Alien 3

[stepp_sensei]

I recently rewatched Alien 3 for the first time since its premiere in 1992.  I even watched the special addition, which fixes at least one narrative hole.  I still don't like the film.  Two reasons:

1. It reinterprets the previous story arc.
2. It's far more a horror film than a sci-fi film.

Comments

[whitebuddha]

I've always thought of Alien as a horror movie set in a sci-fi world, whereas Alien 3 is a horror movie with sci-fi trappings. A minor point, but I've always thought that Aliens was the aberration in the series, thematically speaking.

Alien 3 was a vastly more "classic" horror movie, but I suspect that came from a boatload of writers and a studio that didn't REALLY want to kill off the series.

[whitebuddha]

I always looked at Aliens 3 as a sort of "B-Grade" Saturday night rip-off of the first two movies. I can't really say that I strongly objected to anything they did in Alien 3. I just thought that trashing a storyline that took two movies to create was stupid and amateurish - Stephen H. Jay

[stepp_sensei]

Aliens was a different kind of film, unapologetically pulled from the Vietnam War. But I didn't feel its differences altered the previous film.

I do appreciate the studio's problem of continuing the franchise after Aliens, but I think they were (are?) gravely mistaken to conceive of the franchise as "Ripley vs. aliens." Ripley's story should have ended with Aliens, but the alien story could've easily continued with a new protagonist (ideally a different kind of protagonist).