A lot of people hate this movie as a sequel and it definitely marks a shift away from the first two movies in the series, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie in itself. I’d like to imagine a world where the last we saw of Ripley was at the end of Aliens, dreaming her way to an unknown destination with her new “daughter” by her side – but this isn’t that world.

It’s understandable why David Fincher distances himself from Alien³. While there are some great moments, there’s nothing of the quality that marks his subsequent movies as definitely Fincher-esque.

The biggest problem with Alien³ lies in the effects. The stop-motion Aliens (well, I can’t be sure of this but they certainly look stop-motion and that’s the problem) stand out like a Ray Harryhausen movie, and while this is fine in a Ray Harryhausen movie, it’s not okay in a 1992 Alien sequel. It’s a real shame they felt the need to show the Aliens so much. They obviously thought it looked fine at the time.

In the Special Edition of the movie, you don’t see the Alien bursting out of Ripley’s chest as she falls to her death. I don’t know how to feel about this. I loved the image of her kind of hugging it as they both fell to their doom. But without it, of course, it indicates that perhaps there was time for ‘the company’ to perform the operation to extract it and save her; and who knows, maybe they were telling the truth? It adds a touch of ambiguity I guess. But the image of the thing bursting out of her chest adds a better sense of finality to what, at the time, was The Trilogy. I don’t know.

Though by no means a total failure of a sequel, it nevertheless cries out for more, and it’s no wonder they went on to make another.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2004 at 2:41 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.