Bad is an understatement

Rating: 1/10 (24 February 2009)

Alien3 is garbage. Not only an insult to the Alien series, but one of the worst horror movies ever made. Or perhaps it was the worst. A non-existent script, a silly sequence of uninspired gore (and nudity!) scenes, laughably predictable scares, obnoxious characters and the lamest creature effects since King Kong (1933) make for damn crappy sequels, but this one was crappier than most. Never has a lead actress wrecked her defining role as thoroughly as has Sigourney Weaver in Alien3. She mindlessly stumbles through this entire movie, does Ripley want to fight or die, we don't know and she doesn't know either, there was no script when they shot all these awful scenes, there was no concept, nothing, just pressure from the studio bosses to meet the production deadline. And then there is Weaver and the plot holes: Why does she escape the impact unscathed, and how does she get to the shore? Where did the alien egg come from in the first place, and how are there two aliens? Why does her lifeboat just crash into a planet, and how did the ship get into its orbit in the first place? How can she run around for days carrying an alien embryo, and why would she venture out of the infirmary station knowing she's in a maximum security prison for sex offenders? Unanswered questions, because the actual answer is cheap writing. The writers of this movie, and reportedly there were many, didn't care about continuity or common sense. Just throw logic out the window, throw in Weaver, some alien eggs, some gore scenes and let the audience swallow this load of crap! But Weaver was not alone in having a terrible time in this stinker: The prisoners were some of the most obnoxious "characters" you've ever seen. Not just lame, phony and undeveloped, but downright annoying. The audience wanted them and Weaver to die, well, then how were we supposed to be entertained? Guess we weren't, it's a Fincher movie, and undoubtedly his worst to date. Half of the lines in the movie are four letter words, but don't take that to mean the rest of the dialog is sophisticated. After two hours of tiresome slaughter scenes, the number of characters has been thankfully reduced from a distracting 25 to 3, predictably including Weaver's character, and we are confronted with the final letdown: A cheesy ending that turns out to be a laughable Christ allegory: Weaver's character is tempted, resists and sacrifices herself... only to be reanimated for the next paycheck, in the equally atrocious Alien Resurrection! This is Hollywood and here are the facts: Alien3 is complete garbage, it is beyond me how this story came to be accepted by the studio.