Subject: REVIEW: ALIEN 3

From: [email-masked] (The Third Aardvark)
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1992 10:28:11 GMT

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				    ALIEN 3
		       A film review by Lewis Butler
			Copyright 1992 Lewis Butler

Summary:  The third movie in the highly successful series begun by Ridley
          Scott and continued by James Cameron is a turkey in the worst
          way.  A shameful addition to what are probably two of the best
          action/horror movies ever made.  A -3 (-4 to +4).

     ALIEN 3 is a dumb movie.  It makes dumb mistakes, and has a dumb
plot.  While ALIEN was an intelligent suspense flick and ALIENS was a
masterful action flick, ALIEN 3 is nothing more than a painfully poor
movie.

     The dialogue is so bad it is distracting at every turn, the acting
is not horrid, but it is uninspired and flat through-out.  There is no
emotion on anyone's part (none of ALIENS "Game over, game over man!")
and the entire mood of the picture is, "Oh, there's an Alien eating
everyone.  Wow."

     The plot is at once simplistic and confusing.  The characters
actions are never explained well, the "plan" doesn't make any sense, and
the entire plot revolves around the Alien being extremely stupid (while
the Alien in ALIEN and the Aliens in ALIENS were demonstrably quite
bright).

     The direction is horrid.  The motion is uneven and badly done.  The
camera is used to compensate for bad plotting by making the shots
confusing and difficult to see.  The dialog is hard to hear in many
places, and there is no sense of suspense or even interest.  With all
the things that are wrong with this movie, the direction is the worst.
It appears this refugee from MTV videos (and supposed to be good at
them) will not be making a strong move to the silver screen.  Everyone
should be extremely thankful of this.

     The best thing about this movie is the title.  ALIEN^3 (Cubed).  It
manages to sneak in a "3" reference, tell you the movie is about a
*single* Alien (one cubed is one) and doesn't repeat the stupidity of
RAMBO III (the sequel to RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II).

SPOILER Alert and Plot nit-picks (serious nit picks):


     The movie starts off badly.  Three of the surviving four people from
ALIENS are killed during the opening credits, with no explanation as to
how or why.  We know from ALIENS that there is no possible way that
Alien eggs could have been on the ship, and yet we have two at the
beginning of this movie.  Why?  Because no one was imaginative enough to
think up an original plot, so they decided on the old monster movie
ploy: "Even though you saw us kill every last monster in the last movie,
guess what?  We missed one, and it's pissed off."

     Lt. Ripley is impregnated with an Alien, even though the integrity
of her hypersleep capsule was intact and no "facehugger" remains were
left with her.

     It is quite obvious Hicks was killed because the producers didn't
want to pay Michael Biehn.

     While the Alien in ALIEN was sly and tended to strike quickly and
then vanish (presumably to eat its prey) this one just runs around
killing people.  It will move from one body to the next live one without
a moments hesitation.  We have no explanation for this other than it
allows for an extremely stupid chase sequence where the characters all
get to act as live bait luring the surprisingly stupid Alien to the "kill
zone."

     In short, the movie violates just about every single rule of making
a successful sequel.  It is not at all true to the original movies, it
changes the rules from what we know, and it is poorly made.

     It is not as bad a movie as HIGHLANDER II, but it is not much
better.  A -3 is pretty generous on my part, and it only rates that
because I liked the character of the religious zealot quite a bit.

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kreme@#22 (FV3 Net)