Cameronius Explodius McMonius

NOTE: I watched the Assembly Cut of the film, the extended version closer to the director's original vision which is supposed to be significantly better than the original version.

 

Alien 3 was released in 1992 and was directed by David Fincher. It is the conclusion to the Alien trilogy and picks up from the events of the previous film Aliens after Ripley wakes up from cryogenic sleep on a prison planet.

 

This movie is well-known for being hated by many, including those who worked on it. The production of the film was plagued with so many issues, including shooting without a script and with the director having little-to-no creative control. An extended cut nicknamed the 'Assembly Cut' was later released which tried to be closer to the director's original vision which is the cut I watched.

 

I honestly quite liked this film. It might be because I watched the Assembly Cut which wasn't the supposedly bad original cut but I did think that this was actually a good film. However, it did have flaws which I'll get into later.

 

I thought that this was a decent final instalment and dealt with many necessary dark themes. The setting of the prison planet also added to those dark themes too and there were many elements in the film which help build up the tone of the film too. I also really liked the tone and thought it fitted the film well.

 

Just like Aliens, this one was refreshingly different to the others, with the original being a thriller, the second being an action and this one having parts of the others mixed with emotional drama and they all went together in a decent way and it didn't really feel like it was trying to be too many things at once.

 

All of the cast gave decent performances; Sigourney Weaver gave a great performance as Ripley and something I really like about each film is that you can see how her character changes through each film so you always see a new side to her which makes for an intriguing experience. You see in this film how she is constantly being affected by the events of the previous films and how she feels she doesn't have anything to live for anymore. In one scene it displays perfectly how these events have affected her when she says to the alien, "You've been in my life so long I can't remember anything else". Also, the side-characters of the prisoners helped add to the nihilistic tone of this film and some characters began to get interesting. However, there was something they did with some of these character that I wasn't a fan of which I'll talk about in the spoiler section.

 

Now I've got the things I liked out of the way, here are the things I didn't like. I personally wasn't a big fan of the editing style. The movie has a weird habit of showing something in a scene, then cutting to somewhere else, then cutting back to where it was before, then cutting back to the other thing and so on. From how they do this, I'm guessing this is to try and build tension but it soon gets tedious and in some scenes there is enough tension as it is anyway. This technique would've been fine in one or two scenes but this was used around four or five times.

 

The alien itself looks absolutely awful in some scenes. In most close-ups it looks fine but in many shots taken from a distance it looks horrendous. The special effects for it are terrible and you can see some faint green lines around it in some scenes where I suppose they must've overlaid both the alien footage that was against a green screen with the regular footage. I'm thinking that the troubled production probably contributed to this as it looks incredibly rushed.

 

There was also something else I didn't really like which I mentioned earlier which will be in my spoiler section.

Despite the flaws, I found this to be a good film and a decent conclusion to the Alien trilogy while also dealing with many necessary themes. While it can't compare in quality to the previous two, I'd still recommend watching it as it completes the trilogy (by the way, DO NOT watch the original cut, watch the Assembly Cut which I guess 'assembles' the mess that the original was).

 

7.2/10