Dog Alien?

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2009)

I thought both Alien and Aliens were very good films. I had heard many reviewers state that Alien 3 is by far the worst of the entire Alien series and a terrible film. For the most part those reviewers were correct.
Basically Ripley winds up a planet that is a prison for criminals. During the ship landing while she was asleep, Newt and Hicks both died. An alien managed to sneak aboard the ship and infects a dog and creates a new dog alien that starts to cause problems for everyone on this planet.
First off, I have to say that the story and acting were particularly bad. Why on Earth did this prison planet have NO FREAKING WEOPONS ON IT! It made the conflict somewhat more interesting but that idea is super dumb. Also none of the supporting characters were really that interesting. I did not like how they killed off Hicks and Newt right off the bat. There is no doubt that they just killed them off because they could not get the actors that played them to appear in this film.
Sigourney Weaver is pretty good as Ripley in this film, but she always is good. Still, this is her worst performance I think and I blame more of it on a bad director and script then I do on her. It is like Simon Cowell once said to a bad contestant on American Idol, "Coaching you would be like coaching a one legged person to a gold medal in the one hundred meter dash." If the script and plot is bad, the acting will often suffer as a result.
The Alien is OK. It is kind of cool how it emerged from a different animal, this time a dog. It gets in some good action, but since the rest of the film was so bad, it really was not worth the wait at all. Also the whole alien point of view shots were kind of stupid because it made the alien seem to move much slower than they appear to in the film.
So, bad plot and bad characters. Sigourney Weaver is OK and so is the alien, but I do not recommend this film.