Tags:
Film: Alien 3
Year: 1992
Director: David Fincher
Writer: David Giler, Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton and Charles Dance
Review:
This film begins on the ship that Sigourney Weaver and the other survivors were on at the end of the last film. They’ve all laid down to go into deep sleep. We get images though that there is an egg on board. It hatches and attacks Newt, the young girl’s pod. When this happens, they are ejected from the ship.
They crash land on a prison planet. It has been destroyed by pollution. The prisoners are all men and so are those in charge. They haven’t seen a woman in years. They refine lead to create storage for nuclear waste.
During their morning patrol, the crash is found in the water. Weaver is brought into the prison, covered in dirt and lice. She is unconscious.
The warden is played by Brian Glover. He doesn’t like rumors so he tells all the inmates about Weaver surviving the crash. We learn that the others were not so lucky. His second in command is played by Ralph Brown. The medical officer is played by Charles Dance.
The prisoners follow a religion and are led by Charles S. Dutton. Two others that are important to note, one is not very intelligent and not many like him, he is played by Paul McGann and the other prisoner is played by Danny Webb.
Dance wakes Weaver up and she is disoriented. She asks about what happened to her, what happened to those that she was with and what happened to her ship. She goes to the wreckage that was recovered and notices that there is a burn mark on one of the pods. She asks if she can see the bodies.
Glover doesn’t like the idea of a woman being at the prison and has already informed the company of her presence. They are sending someone to get her.
Weaver and Dance check on the bodies. Weaver investigates Newt and tells Dance that she wants an autopsy done. It takes some lies and convincing, but he does it. They don’t find anything and Glover shows up with Brown. Dance helps convince him to do what Weaver wants, which is to have the bodies cremated, even though the company said to have the bodies preserved.
Weaver interjects herself into the prison life, much to the dismay of Glover. She also takes a liking to Dance. Dance and Glover butt heads, but he also doesn’t stop him.
We also get a scene of an oxen having just died. It is strung up to be used for meat. One of the men notices there is a dead face-sucker, but doesn’t know what it is. They leave the room and the belly of the oxen explodes. The alien is alive.
Weaver relaxes thinking that there’s no way there could be any of the aliens on board. At the ceremony for her fallen comrades, she gets a nose bleed and she isn’t feeling well. This gets worse and worse as time goes on.
The alien is growing and creating a nest within the air ducts. His first victim is someone given the duty to clean up a tunnel. The alien spits acid in his face and the man falls into a giant fan.
Glover, Brown and Dance check it out. They think it was an accident, but Dance notices the acid burn that Weaver saw on the pod. When he asks her about it, she still doesn’t give him anything. Weaver also has removed the flight recorder from her escape pod and needs to find a computer to listen to it. There isn’t one in the prison so she is told to find her android from the last film that was destroyed. She is also starting to wonder if the death was an accident.
We get a scene of a group of prisoners who have a detail to go into the tunnels. Two of them don’t want to work with McGann, because he is weird. Hearing this hurts his feelings, but Dutton tells them to go to work. Down in the tunnels they are attacked. McGann watches it happen and gets covered in blood. When others see him, they think he did it. Weaver knows he didn’t.
As the guards and the prisoners begin to get picked off one-by-one. They come up with a plan to capture the alien. It doesn’t work out quite as well as they thought, but they trap it in a containment room. This doesn’t hold it though when McGann is entranced by the monster and lets it out.
Will they be able to survive or will be picked off until there’s no one left? Why doesn’t the alien attack Weaver? Will the company show up to save the day or do what they’ve done all along and try to take the alien back with them? Can they put a stop to it before it’s too late?
I have to say that I do like that this film does go back to what the original one does. They are trapped with no weapons and there’s nowhere they can go to get away from the alien. This one is also like the original in that there is only one alien to deal with. Weaver does a great job in her role as Ripley, per usual for this series. The rest of the cast is okay in their supporting role.
Now there is a lot that I don’t like about this film and it makes sense after learning some backstory. The script of this film was in constant flux, which explains a lot of the plot holes. At one point this was supposed to be a planet with monastery. They kept some of that idea with having the prisoners be religious, which wasn’t horrible, but it also didn’t sit entirely well. I also knew the ending of this film, but the film doesn’t explain how Weaver got the embryo in her. Some of the concepts for the screenplay would have made a lot better film. It does sound like the studio was constantly involved which held this one back.
With that said, this isn’t horrible. This film just doesn’t live up to what its predecessors did. The story was hampered by outside influences. The acting though does make up for some of that. The alien doesn’t look super realistic, but a lot of that goes to the technology of the time. The up-close scenes of it are good though. Could do worse and despite how boring this one is, it is a continuation of the alien line of films.
My Rating: 6 out of 10