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397. Alien³ – All-ien 2024 (#—)

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Jess Dunne, this week with special guest Alex Towers, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This time, David Fincher’s Alien³.

A freak accident on her lifepod sends xenomorph survivor Ellen Ripley off-course. Plunging to the surface of a long-abandoned prison planet inhabited by the inmates so institutionalised that they refused to leave, Ripley finds herself haunted by the possibility that the monster that has taken so much from her is still with her, and that she is trapped inside of a prison of the creature’s making.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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On Second Thought: Alien³ (The Assembly Cut)

To celebrate the release of Prometheus this week, we’ll be taking a look at the other movies in the Alien franchise.

Alien and Aliens are, quite rightly, considered classics of the science-fiction horror subgenre, superbly constructed examinations of the monsters lurking in the darkness. Unfortunately, the two sequels, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection are not so highly regarded. One would imagine that producing a film about a monster in the future really wouldn’t be that difficult, but the films were both dogged by their own pre-production turmoil. In particular, this third film went through several painful iterations before reaching the big screen – and, even then, there was a sense that nobody was especially happy with the result.

However, this series of films has also benefited from a great deal of affection, attention and examination from both creators and fans. As such, it isn’t really a surprise that even the creators have returned to help patch them up from time to time, lovingly repairing and restoring and updating the installments in this landmark franchise. While Alien³: The Assembly Cut is not a literal Director’s Cut, it does afford the viewer a rare insight into what David Fincher’s version of the film might have looked like.

Back against the wall…

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