Not bad but not as good as the first two

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2005)

This movie gets a lot of crap because it was preceded by two much better movies. In truth I found Alien 3 to be the darkest of the series. The prison setting definitely adds a darker mood and feeling to the whole thing. I found that a few things did not make much sense when you looked back at the first two movies, such as (spoiler) {why could the alien come out of a dead animal but couldn't kill Ripley when she had the queen in her stomach? couldn't the queen come out of Ripley's dead body?} but such dissidence's are few and generally unnoticeable. However, to put it frankly, the theatrical version of this movie was missing something and palled in comparison to the first two. It felt strained and did not build up the terror and in the end felt like mindless violence. The added gore seemed like a filler for the fact that the movie lacked a good suspenseful set up.
However I gave this movie an 8 out of 10 because after buying the Alien Quadrilogy I found that there was a special edition of this movie, and oh how much better it is. The length is increased to about 3 hours but its all worth it. The added time builds up the suspense much better and when the time finally arrives for the violence, gore and mayhem it all much more nicely set up and seems to have more purpose. Also, many scenes that were deleted contain some good dialogue that helps set up the dark mood of the prison and the feelings of the inmates to the terror that is the alien.