Surprisingly very good.

Rating: 7/10 (13 December 2003)

Most movies that are made into trilogies without being written as such in the first place usually degenerate into crap, no matter how good the idea was to start out with. Take the Terminator trilogy for instance (though it must be admitted that the second one was pretty cool). Alien, however, is not one of those trilogies. The first and the second are different enough that the movies each remain interesting. And the third one, amazingly enough, does the same thing. Unlike most of the movie series put out by Hollywood, there is enough to do with the Alien storyline that there can conceivably be more than one movie. Alien 3 is an often underrated sci-fi film, as it hearkens back to the first one. However, it also does several things the first two do not in terms of character embellishment and suspense. In addition, it provides beautiful visual effects (if the word 'beautiful' can be connected to a sci-fi/horror monster). The acting isn't incredible, but it's not bad, and the ending ties things up nicely, finishing the series in a satisfactory way. If only the producers had recognized that before they made the fourth one, which is tripe.