The great betrayal

Rating: 4/10 (29 September 2019)

I have a great respect for David Fincher's craft as a director; even if I'm not a fan of most of his movies - with some exceptions, for example I loved Zodiac - I recognize their quality.
However, I hate Alien 3. Fincher is mostly blameless, I guess, although his cinematic debut here doesn't show many traces of the superior visual control he has become famous for.
No, the real culprit is the screenplay. Characters are uniformly one-note and unlikable (with the exception of Charles Dance's doctor), so different from the relatable space truckers of Alien and the well-sketched marines of Aliens. The troubled production history rears its ugly head here, with many rewrites and rejected ideas - the Xenomorphs were initially supposed to come to Earth, then to a forest planet inhabited by monks.
Also, killing off Newt and Hicks like that, before the film even starts, feels like intentionally trolling the fans of Aliens (it certainly offended James Cameron, who was very vocal about it at the time). While I like Hicks a lot, he was expendable; Newt wasn't. Her relationship with Ripley was the emotional core of Aliens. Her lazy demise retroactively makes the climax of Cameron's classic, where Ripley goes back for her, quite pointless.
Now, if they absolutely wanted a dark sequel where Newt died, it could have been done - but it should have felt like a central moment, in a situation where the protagonist had some agency. Imagine a climax where, say, Ripley has to choose between saving her "daughter" or stopping some corporate goons from bringing the Xenomorphs to Earth. That would have been gut-wrenching.
Instead, we get this limp mess. Once Newt and Hicks are dead and we find out Ripley is incubating a xenomorph and is therefore doomed, all the characters we like are gone; tension and audience investment whoosh out of the picture like air out of a punctured balloon.
The series never recovered.
4/10