Frustratingly dull, devoid of suspense, and lacks the fleshed out, likable characters of its predecessors.

Rating: 5/10 (1 July 2016)

The premise behind Alien 3 is interesting: Ripley is the only survivor when her ship crash lands on a prison planet full of murderers and rapists while an alien that somehow survived from Ripley's cashed ship starts wreaking havoc on the inmates. The scary thing is that there are no weapons on this planet. It's a throwback to the suspense of the first movie where all they had was a flamethrower, except in Alien 3 they don't even have that. So as you can assume, they're f*cked. Well unfortunately, so is this movie. It's really bad, and it pains me to say it; even the assembly cut. David Fincher disowns this movie because of the constant studio interference, but even then the worst part of the movie is its script. It's horrendous. Apparently they were doing rewrites as they were shooting the movie and you can tell. None of the characters are relatable (sans Ripley of course), and any time they start to build a character, they kill them off soon after. They're all one-dimensional to the point that it's impossible to care when the fifteen nameless bald guys get slaughtered, partially because you can't even tell them apart.
It feels haphazardly thrown together. The pacing is terrible - it's slow and never gains any momentum. There's also nothing quotable in this movie. Nothing. The first two movies had countless quotable lines. This movie has exposition and boring conversations to fill in the gaps between the alien attacks. The alien itself looks like ass - they show it running around a couple times and it looks horrifically bad. They also show POV shots of the alien hunting these guys down which sucks away all the suspense. How can I be afraid of something when I know where it is the whole time? The atmosphere itself is drab and dark, which I wouldn't be opposed to if the movie itself wasn't so boring.
On a positive note, the acting is quite good. Sigourney Weaver is great as usual, the preacher and the doctor (the two characters they try to flesh out) are very good. Even the nameless dumb bald guys are decent. The problem is when they say words. The dialogue is excruciatingly bad and the plot is a mess. Ripley isn't nearly as badass as she used to be; I don't care about anyone else so everything they say is just a waste of time. Because of this the movie feels like it's three hours long. The ending is okay I guess; I like how Lance Henriksen was used, and there are a couple scenes that showed promise. But as a whole, it's physically draining to watch. It's especially painful watching it after Alien and Aliens - both of which were riveting from beginning to end - and this dull piece of crap comes along and sucks the life right out of you. In short, Alien 3 is exhaustingly bad. I recommend this only to Alien completists, and even then you'd probably want to forget this one ever happened.