What a mess

Rating: 3/10 (13 August 2014)

In addition to being a quite terrible movie Alien³ also manages to completely undercut the legacy of the previous films in the series. If you liked Aliens, and were happy with the way that film ended, you certainly won't want to watch Alien³. The very first thing this movie does is completely ruin the ending of Aliens. Whose bright idea was that? Heaven only knows whose idea that really was as there were so many people who had a hand in producing this awful film. With so much studio interference director David Fincher never had a chance. This film was always going to be a mess. No wonder Fincher would ultimately disown the film. It's not his film. It's nobody's film. It's just a bunch of disparate ideas, most of them terrible, slapped together to produce two hours of misery.
Since I was not particularly a fan of the first two Alien films I don't find this one as much of an insult as I imagine fans of the series would. You don't really have to take in the whole scope of the Alien series to understand just how awful this movie really is though. Taken on its own merits...well, actually it has no merits. There is really nothing good to say about this movie. Maybe if you're being generous you could say it provides a decent resolution to Ripley's story arc. But what a painful slog it is in getting to that resolution. No excitement, no drama. The story is weak, the dialogue is laughably bad, the performances are by and large terrible. Sigourney Weaver again has some nice presence to her as she reprises the famous role of Ripley. But everything which surrounds her disappoints. The flimsy story sees Ripley land on a penal colony inhabited by all-male inmates with a history of extreme physical and sexual violence. Not a great place for a woman then. But wait, these prisoners have been redeemed! Sort of. They're following some kooky, made-up quasi-religion. One inmate, Dillon, is more or less the leader. His preaching keeps the guys in line but that preaching comes across as much more corny than powerful. Anyhow, turns out Ripley brought an Alien with her because of course she did. Chaos ensues, we get a bunch of largely incoherent action sequences with a bunch of bald guys we can't tell apart running around willy-nilly. And eventually the movie ends. There's really not much more to it than that. The whole thing has more than a touch of incoherence to it. It's really quite a mess. But when you understand the behind the scenes shenanigans that were going on you realize there was never any way it was going to be anything but a mess. With the weak material he had Fincher was never going to be able to fashion a good movie here. But left to his own devices he surely could have come up with something at least marginally better than this. As it is Alien³ is just an awful, awful movie.