Alien 3 (1992)

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Alien Reviews

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This has always been one of those movies I tend to meet in the middle. While there are things I outright hate about this movie, I feel like as a whole, it's bad, but not quite as awful as people claim. As far as a third entry into a series, I've definitely seen worse, and I've definitely seen better. I'd claim it to be passable, but it has absolutely nothing on the first two films, which have both reached a sort of "classic" classification at this point in time. This pretty much has one really famous seen (as seen in accompanying pic), but is otherwise not as memorable.

We know we're gonna be pretty disappointed throughout the opening credits, as they essentially show you right from the get go that the whole plot of 'Aliens' (by far the best of them) gets tossed out the window here. Remember that little girl, Newt, who Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was essentially playing mother bear to, protecting her every step of the way? Well, spoiler alert, but she dies while in stasis (along with a couple of others I won't name), and the ship they're travelling in, The Sulaco, eventually crash lands on an all-male inhabited foundry and maximum-security correctional facility called Fiorina "Fury" 161.

Upon being awoken by the prison's chief medical officer, Clemens (Charles Dance), Ripley learns that she is the sole survivor, and worries that there may have been an alien on board - which there was. Said alien (a facehugger in this case) escapes into the facility, and goes after a poor dog, thus eventually creating the "Dog Xenomorph," who's our big baddie in this chapter. There's not a whole lot of difference between this thing and your average hunter/drone, except that it seem much more animalistic, and perhaps faster on all fours.

While Ripley tries to take every precaution to try to find out whether or not this crew is gonna have to deal with another damned Xenomorph, the others pretty much toss aside her thought, thinking she's maybe gone mad. However, as one by one the prisoners and crew start going missing under mysterious circumstances, it seems that Ripley isn't so full of crap. Now it's up to her to familiarize these dudes with the monster who has haunted her for too long now, and hopefully kill it.

As far as the aspects of the movie that I hate, the biggest problem to me is the idea that 'Aliens,' while still being a great sci-fi action flick, is essentially rendered "pointless" after the very beginning of this - and the same writers are on it! This could have had to do with Carrie Henn's aging of six years, but in such cases, a recasting is forgivable. On top of that, I honestly just find the film to be altogether slow, and when the action does happen, it tends happen off screen or show that insanely aged '92 CG. 'Jurassic Park' wouldn't set that bar until the following year. Forgivable, but hard to look at now.

Another thing that I feel like I need to point out is the fact that this was directed by the one and only David Fincher. Some consider it one of his worst movies, but in his defence, he wasn't much more than a music video director at the time this was released. Quite honestly, I think he's a more forgivable aspect of the film, being that he wasn't only a rookie director back then, but with that particular script, I still see that he did the best with what he had to work with. He is not the problem here.

Despite a few rough things about the film, however, I am an 'Alien' fan much in the same way I'm an 'Elm Street' or 'Friday the 13th' fan. I even find the bad stuff relatively entertaining, even if it is pretty bad. For my money, this one's definitely the worst of the original trilogy, when that was still a thing. But from here on, these movies split audiences like crazy. It all just reverts back to the idea that, like with 'Terminator', this is a series in which if you just watch the first two, you're pretty much good to go.

2/5

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