Not Alien enough

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 1999)

First of all, I would like to say that Alien 3 is a good action/thriller. It has suspense, good dialogue and a decent plot. But it isn't a good Alien movie, and because of that it will be unfairly dismissed as 'bad'. Aliens continued logically on from Alien, with a storyline that told us more about Ripley, the company and the creature. But with Alien 3, however, it seemed to hit a brick wall. Yes, the isolated mining facility looked nice, and it did establish a forboding atmosphere, but it didn't have the tension of the first two. In the first two films, it was more the thought of an deadly monster hunting you down than the actual monster itself, but here the Xenomorph seems less deadly, and therefore less frightening. In Alien and Aliens, letting it get anywhere near you was certainly fatal, but here you might as well play fetch with it. I recommend to anyone who has seen Alien and Aliens but hasn't seen Alien 3 yet, that when you do watch it, try and imagine that after Aliens, Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop (the coolest character in the trilogy) were rescued by the Corporation and that the people here are actually not the same people from the first two films, and it's just a coincidence that they have the same names. You'll enjoy Alien 3 a lot more, and it won't depress you every time you see the ending to Aliens knowing that they're all going to die.