Trainwreck or not? Not an easy decision, but the answer is: Trainwreck

Rating: 4/10 (30 January 2005)

I never used to flat-out hate Alien 3, but I was never a huge fan of it, either. Of course, both Alien and Aliens are perfect 10s, while Alien 3 deviates from the course of excellence. It had many problems, chief of which was the way it continued and yet did not continue from the previous film. If Hollywood wants to do a continuation, they should do a continuation, instead of making a movie that really stands alone, but has a misplaced reference to continuity between the two movies ungracefully inserted. That's a very inconsistent, half-assed and frankly shitty way to present a movie to devoted audiences.
However, I did watch Alien 3 several times up through the last 12 years, and seemed to like it better and better each time. I was starting to convince - I mean fool - myself that it was a wholesome stylistic exercise and experience.
Then the Director's Cut came out. A friend of mine characterizes it as "different, but not better or worse. Just different". We have a longer and infinitely more well-rounded story, with a completely different opening (Ripley having been flung out of the EEV, and the chest-burster having infected an ox - not a dog), and much, much bigger roles for the inmates at the penal colony. Finally, there is a reason for the story to be set in a prison. And there's much more human drama, and it's quite well-made.
But. There's a big "but". It is stylistically well done, but it just doesn't work very well. It's not a terribly interesting story. The whole thing reeks of a bad idea that has nothing much to do with sci-fi *or* aliens - or anything else. One doesn't really care about the characters. Sigourney Weaver and Charles Dance both do a good job in their roles, but the story is just not substantial. Where are the overtones and the subtext; the symbolism? What is the movie saying? Not much.
All the Director's Cut has accomplished for me is to demonstrate how enormously empty the theatrical version was, and replaced it with something that indeed is not better, just different. One cannot call the Director's Cut worse, because the story is much more coherent and wholesome. It just isn't of much interest.
I am sad to say that I have now lost the mild appreciation I used to have for Alien 3. I used to rate it a 6 out of 10, but now, in the realization that it really is quite a bad movie, I have to revise that rating to a 4. *Sigh!*