1992, David Fincher

And this is how you ruin a franchise. Coming off a masterpiece and a very solid sequel, Alien 3 had a lot to live up to and it didn’t do that at all. Tossing Ripley out of the skies and onto a prison planet inhabited solely by men, Alien 3 suffers not only from being a dull attempt at an action thriller but more frustratingly it just feels totally worthless. This whole premise of placing her onto this planet with these men is completely unnecessary and the film is never able to rise itself out of that hole it’s dug itself into.

The plot builds itself in such a similar way to the films before it, where the alien slowly becomes a greater threat and the crew terrorized by it have to deal with not only the creature itself but also with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, who want to capture the beast rather than kill it. Part of what makes the first two films work so well is in the design of the creatures and the world built for the characters to inhabit, which is almost entirely diminished here. The prison planet has this dull, clay color to it that strips away any of the impressiveness that the previous films had.

The creature itself is perhaps one of the biggest flops that Alien 3 contains, as they rely more on special effects than physical creations, and the effects done for the creature are so hilariously bad that it becomes impossible to be afraid of this thing. Along with failing when it comes to the actual creature, it seems like the script doesn’t really know what it wants to do. There’s a lot of awkward character conflicts between the men of the planet and Ripley, the first woman they’ve seen in years, but most of it goes away quickly and then there are one or two bizarrely incorporated scenes that play into this underdeveloped theme randomly tossed in throughout the film.

When Ripley first arrives on the planet she is informed that she has to shave her head due to a “lice problem”. It seems a rather silly way to make Ripley look like even more of a badass (which you don’t need when Weaver takes care of that all on her own) and it backfires completely given that the film has about two dozen supporting male characters and a good dozen of them look almost exactly the same now. I can’t tell you how many times I had no idea what character I was currently watching on the screen. Along with this, there is a religious theme running through it that could have helped make this something more than your standard monster movie flop, but they don’t utilize it well enough to make it work at all.

As a result, Alien 3 ends up being a dull exercise in needlessness, where it’s only positive aspect comes again from seeing Sigourney Weaver slip into the skin of Ripley. As she did in Aliens, Weaver utilizes her extended time with this character to grow her performance with this new incarnation. She really takes advantage of her grasp on this character and watching her perform Ripley’s evolution is the one thing that prevents this from being a complete waste of time. Poor David Fincher never stood a chance with this one.

D-

Film #162 of The 365 Film Challenge.