The original Blade Runner helmer Ridley Scott’s Alien was a blockbuster hit with audiences. Pitched as a “haunted house in space” movie, Alien was one of the first movies to marry a sci-fi setting with the tropes of then-new slasher horror movies.
The original script for Alien may have Aliens. Faster-paced and boasting a bigger budget and cast, Aliens was a tonal transformation for the franchise.
Cameron’s sequel gave the series more of an action-adventure feel where the first film was pure horror. Arming its heroes and giving them an entire hive of the titular foes to face off against, Aliens was bigger, louder, and more action-packed than its predecessor. The next sequel, David Fincher’s Alien 3, was a failure with critics and fans of the franchise thanks to its pitilessly bleak and hopeless tone. However, despite the success of the original Alien’s horror elements gelling well with their sci-fi setting, the second sequel of the franchise failed precisely because it leaned too hard into the slasher movie aspects of its story.
Aliens Leaned Into Action (Successfully)
With bigger monsters and bigger guns, Aliens was a sci-fi action extravaganza where the first film was a tense, slow-burn space-set slasher. The first film in the series was filled with sequences of characters being picked off one-by-one by a lone, largely unseen monster, where Aliens was filled with countless Xenomorphs and featured a string of bigger, less scary but more thrilling action sequences, changing what audiences wanted from a sequel. By the time the plot holes.
‘90s Audiences Were Bored By Sci-Fi Horror
When the original Alien arrived in theatres, viewers had never seen such an effective fusion of R-rated gory horror and fantastical, futuristic sci-fi story elements. The combination was intriguing precisely because it was new and innovative, something that could not be said for the movie's second sequel. By the time Alien 3 was arriving in cinemas in the early ‘90s, viewers were understandably sick of the sci-fi horror genre hybrid. Throughout the ‘80s the likes of John Carpenter’s 1990 sequel, the Easter egg-ridden Predator 2, The Hidden, and the oeuvre of body horror legend David Cronenberg had rendered sci-fi horror a multiplex mainstay. Now that the crossover itself was no longer innovative, audiences wanted more from an Alien sequel than the bleak, brutal space-set horror of countless Alien clones like Galaxy of Terror and Creature.
Alien 3’s Slasher Story Limited Character Development
Alien 3 had few memorable characters, but that’s not to say the movie didn’t have enough characters. Instead, being set on a prison ship meant there was plenty of unsympathetic cannon fodder character for the title character to chew through (and indeed, Alien 3’s villain The Dragon racks up the highest body count of any Xenomorph in the series). But viewers had little reason to care for these characters as they were disposable, slasher-movie-style victims, where the first film fleshed out even its doomed cast . Where the original movie had likable character actors like John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, and Veronica Cartwright filling out its ing cast, almost everyone in Alien 3 was either a straight-up villain or a leery, vague threat. From the deeply creepy Golic to the inmates that try to rape Ripley, the movie is filled with characters it is difficult to care about thanks to the slasher movie maxim that ing characters never need to be too likable since they are not going to last long and viewers should be ready to applaud their eventual, inevitable deaths.
Alien 3’s Bleakness Came From Returning To Horror
Saving Newt was one thing but letting both Newt and Friday the 13th maintained a sense of humor to lighten the constant parade of gore and scary scenes, as viewers would otherwise likely be put off by the sheer brutality of the killings. However, Alien 3 wanted to be a more serious sort of horror while also depicting its cast as interchangeable, disposable victims, meaning viewers had no comic relief to rely on, but also no interesting characters to be invested in. As a result, franchise fans hoping to connect with Alien 3 were given a colder, crueler revision of the first film precisely because the movie hoped to bring back horror movie brutality to the series, but way overshoot the mark in this regard.
