Alien 3 Movie Review: Witness a Slow Decline

David Fincher’s Alien³ is the third entry in the Alien franchise and, chronologically, directly follows the first two films, Alien and Aliens. At the end of Aliens, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a couple other crew members who escaped the movie’s carnage strap themselves in for cryo-sleep and their journey home to Earth. When Alien³ begins, we discover that an alien has hitchhiked with Ripley and the rest, killing everybody on board except for Ripley whose body has been made host to an alien queen.

This time, Ripley lands in a prison world where violent men are kept far from regular society. In Alien, Ripley and crew had the means to build flamethrowers and had access to a couple useful guns. In Aliens, Ripley and crew came loaded for bear, bringing along a squad of elite Marines. In Alien³, Ripley and the prison crew somehow cannot find two bolts to tape together, even though the prison planet was previously a foundry. And it is still a working foundry. This means they could build just about any sort of sharp or blunt object they want. Nobody seems to think of this strategy. Instead, we get about an hour of not-very-skilled people trying to lure an alien into molten steel.

Alien³ struggles from its own, self-inflicted constraints: too few interesting characters, no plausible way to fight the aliens (at least, none that Ripley and the rest can imagine). To keep Ripley physically safe in the prison, all the men in the colony have become devoutly religious. It is all too convenient. Killing off everybody from Aliens is an obvious mistake, especially since the character known as Newt (Ripley’s surrogate daughter) would have been a perfect addition to the cast of characters and given the story gravitas. Everything that made Alien and Aliens exciting is ignored, dumbed down, or poorly executed in Alien³.