A stylish horror video clip lacking substance and meaning

Rating: 2/10 (22 March 2009)

Alien 3, pretentiously written as Alien "cubed", follows Ridley Scott's horror classic Alien (1979) and James Cameron's amazing sequel Aliens (1986). Alien 3 was directed by David Fincher, a guy who made video clips for MTV before he was inexplicably hired to follow in the footsteps of two of the greatest directors Hollywood has ever seen. To get straight to the point, Fincher knows how to handle his camera, he has a distinctive style, but that's about it. His movie is ruined by an awfully unimaginative script that essentially repeats the story of the first movie on a remote planet, but it does so without fleshing out the characters, without giving the movie an underlying meaning except for some vague notions of religion (which were apparently taken over from an abandoned script about a religious cult inhabiting the planet).
Weaver returns as Ripley, strangely promoted to the rank of Lieutenant since Aliens (impossible really, since there is no time gap between the second and third movie to allow this to happen). I guess this is one of the many flaws and plot holes in Alien 3, another is the impossible appearance of an alien egg on the Sulaco right at the beginning of the movie, obviously put there by the script writers to trigger off the story. Weaver fails to give her character the depth it had in Aliens, quite likely thanks to the weakness of the script. The other characters are mostly cannon fodder whose only function is to cross the alien's path, scream and die. There is virtually no character development in Alien 3, and thus no suspense.
Alien 3 is a cheap, unimaginative Hollywood sequel that should have never been made. It has no respect for the grandiose first two movies and the only reason why it was made was money. Unfortunately Alien 3 didn't tank as badly as could have been expected, and so the producers decided to make a fourth movie and the AVP movies. My recommendation: Consider all these movies nightmares and ignore them. The Alien Series, quality wise, ended with Aliens.