A lowered expectation film from an era of lesser achievement.

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2017)

Starting with Star Wars in 1977, there was a non-stop march of blockbuster science films continuing on throughout most of the 1980s. However, things suddenly took a sour note with the release of 1989's Star Trek - The Final Frontier, and Alien 3 is really just a continuation of that ongoing downward trend in science fiction movies which began with The Final Frontier.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that between the years 1989 and 2000 there were only a handful of really good science fiction movies released; 1991's Terminator II, 1997's Alien Resurrection, and 1998's Deep Impact. Aside from these three films the 1990s were pretty much a harsh desert as far as science fiction films go. Moreover, it could even be argued that Terminator II isn't at all a science fiction movie, and it is really more of a story about a boy and his faithful dog(android). But, however, you slice it, Alien 3 cannot hold a candle to any of the better science fiction films of the 1990s, and it is simply a weak film in every category.
But what is it which makes 1992's Alien 3 such a weak film when compared to other great films such as its predecessor, Aliens, from 1986?
To begin with, the over arching story line is too improbable for most audience members to buy into it. An audience will buy into a weak story line if the film has enough other redeeming qualities to make up for the film's weak story line. A crew of blue-collar workers manning the commercial spacecraft Nostromo is believable, a platoon of colonial marines sent out to investigate the disappearance of a colony is believable, however, prison inmates left alone unsupervised on a shut down factory planet is not believable! Maybe if they'd portrayed the prison planet as being more like the real life settlers who lived in early Australia, with men, women, and children, then perhaps it would have been more believable, but they didn't do that, they just put matching uniforms on a group of men and said, "Here, these guys, are in prison, you figure out why there aren't any guards, even robotic ones, around." It is hard to buy into the characters found in Alien 3, because unlike the colonial marines found in Aliens, the inmate characters depicted in Alien 3 are completely lacking in dignity, heroics, or individuality.
Unfortunately, Alien 3 lacks enough redeeming features to overcome the weak premise of its story line, and what little action that does takes place is done without the suspense found in the two earlier films.
When the audience witnesses an inmate being eviscerated by an alien, the feeling is pretty much, Oh well, we've seen this type of gore before in the two earlier films, maybe the next scene will be better. As each secondary character is killed off by the aliens, there is no suspense, and the audience isn't left wondering how the group will go on surviving after the loss of this particular individual. To make matters worse the acting found in Alien 3 is stale in comparison to Aliens, and at times it even seems that the great Sigourney Weaver is phoning it in.
When Commander Spock was temporarily killed off towards the end of Wrath of Khan, the audience fell the sting of his death. However, after Sigourney Weaver's Ripley character did a black flip into a pool of molten lead, the only thing that the audience felt was, "Well, I guess I have to pick up a few things at the grocery store on my way home from the movie theater."
Additionally, Alien 3 is plagued with pointless and sporadic action sequences set mainly in dimly lit stone corridors. The visual effects are underwhelming even by the standards of the early 1990s (keep in mind that this came out approximately one year before Jurassic Park), and due to the absences of high technology throughout most of the film, Alien 3 does not seem to fit within the same universe containing Alien, and Aliens.
In reality Alien 3 is simply a cheap B movie, and if it had been released ten or twelve years earlier, then it might have done very well at the box office. However after more than a decade of films such as Blade Runner, The Thing, The Terminator, and Aliens, the audience expected much more. Sadly, however, by this time the studios had figured out that all they needed to do to turn a profit was to slap a popular franchise logo onto a turd, and the science fiction fans would come running to shell out their hard earned money.