AmateurMovieReviews.com

By Simon Woodhouse

The buzzword in Hollywood these days seems to be 'franchise'. If a movie looks as though it might spawn a whole host of sequels, and therefore generate piles of cash by stretching an original premise to breaking point, no one stops to think about quality control. You can count on one hand the number of sequels (or prequels) that have lived up to the original. Like most franchises, the Alien movies have been going steadily down hill over recent years. The first one was a masterpiece, the second one sort of so-so, but by the time you get to number three you're in really dodgy territory.

If there has to be such a thing as a sequel, it works much better if the movie follows on from its predecessor, especially if what came before did reasonably well. Aliens (the second Alien film) took the original idea and pushed it in a new direction. Whereas the first film was all creepy and moody, the second one was just gung-ho action all the way. Though not as good as its parent, Aliens at least showed that the people involved were willing to acknowledge the first film. Aliens ended with three and a half of the cast surviving relatively unscathed (the half being Bishop the android). So you'd think it would make sense to bring this little group back for number three. But when has sense ever played a part in movie sequels?

As the opening credits are rolling, we're treated to a bit of back-story. This rather clumsily stitches together what is to come, with what happened at the end of Aliens. But it's a shame that two of the previous films best characters are written off in a heavy-handed piece of non-story. This ham-fisted approach sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

Besides needing a snot-dribbling monster, no Alien film seems to be able to see the light of day without involving the character of Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Alien 3 is no exception to this rule. The film starts with Ripley crash landing on the planet of Fiorini 161. Thanks to the crass opening sequence we know there's an alien with her (even if she doesn't), a fact that removes any suspenseful is-there isn't-there subplot. Fiorini is home to a penal facility, and nothing else. So what a stroke of luck that out of a whole planet, Ripley manages to crash land right outside the prison. Clumsy plot points like this pop up throughout the whole film, but perhaps the moviemakers were hoping no one would notice.

For some reason that's never explained, most of the prisoners have terrible British accents. Perhaps this is supposed to make them seem more sinister, whereas in actual fact it just makes them sound daft. Having landed on the planet and been taken in by the convicts, Ripley's adventures in Alien 3 can then be divided into four handy, bite-sized chunks. Chunk one - trying to find out if there's an alien down there with her. Chunk two - finding out there is. Chunk three - trying to convince everyone else there's an alien down there with her. Chunk four - trying to kill the alien. As this ponderous series of events roll by, various co-stars get dispatched by said alien. But because the previous two movies have shown us exactly how the beastie does this, seeing it mangle its victims doesn't have any real impact. And while we're on the subject of the alien, its incantation in this movie has it looking a little odd. The creature is CGI in some scenes, and animatronics in others, but these two renditions of the same beast don't look anything like each other. The computer-generated alien is black and shiny, whereas the puppet version is brown and crispy. Once again, perhaps the moviemakers just hoped we wouldn't notice.

For a while it looks as though a subtle sub-plot within the movie might save it from itself. Ripley becomes romantically involved with Clemens (Charles Dance), the prison's doctor. This is good, because Charles Dance delivers quite a fine performance. He's cool and collected, whilst everyone else swings wildly from one hysterical fit to the next. Unfortunately his liaison with Ripley is cut short. This leaves the prison (and the film) populated by panic-stricken inmates whose antics shift from irritating to hilarious and back again. The character of Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the prison's chief inmate, seems to be there to try and inject the proceedings with a degree of rational, hard-man wisdom. But it's an over the top performance that's even more unrealistic than the CGI alien. The final few scenes contain a couple of 'twists', however these don't work, because by then the whole thing is such a shambles all they do is add to the ridiculousness.

In an ideal world Alien would have been a standalone movie that spawned no sequels. The fact that it has, and that they've all featured the character of Ripley, reflect badly on the first film. It's difficult to watch Alien without pondering the franchise's woeful mishandling. Alien Resurrection came after Alien 3, and it's difficult to know which film is worse. If pushed, I'd say the third movie stinks the most. There's really nothing note worthy about it at all. My advice to anyone lucky enough to have only watched the original film, is do yourself a favor and leave it at that.