I admit that I have a soft spot for Alien 3. It's the first of the Alien franchise I watched, which ignited a love affair with the rest of the series. That being said, I was never attached to the secondary characters like others were, and so the controversial opening sequence (where the majority of the crew from the previous film are killed off) never phased me.
What does annoy me is the rest of the film.
Make no mistake — 3 has some memorable moments, cinematography and character beats. The notion of Ripley being the Sole Survivor of her group in a planet of strange, hostile criminals could have mined a lot of drama from a better script, but the way it is (regardless of the version), it's a mediocre mess.
I echo David Giler's comments that the film devolves into "bald British men running around dark tunnels." Several characters are either short-shifted or rarely make an impact, while others exist as little more than cannon fodder for the dodgy CGI'd xeno in the third act.
Weaver, Charles Dance and Charles S. Dutton give it their all, but the visuals of the planet are largely let down by a murky plot that copies beats from the original film, a third act that is just as confusing as it is lethargic, and an ending that seems to go for heavy-handed symbolism over making the sacrifice actually meaningful — especially in context of the Expanded Universe and future film installments, which nullified the moment.
There's a lot of "what if's" surrounding David Fincher's vision of the film, or how any of the earlier scripts would have turned out, but I can only recommend watching this if you're going into the series with no baggage from the previous films. Otherwise, there's too much baggage here that will alienate long-time fans.
An Interesting Failure
I admit that I have a soft spot for Alien 3. It's the first of the Alien franchise I watched, which ignited a love affair with the rest of the series. That being said, I was never attached to the secondary characters like others were, and so the controversial opening sequence (where the majority of the crew from the previous film are killed off) never phased me.
What does annoy me is the rest of the film.
Make no mistake — 3 has some memorable moments, cinematography and character beats. The notion of Ripley being the Sole Survivor of her group in a planet of strange, hostile criminals could have mined a lot of drama from a better script, but the way it is (regardless of the version), it's a mediocre mess.
I echo David Giler's comments that the film devolves into "bald British men running around dark tunnels." Several characters are either short-shifted or rarely make an impact, while others exist as little more than cannon fodder for the dodgy CGI'd xeno in the third act.
Weaver, Charles Dance and Charles S. Dutton give it their all, but the visuals of the planet are largely let down by a murky plot that copies beats from the original film, a third act that is just as confusing as it is lethargic, and an ending that seems to go for heavy-handed symbolism over making the sacrifice actually meaningful — especially in context of the Expanded Universe and future film installments, which nullified the moment.
There's a lot of "what if's" surrounding David Fincher's vision of the film, or how any of the earlier scripts would have turned out, but I can only recommend watching this if you're going into the series with no baggage from the previous films. Otherwise, there's too much baggage here that will alienate long-time fans.