The movie David Fincher called “just awful”
Too often forgotten in the busy landscape of contemporary cinema, the American visionary David Fincher is one of the most important filmmakers of the modern industry. Responsible for some of America’s finest recent works, including Seven, Fight Club, Gone Girl and The Social Network, Fincher has surprisingly never been awarded an Oscar for any of his movies, despite three nominations.
Like every burgeoning filmmaker, Fincher started at the very bottom of the movie industry, learning his craft by making countless music videos for stars such as Michael Jackson, Iggy Pop and Madonna. Though before this, Fincher worked as a visual effects producer, working beside George Lucas on the 1983 movie Twice Upon a Time before being hired by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to work as an assistant cameraman on the iconic sequel Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and 1984s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Leaving ILM in 1984, Fincher set his sights on directing, and after being given the opportunity to direct Rick Springfield’s 1985 documentary, The Beat of the Live Drum, co-founded a production company named Propaganda Films. Making multiple commercials and 53 music videos across the course of just under a decade, Fincher referred to this period of his career as his “film school” and was awarded his first feature film directing gig in 1992, thanks to his efforts.
Following in the footsteps of two iconic filmmakers, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, Fincher was burdened with a heavy weight when he took on the third film in the Alien franchise from the hands of previous director Vincent Ward.
Working off Ward’s troubled story, Fincher struggled to make anything great from the template, producing one of the franchise’s worst movies as a result, with fans and critics across the world shocked at its lack of quality. Needlessly complex and narratively dull, Alien3 is seen as one of Fincher’s worst movies, if you can even attribute the failure to him, with many hands meddling with the disastrous film.
Having just five weeks of preparation time before filming began, Fincher had to work off an unfinished script, an experience he would later call “just awful” in a candid interview with journalist Mark Burman that later ended up in Imagi-Movies Magazine.
Speaking about his experience, he added: “Look, it would be stupid for me to say that I didn’t know what I was getting into. It took me five years to decide what I wanted to do and I always held out for something on this scale because I like this kind of canvas, I like the scope of this kind of thing…The lesson to be learned is that you really can’t take on an enterprise of this size and scope if you don’t really have a movie like The Terminator or Jaws behind you”.
If this weren’t enough evidence that Fincher hated the movie, he would later state on-stage at the BFI Southbank in 2009, “No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me”.
Sometimes we’d recommend watching a terrible film, just to tick it off your watchlist. But Fincher’s film is truly awful; just leave it to the realm of cinematic obscurity.
