Alien 3 [1992]
Now I want to note that the copy of Alien 3 that I watched was the "Assembly Cut", which ran around a full half-hour longer, and fixes a lot of the pacing problems that the original theatrical version had. I imagine that if I had watched the theatrical version, with how it was described to me, I'd probably have a much, much lower opinion of this movie than I do now. As it is, my opinion of this movie is basically just 'm'eh'.
Alien 3 follows off the events of Aliens, but also at the same time negates most of the bittersweet happy ending from that movie. Spoilers for a three-decade-old movie, I guess, but everyone at the end of Aliens all dies off-screen. Hicks, Bishop and little girl Newt just all die in the crash that happens at the beginning of the movie, and a lot of fans of the second movie are immediately turned off by this... and it's hard to blame them. Sure, Alien as a franchise has a high death count, but the sheer callousness of how they are disposed of would rub people the wrong way.
After that, though, Alien 3 sets up the premise of their new location. The pod crash-lands on a prison world, Fiorina/Fury-161, and the audience is quickly introduced to the location's little gimmick, that the prisoners are all men who are trying to 'better themselves' with religion. Ripley wakes up and the only friendly face is dr. Clemens (Charles Dance!), who humours her panicked attempts to want an autopsy done on the body of Newt after dreams of a xenomorph sneaking on-board. The prison being held together by a religion is... it's interesting atmosphere. But other than some nice lines from Dillon, I don't think it really goes anywhere.
Meanwhile, the audience learns to meet the rest of the cast, and... and I'm sorry to say that not a lot of them are memorable. It honestly doesn't help that 90% of the cast are just bald angry men. The notable ones include Warden Andrews (who's pretty fun for being a 'doubter'), his second-in-command '85' Aaron (who's got the personality of a brick), Dillon (essentially the male lead, as both the reasonable prisoner and the one that keeps the other prisoners in line), Morse (the one that survives to the end, though I'm hard-pressed to distinguish him from the others earlier in the movie) and Golic (a.k.a. the crazy one).
Obviously, there's a xenomorph on board Ripley's ship (how it got there after the ending of Aliens is kind of a shrug, I guess the Queen left one on board?) otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. This particular xenomorph infects a cow (a dog in the theatrical version) and emerges as a quadrupedal version of the xenomorph we've seen in the previous two movies, dubbed 'the Dragon' by Golic when he witnesses it kill some of his fellow prisoners and the name that the fandom seems to refer to this particular xenomorph as.
And... and then we essentially have the plot of Alien, but in an off-world prison. Which honestly is something that isn't as bad as I thought it would be. And part of it might just be because I'm watching the 'Assembly Cut', which I know has been re-edited to be paced better. But while it certainly never hits the tenseness of Alien or the high-octane energy of Aliens, it's... it's a decent sci-fi flick? Once you ignore some of the inconsistencies with the previous movies, I mean.
It's just such a shame that aside from Ripley and Dillon, a huge amount of the cast are just disposable, one-note and honestly end up just being fodder for the Dragon to massacre. Eventually, after the requisite screentime given for the xenomorph to prove itself powerful and deadly and rack high enough of a bodycount, everyone starts listening to Ripley. Ripley goes through two plans to trap the Dragon (the first one fails after Golic goes crazy and lets the Dragon out from where it's caged), and, as usual, Weyland-Yutani completely disregards human life and only intervenes when it seems like the xenomorph is threatened and wouldn't be delivered to them intact.
The complications rise up as we near the climax not only because the Dragon escapes, but because Ripley is also carrying a larva within her... which takes the entire movie to burst out, apparently. It's also an Alien Queen larva, which I felt was pretty easy to miss and I didn't realize until a friend pointed it out to me. While this makes the Dragon unwilling to kill Ripley, it also means that Ripley herself is a ticking time-bomb; either the alien kills her, or Weyland-Yutani gets their hands on the xenomorph and uses it to create bioweapons.
The action scenes are... it's all right, I guess. The Dragon looks honestly similar enough to the monsters we saw in Alien and Aliens that while it's cool to see it massacre grown men and scuttle through vents, it's also... nothing particularly new? I did like the scene at the end where they try to kill the bugger by dropping molten lead onto him, that's cool. And then we get the final conflict, with Aaron calling in a Weyland-Yutani for the final confrontation... before Ripley elects to toss herself into molten metal to kill herself and the alien within her, and deny Weyland-Yutani their prize. It's a pretty depressing ending to Ripley's story, and honestly, while I get that not all stories have (or need) a happy ending, this one does kind of work? Sort of?
And... and, again, I don't really think that there's anything the movie does that's particularly wrong, except maybe the fact that I can't tell much of the cast apart. I guess the cast in Alien 3 is just so much less interesting than Alien, Aliens and Prometheus? And the plot feels like Alien, just rehashed in the prison? The movie itself is honestly also kind of dreary and bland at times, although one could argue that the huge theme of the movie is redemption... which, while done pretty well on Dillon's part, kind of doesn't work all that well for dr. Clemens (who dies before he does anything significant) or Ripley (her 'failure' doesn't really have anything to do with her actions). It's honestly a step down from the previous two movies, and while I'd still argue that this is a solid one, I can see why it was received so poorly especially when you factor in that the movie's nihilistic and depressing undertone. On the other hand, I would still say that the movie -- at least its 'Assembly Cut' -- is still a pretty all right entry in the series.
Random Notes:
- It is an interesting bit going from 'we have giant guns and flamethrowers' in Aliens with marines fighting an entire xenomorph colony to a single specimen (granted, Dragon's born out of a cow and seems to be faster) murdering an entire prison's population. But as the movie points out, the fact that there's no weapon in the prison does make it a bit problematic.
- Clemens dying so early on after revealing his backstory to Ripley was pretty bizarre from a writing standpoint. I mean, yes, okay, it does establish the 'anyone-can-die' stakes, but when I don't particularly care about the rest of the cast...
- On the other hand, as entertaining as his 'rumour mill' schtick was, Warden Andrews being killed mid-speech by being dragged into the ceiling was nothing short of hilarious.
- I honestly do struggle to think of any notable death scenes in this one, which I feel is also something that sort of hurts this movie a fair bit as a monster movie. I guess there's that "Ripley mistakes a pipe for the xeno's head" scene?
- The Weyland-Yutani team is led by Bishop's human creator, who has the same face as Bishop. It's bizarre, comes out of nowhere, and it doesn't even get a 'shock value' to me beyond a raised eyebrow.
- Aaron also dies in the confrontation after attacking 'original Bishop' for no real reason, which, after being kind of wishy-washy throughout the whole movie and the only real memorable thing about him being that he 'wants to go home'... it's kind of bizarre why he would attack Bishop at that point in the movie.
- In the theatrical version, apparently the queen xenomorph bursts out of Ripley's chest as she falls down to her death? Having seen the Assembly Cut first, I'm not sure how I feel about that version of that scene.
- The absolutely gory work done to show Hicks and Newt's squashed, maggot-covered bodies is utterly nasty. I can appreciate the amount of practical effects put into this, but just why tho.
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