Well, it had to happen eventually. I'd previously reviewed the other three movies in the Alien tetralogy on this website, so sooner or later I was going to have to come to this one. David Fincher's Alien 3 was the highly anticipated follow-up to Jim Cameron's hit Aliens, and the pre-release hype indicated he would be implementing a new visual style that would propel the series forward.
Uh uh. Alien 3 is a heroic disaster on almost every level, and it makes one wonder if the makers were actually intentionally making the movie this bad or if it was simply that no one involved could tell how bad it was until it was too late. Either way, Sigourney Weaver must have been laughing all the way to the bank -- they had killed off her beloved character Ripley and gave her very little actual acting to do thanks to a terrible script.
This time around, Ripley is the lone survivor from the previous film and she lands on a prison planet inhabited by murderers and lifelong criminals. An alien critter has also survived, and, in a poorly edited sequence, trades barbs with a mutt, thus giving it such natural dog-like features as being able to walk on ceilings and maneuver about like a praying mantis(!). Perhaps it bonded with an insect version of Lionel Richie, I don't know.
Anyway, the prisoners are offed one by one because the scriptwriter decided not to allow weapons into the story. That's okay though, because all of the characters look exactly the same and they all exclaim the same things to each other: "What do we do?" and "This can't be happening", etc. In the end, they are running from tunnel to tunnel while a camera chases them. Then in the other shots they wait while the obviously computer-generated alien rushes by them or directly into them.
There is no real action in this movie, no emotional involvement, no good jokes, not even any effective surprises. The only reason I haven't given Alien 3 a no star rating is that I know I have seen even worse monster movies. That, however, should be little consolation for this boring and phony installment in an otherwise entertaining franchise.
