The ‘Alien 3’ Superior Assembly Cut has Crash-Landed on HBO Max
The far superior version of ‘Alien 3’, the Assembly Cut, has crash-landed on HBO Max, and we cannot recommend it enough.
I have long been a defender of Alien 3. David Fincher‘s (Se7en) debut feature was an utterly disastrous production, riddled with constant restarts and studio interference. And yet, the filmmaker still managed to deliver a competent, exciting, and most importantly, great Alien sequel. While fans have argued over the quality of the film for decades, one thing we can all agree on is that the Assembly Cut is the superior version of the film…and it just dropped on HBO Max, reports THR this morning.
The cut features a much longer (and better) version of the film, clocking in at two hours and 25 minutes compared to the theatrical cut, which is one hour and 54 minutes.
Without getting too deep into it, the cut essentially expands on the story, containing various extended and deleted scenes. I won’t spoil anything, but the Assembly Cut makes for a much richer experience, providing certain characters greater depth and making sense of some plot holes.
The version exists because Fox wanted a “Director’s Cut” of Alien 3 for home video, but Fincher refused to participate. So the studio created this “Assembly Cut” and released it on the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set (a set you bet I owned and watched through religiously).
In Alien 3, “Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-lands on the maximum-security prison Fiorina 161, where she discovers that she has unwittingly brought along an unwelcome visitor.”
The Aliens: Directors Cut and Alien Resurrection: Special Edition were also added to HBO Max…all of it just in time for Alien Day on April 26th. If you’ve never seen any of the above (and especially the Alien 3 Assembly Cut), I could not recommend more that you fix that.
