Unfairly criticised entry to the Alien series

Rating: 9/10 (18 November 2009)

I have long considered the first Alien movie to be one of my, if not my all time favourite movie. The sequel, Aliens was the rare sequel which came close to being almost as good as the original. The third entry in the series was a film which I once did not care for. I will admit that the theatrical version of this movie is not exactly firing on all cylinders. The studio had butchered David Fincher's work into a near-incomprehensible and deeply flawed movie. The film became dismissed by a lot of people as a misstep in the Alien franchise and rightly so. However...
In 2003, with the debut of the truly excellent DVD known as the Alien Quadrilogy, I discovered a so-called Assembeley Cut of Alien 3 which included around half an hour of new footage. I watched this cut and was very surprised with the result.The assembly cut of this movie was a better movie than the theatrical version. Here are several ways in which the assembly cut triumphs over the somewhat dire theatrical version: The pacing. In the theatrical version, the pacing is very convoluted and is not worth following. The special edition (assembly cut, whatever) has far better pacing. We are given an explanation to several things such as how Paul McGann's character dies and whole new interesting subplot involving the capture and subsequent escape of the alien. Many people complain about the cgi, when in reality the movie only had one single cgi shot, the rest was heavily animatronics.
The movie still has it's flaws, it's never fully explained exactly how the egg got on the ship, but as far as third entries into a series go, it's not bad. In short, if you watch a version of this movie, make sure it's the assembly cut. If you've only seen the (admittidly poor) theatrical version, seek out the assembly cut before you give this movie a 1/10. You probably won't regret it.