Nice Poster...

Rating: 1/10 (23 January 2004)

Sorry, I have tried hard to like this movie but I really don't! The only thing that makes me giving it 3 instead of 1 is that the Directors Cut version I have just seen is an awful lot more cohesive in structure and characterization than the one I saw in the cinema - full credit to Paul McGann. The whole behind the scenes struggle to make the film is very apparent in the final film - characters are introduced and dispatched, and do we care? No The sets are beautiful - but what are they for?! The prisoners / monk set up just isn't credible, Charles Dance is wasted (literally!) for what? There are no answers to any of the questions posed by the first two films, no development to the franchise as we knew the company were no gooders in the first one! The only scenes (apart from the restored Golic ones) that meant anything to me were the ones involving Ripley, Bishop the android and the bodies of Newt & Hicks. They were very poignant after all the trials we had been through with the characters in Aliens. The ending didn't help much at the time I first saw it either, as Ripleys big suicide moment came to the screens too close to Arnies trip to the furnice in T2 to be anything approaching original. But of all the criticism I could heap on this unfortunate film, the biggest one in my eyes is that along with killing Hicks and Newt, the writers dismissed Aliens altogether and turned Alien3 into a dismal rehash of Alien. The more I think of it, the more I am inclined to give it 1 out of 10 after all... But the poster and T shirt were great