good but not great

Rating: 6/10 (7 February 2011)

First of all this film is not a 1 star movie, not buy a long shot... The fact is there are quite a few negative reviews of this film because of the First 2 Alien movies!! Alien & Aliens Were both fantastic groundbreaking films in their own right and unfortunately this movie just cant live upto them. It doesn't make it a bad film i actually think Alien3 is pretty good - it has some good ideas = Ripley crash lands on a refinery/prison planet full of male prisoners (there is a lice problem on the planet so no one has any hair (apparently the working title was"Skinheads in space" lol)) The survivors at the end of Aliens all died in the crash apart from Ripley, So she is alone on a planet full of hairless horny hate filled convicts who seem to have embraced Christianity in an almost military fashion(No doubt fed thro the Prison warden the brilliant - Brian Glover) , she manages to find a friend in the prison doctor (Charles Dance)and starts trying to unravel the mystery of what went wrong and why she ended up here, during these events we see one of the prison sniffer dogs with strange new lacerations round its mouth become ill....(you get the picture). There is a great sort of moody claustrophobic feel to this picture, its a shame David Fincher had so many problems with the Studio when making Alien3 because i truly believe that this good film could have been a great film if it had the right sort of time and support that it should have had(apparently the studio kept messing fincher about, and made him start shooting before the script was even finished) So....its not the masterpiece of the first two but (ignore the naysayers) it still has its moments, and the fact that this has a lower IMDb score than Alien Resurrection is an absolute travesty, that was the movie that ruined the alien series for me (i like jeunet films but there's no way he was the right guy to do that sort of movie, i really wanted to like it but.... how long are they under water for without breathing in that underwater scene!???!)