Alien 3 (1992)

  This is a terrible poster.  It does the movie no justice whatsoever.

LT Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is once again the lone survivor after her craft suffers a malfunction which jettisons the sleep pods into space.  She lands on a prison planet run by a skeleton crew of 25 criminals, two administrators, and a medical officer.  As upset as she is that her friends are dead, she is more dismayed by the evidence that an alien had gotten on board and caused the initial malfunction.  She doesn't want to tell anyone her suspicions but her erratic behavior is a concern for Clemens (Charles Dance), the medical officer.  Then people start dying.

It seems like no one ever wants to acknowledge this film as part of the Alien canon but it's actually a really important part.  This is the first time we see the xenomorph come from a non-human host, which tells us that the host does affect the parasite in some ways.  In this case, it's an ox so the resulting alien is larger right out of the gate and also a quadruped primarily.  Part of that is because this is the first movie to try CGI to show us the alien as opposed to a guy in a suit.  The CGI has not held up as well as the practical effects but the filmmakers probably wouldn't have known that at the time.

It's also a big step in the evolution of Ripley as a character.  She goes from virgin (as in never having experienced anything like the xenomorph, not sexual virgin) in Alien to mother in Aliens to martyr.  By this third go around, she knows exactly what is going to happen and is willing to sacrifice herself to save others.  No more of the traumatized "I don't want to have anything to do with it" attitude from Aliens.  She has accepted her destiny.  And then things get weird for Alien:  Resurrection but we'll get to that in a later post.

This installment was directed by David Fincher, continuing the trend of having a new perspective for each chapter.  Up until this point, Fincher had only done music videos and documentaries; this was his feature debut.  He went on to do Fight Club, Se7en, Gone Girl, and weirdly, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  So, if Ridley Scott was the master of dread, and James Cameron kept us on the edge of our seats, then Fincher made our skin crawl.  Maybe that's not your preferred flavor of horror but I dig it.  The previous two movies left us with some hope, but Fincher strips that away like the illusion that it is.  Evil is everywhere in the Fincher-verse and all you can pray for is to remain as changed by it as little as possible.