the complete opposite of Aliens

Rating: Null/10 (22 October 1999)

Which is a reason why this movie is hated so much. Even though Alien 3 is much closer to the intent of the original movie. Aliens turned Alien into a neat action/sci-fi flick with a bunch of simple characters and moronic catch-phrases, and Alien 3 takes it to the opposite extreme. It's a dark thriller, not an action flick.
Unfortunately it suffers from some big drawbacks. The sound mix is awful. For Example when Ripley is whispering you can barely make out what she's saying, so you turn the sound up and that's when a large explosion goes off and blows out your speakers. The effects hold up rather poorly. Also, every time they build up a character they kill them 5 minutes later. Leaving you with a bunch of characters you don't really care about.
There are some great moments in this movie, and the cinematography is great, but it could have been so much better. Fincher said it was only 25% of what he wanted, and it shows. Maybe if the studio hadn't screwed around with the script and the editing, trying to dumb down the movie, this could have been great. Unfortunatley it's not, and is just slightly above average.