“My favorite scene is the one when the bald guy gets killed.” – Dave Smith
What a miserable, boring slog this film is. What a senseless, inert and strange experience. What a waste of beautiful craftsmanship.
Alien 3 begins, like Aliens itself, where the previous movie ended. Ripley is drifting through space, frozen, along with Newt and Hicks, hopefully heading back home after blowing up their enemies. But of course, there is an alien egg on the ship, and it makes things go very wrong. The cryogenic pod ejects, Ripley crashes into the ocean, and she is pulled out by the prisoners/custodians/weird demi-Christians of a former prison/mining planet owned by Weyland-Yutani, who seem to own everything in the universe.
There are mistakes aplenty in this film: the scripting, the special effects, the tone. The movie was made with barely a script, and scenes and entire plotlines seem to be grafted from entirely different stories. From what is here, it seems like the film is about punishment. Ripley’s hope, the semi-family she had with her, all perish in the crash, and the monster that has chased her across space is still there – but, in one of the few memorable scenes, it will not attack her. The prisoners who inhabit the planet were to be evacuated at some point, but decided to stay. When Ripley eventually asks to be killed (what a cheery scene), Charles S. Dutton’s evil convict guy/priest refuses to do it, and not out of any love for her. It is all about punishment, and misery. To what end? That’s anyone’s guess. A lot of it looks great. David Fincher’s aesthetic, his unblinking gaze on violence, is fully formed here on his first feature. But it is at the service of no story. And the special effects let him down. The alien (called the Runner, I think) looks pretty neat, but in all the scenes when it’s off a-running, the animation is fine, but the lighting doesn’t fit. It looks strange and out of place in every single scene it is in.
Unpleasant, muddled, hardly any story, character arcs that break halfway through, a complete waste of Charles Dance: It is not (in this, the theatrical cut) an unappreciated classic. It is a mess.