I guess I remember as an Alien series weirdo about everyone flipping the fuck out about how cool William Gibson's Alien 3 was going to be, and I was just laughing. It had the most generic fucking script ever, it was as by the books as you could get. It was their first attempt

They couldn't get Weaver back on so she was in a coma the entire movie. It would have been Renny Harlin's second movie after directing a Nightmare on Elm Street whichever, Die Hard 2, but between this failed project and that, the shark movie Deep Blue Sea

People have this extreme hatred for Alien 3, even as an Assembly Cut to the point they want to make an effeminate series about confronting masculinity, confronting the dragon itself, about fucking science. Which the series was never about strictly.

There's entire scenes in that script of pure military technobabble which I'm sure Michael Biehn would have said wonderfully, a character who's survival in Aliens always felt..off? Like how the hell did he survive the point of the series isn't about a family unit or about mom

It would have involved Space Soviets even though in two years, Cold War would be over and everyone at the time knew it would be over. So you have this movie filled with technojargin, Space Soviets, maybe released months before the USSR collapsed if it was made, without Ripley

Every other script between that was god awful. It went from William Gibson leaving the project because Fox realized it was so cookie cutter, to a fucking script about space hicks in a glass space dome where people can't stop saying "DARN IT" and "FUCKERS" and I shit you not

Aliens becoming aliens because of spores, that carried over from the Gibson's, making everything biomechanical. Sounds cool right? No it isn't. Pig aliens. Mosquito aliens. Cow aliens. fUse together to make a giant ball of alien. A tiny alien that gets it in a garbage disposal

That movie had no returning characters, neither would the next. Just awful.

Then you have the guy who made Chronicles of Riddick but wasn't yet known for Chronicles of Riddick, write an edgy version about Weyland Yutani testing on a bunch of prisoners different engineered Aliens. I mean it was alright I guess but forgettable in the same way as Gibson's

Then they had a script that finally got Weaver's attention after years by a New Zealand film maker by the name of Vincent Ward. Giler and Hill saw a baroque movie movie that came out recently that was getting a lot of buzz called The Navigator and they got him on the line

He reminded David Giler and Walter Hill of a young Ridley Scott fresh off The Duelists, but he read this prison script and said "I'm not doing this, this is boring." And then they did something strange as hell considering. They asked, well alright, give us a treatment

What happened next is one of the most beautiful sounding scifi movies never made that got Weaver back on. The story goes decades ago, economic-heretics of a religious order that totally reject all advanced technology, are committed to a life aboard a customizable spheroid station

They hate the idea but they are of their own kind, prisoners. Economic-Heretics. They clad it in wood to make sure that they can at least never see such terrible technology. Eventually, they're in deep space, with an atmosphere processor, solid anti-gravity, and a thin atmosphere

All Male Econ-Exile Colony Arceon: Population 350 Political Exiles
Crime: Political Heresy Against Earth And Her Colonies

They lived a simple life in this wooden clad world. A glass works made mirrors, churches with stained glass, they paint the skies inside with ladders, daily

The movie would have progressed similarly, Hicks and Newt dying, but ultimately more focus was put on the hallucinatory aspects, her confronting her demons. The Aliens intelligence was to be explored, an incredibly surreal and baroque, ending in what Ward described "Bosche"

20th Century Fox got weak kneed and changed the prisoners to regular prisoners, but kept much of the story intact except changing a few details, making the habitat a colony. Making it mechanical and dirty. And when they finally started shooting they hated what they had

David Fincher's first movie, like the film itself, takes place in hell. A cold prison. But it is about the same things, and one day I'll elaborate on why the assembly cut truly stuck with me as a trans woman, just nailing feminine vulnerability in both scripts. But in the end?

William Gibson's Alien 3 would have sucked in comparison to Ward's vision and Fincher's flawed but beautiful film that was never meant to be, we only have an Assembly Cut to guide us.

You're all a bunch of freaks for thinking the alien monkey movie would have been better

I just wish, in my heart of hearts, that Ward's version was made instead. God what a beautifully tragic and sad movie about confronting your most inner demons and changes in life you never wanted, that just follows. Many people consider it one of the best scifi movies never made

You can imagine why this would impact me so strongly and emotionally as a transwoman herself. It isn't so much that I just chose a random movie that struck me and informed much of my growth, but that it feels like Fincher's Assembly Cut, and this movie. They both struck something

And I still cannot for the life of me find out why you think Gibson's story about Space Communists vs Space Capitalists was better than an exploration of the role of women in society and how to confront trauma you've "lived with you so long, you don't remember anything else"

Just ultimately forgettable trash in comparison.

Well there's my psycho morning thread. Americans need better taste

Ultimately Americans wanted guns and space ships, not women and trauma, and coming out the other end living life on your own terms. Ultimately unsurprising.