ALIEN 3
A film review by Lewis Butler
Copyright 1992 Lewis Butler
Summary: The third movie in the highly successful series begun by Ridley
Scott and continued by James Cameron is a turkey in the worst
way. A shameful addition to what are probably two of the best
action/horror movies ever made. A -3 (-4 to +4).
ALIEN 3 is a dumb movie. It makes dumb mistakes, and has a dumb plot. While ALIEN was an intelligent suspense flick and ALIENS was a masterful action flick, ALIEN 3 is nothing more than a painfully poor movie.
The dialogue is so bad it is distracting at every turn, the acting is not horrid, but it is uninspired and flat through-out. There is no emotion on anyone's part (none of ALIENS "Game over, game over man!") and the entire mood of the picture is, "Oh, there's an Alien eating everyone. Wow."
The plot is at once simplistic and confusing. The characters actions are never explained well, the "plan" doesn't make any sense, and the entire plot revolves around the Alien being extremely stupid (while the Alien in ALIEN and the Aliens in ALIENS were demonstrably quite bright).
The direction is horrid. The motion is uneven and badly done. The camera is used to compensate for bad plotting by making the shots confusing and difficult to see. The dialog is hard to hear in many places, and there is no sense of suspense or even interest. With all the things that are wrong with this movie, the direction is the worst. It appears this refugee from MTV videos (and supposed to be good at them) will not be making a strong move to the silver screen. Everyone should be extremely thankful of this.
The best thing about this movie is the title. ALIEN^3 (Cubed). It manages to sneak in a "3" reference, tell you the movie is about a *single* Alien (one cubed is one) and doesn't repeat the stupidity of RAMBO III (the sequel to RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II).
SPOILER Alert and Plot nit-picks (serious nit picks):
The movie starts off badly. Three of the surviving four people from ALIENS are killed during the opening credits, with no explanation as to how or why. We know from ALIENS that there is no possible way that Alien eggs could have been on the ship, and yet we have two at the beginning of this movie. Why? Because no one was imaginative enough to think up an original plot, so they decided on the old monster movie ploy: "Even though you saw us kill every last monster in the last movie, guess what? We missed one, and it's pissed off."
Lt. Ripley is impregnated with an Alien, even though the integrity of her hypersleep capsule was intact and no "facehugger" remains were left with her.
It is quite obvious Hicks was killed because the producers didn't want to pay Michael Biehn.
While the Alien in ALIEN was sly and tended to strike quickly and then vanish (presumably to eat its prey) this one just runs around killing people. It will move from one body to the next live one without a moments hesitation. We have no explanation for this other than it allows for an extremely stupid chase sequence where the characters all get to act as live bait luring the surprisingly stupid Alien to the "kill zone."
In short, the movie violates just about every single rule of making a successful sequel. It is not at all true to the original movies, it changes the rules from what we know, and it is poorly made.
It is not as bad a movie as HIGHLANDER II, but it is not much better. A -3 is pretty generous on my part, and it only rates that because I liked the character of the religious zealot quite a bit.
-- kreme@nyx.cs.du.edu kreme@#22 (FV3 Net)
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