chestburster emerges from Ripley as she falls, the Assembly Cut wisely does away with this, allowing Ripley’s sacrifice to be a moment of peace instead of horror, allowing her to beat the creature before it can beat her and rob the company of something it clearly values more precious than human life. It’s both a tragic and fitting end to a character who was never going to escape the shadow of the alien in her life, and even though we had to lose Newt and Hicks to get there, it’s still a pretty poignant sendoff when taken in context.
In the end, it’s still easy to see why people don’t entirely like Alien 3. It truly is a harsh film, particularly for a character we’d already spent two movies getting to know and root for, and the theatrical version of the film in particular was an underwhelming experience following the one-two punch of Alien and Aliens. That said, the film isn’t going anywhere, and the existence of the Assembly Cut means that we forever have a version that stands above what we initially got.
For better or worse, it takes risks in a franchise that immediately went on to find an eye-rolling way to bring Ripley back and started going downhill from there, and the sheer amount of positives you can find when moving past its perceived faults more than outweigh its negatives in a way that has helped it age gracefully over the last 25 years and makes it a respectable early entry in a franchise littered with lesser entries.