The interesting part comes eleven years later. In preparing a big fancy box set of what it insisted in calling the "Alien Quadrilogy," 20th Century Fox invited the four directors of the four Alien films to prepare director's cuts of the films (or simply to re-issue an existing director's cut, for James Cameron's Aliens). Fincher refused to have any part of it, leaving the studio to hunt elsewhere for an alternate version of the movie. They found it in the form of Fincher's workprint, the complete (but unpolished) edit of the movie that the director presented to the studio as his last step before bailing out. A coat of color-correction later, as well as tightening the sound mix and finishing up some visual effects, and Fox was able to release the workprint on DVD in 2003 as an "assembly cut."
Lo and behold, this much longer version (37 minutes over the theatrical cut) largely manages to save the movie; even more so if we're talking about the 2010 Blu-ray version, which has the cast come back to overdub some inaudible dialogue. It's not that the assembly cut of Alien³ is somehow a fundamentally different movie than the theatrical cut. It's the same movie done much, much better.
