The Road Not Taken -- For the Better

It's widely acknowledged among fans of action, sci-fi, and horror movies that while Alien and Aliens were both great, Alien 3 was... not. Though it essentially launched the career of director David Fincher, its troubled gestation -- multiple script drafts by multiple writers -- was an insurmountable obstacle resulting in a disappointing and flawed movie.

Because the story passed through so many hands, there's always been talk about the Alien 3 that might have been. And now, one particular incarnation of that is seeing the light of day. A script by author William Gibson has been unearthed and given a full audiobook treatment by Audible. With a complete cast including Michael Biehn as Hicks and Lance Henriksen as Bishop, and an elaborate soundscape of audio effects, this is being presented essentially as "Alien III" -- essentially a movie, missing only the picture.

Unfortunately, it's an idea that I think does not work. This story, appropriately for the movie it was meant to be, is very action oriented. While there's a game attempt to set a stage with sound, this is not the medium in which to be telling this kind of story. In this format, it's not tense, scary, or exciting. If anything, it's just confusing. The characters are shallow in the way of mindless blockbusters, and cast with a variety of largely indistinguishable voices. In important scenes, you often can't tell who's who, nor do you care about any of them enough to make the effort.

There are a few interesting ideas in the story, new notions of how the alien creatures might morph and where they might come from, but it feels as though the most interesting details of this story were already mined years ago to make Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (to diminishing returns). There's a fair bit of exploration of what communism would be like in a dystopian future, though these elements really make this feel like what it is: an abandoned script from the 1980s.

It's hard to tell if some of the problems here were that William Gibson never got enough drafts of his story to polish it, if it was compromised in rewriting to create this audio drama, or some combination of both. Regardless, there are many other problems. The biggest complaint of the Alien 3 we actually got is how it summarily dispense with the characters of Hicks and Newt. This audio drama marginalizes Ripley almost as badly. Is this because they weren't planning on having Sigourney Weaver at the time, or because they didn't have her now? Either way, it's the same flawed way of following up Aliens: failing to use its surviving characters the right way,

The first half is also quite frustrating and slow. Sure... characters in slasher films shouldn't know they're in a slasher film, but such movies should also get to the point fairly expediently. Half of this 2.5 hour audio drama is spent waiting for a cast of mostly new characters to figure out they've been making bone-headed decisions and are starting to get slaughtered for it. The audience is way too far ahead of them, for far too long.

There is some nostalgia here in hearing Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen back as their beloved characters from Aliens. And the production values thrown at this presentation feel sky high for the format. But William Gibson's Alien III is so boring that, even for all its flaws, I actually prefer the real Alien 3. I give the audio drama a D.