Special Edition (138 min)

Rating: 4/10 (9 May 2020)

That's very profound, Golic. Thank you.
This is me after every attempt this one makes to be an Alien sequel. To be honest, it's visually faithful to the franchise, but it's just the way it looks. The cinematography, as stunning and faithful to the franchise as it is, it neither captures the atmosphere nor the tension of the first two installments. Instead, it just ended up feeling gratuitously grim for the sake of it. Apart from the way it looks, the narrative is even worse. The film has some cool ideas, but it is so predictable and generic at its core. Moreover, it tries to conceal itself under the cloak of the franchise's tropes, and it failed miserably. What's even worse is that it also tries to slightly diverge from its predecessors. The plot, the suspense, the horror elements and the action all take a second seat to "character development and exploration". Well, the characters here can't hold a candle to the effortlessly well-rounded, genuinely characters of the original and its first sequel. Frankly, I didn't mind at first that the decision of discarding all the characters that we became completely invested in in Aliens, but here every try to give the characters some depth comes off as utterly pretentious, and the same goes with most of the lines they deliver, which feel superimposed and unnatural. Ripley and Clemens are the only two characters that I found tolerable. There's no need to say that Sigourney Weaver and Charles Dance are partly responsible for that. But apart from their acting and the chemistry they share, I think the dialogue between them is relatively better or at least slightly more interesting. Overall, though, Alien³ deserves all the notoriety it holds. It's awkward and disgusting and I just hate it, maybe not as much as Fincher does, but I still despise it. I have to admit it's not boring, though, especially the first half of it.
(4/10)