Is it THAT BAD? - Alien 3 Retro Review - Road to Romulus
The third film in the Alien franchise, Alien 3, having come after Alien and Aliens, had big shoes to fill; and what is pretty much agreed on universally, is that it comes no where close to captivating us like the first two did. But, while it is no ones favourite, the movie does have its fans, especially with the Assembly cut, which not only adds in deleted scenes, but changes whole ones entirely. Can Alien 3 be redeemed?
So I’ll begin by telling you the version I watched for this review. It was the extended version, known as the Assembly cut, and the format I watched it on was the Blu Ray from the Alien Anthology BluRay set. I actually got this set with Alien Isolation when I bought that game.
I found the picture quality to be top notch as you’d expect with the movie being upscaled to high definition, but what let the viewing experience down was the sound mixing, with dialog being too quiet, so I’d have to turn the volume up to hear what someone’s saying, and then during an action scene it goes to being too loud, and I’d have to reduce it again. A pet peeve with a lot of Blurays released around this time, that is not only slightly irritating, but immersion breaking too.
So Alien 3 picks up just after the events of Aliens, with Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Bishop safely in their stasis pods, and the Sulaco on a return course to Earth.
But quite literally out of nowhere, and making no sense at all, there’s actually an Alien egg stuck to the ceiling for reasons, and out comes a Fechugger, which burns its way into one of the pods, and upon doing so, sparks an electrical fire, and the entire unit is jettisoned as an escape vessel. It then lands on the nearest planet, a prison colony named Fiorina 161, nicknamed “Fury”, a desolate hellhole of a planet, containing a maximum security prison housing the scum of the Earth, or more accurately, the scum of Earth and its colonies.
Here, a new Alien is born and Ripley has to cooperate with the prisons inhabitants to kill it, before the company, Weyland Yutani, arrives to take it back to Earth.
So, having watched Alien 3 around two or maybe three times before, my memory is that I basically hated everything about it, I found the aesthetic to be boring, dreary, and miserable in its mud-coloured colour palette, as well as its religious themes not being my sort of thing at all either. I found the films look and feel to be the most mundane and depressing thing in the world. Especially after the bombastic, heroic satisfaction of Aliens, and the dark, intriguing horror of Alien; especially when comparing to the first, as this is again a single Alien, and with no real weapons to fight it, retreading similar ground, but not as well done, and a far far less impressive backdrop. I remember feeling like ending myself after seeing it back then.
Joking aside, I think it’s a very low, and lazy way to try and make people feel something. I wonder how, but this entire scene is changed in the Assembly cut to be an Ox, which keels over and dies before it erupts out. We do see some Oxes, or is it Oxen? I don’t know, but we see some of them used to pull the escape pod out from the beach it lands off, so it makes sense. I don’t know how they would even go about changing something that big in the film, did they do reshoots afterwards? Or did they film both then make their minds up later? I’m not sure.
Being the extended cut, lasting for about 2 and a half hours, I found, pacing wise, it just drag on for far too long, and I was half-way bored throughout most of the runtime. I thought the same about the first two films, but I wasn’t bored during those, I just think the theatrical versions of them were just right when it comes to the way things flow.
When it comes to characters, the film left a lot of fans, including myself unhappy by killing off everyone but Ripley during the introduction where the pod lands, in the impact both Newt and Hicks are both killed off-screen. Bishop does return for a minute when Ripley plugs him back in to retrieve the flight data, but then unplugs him after and he is gone. I did like Bishop returning for this short part, even played by the same actor, and again later as a Weyland Yutani employee to try and convince Ripley to give herself up.
But knowing after everything Hicks and Newt went through in Aliens, only to be killed off-screen sours a lot of people, and is a huge shame and a missed opportunity in my opinion too.
The new characters, namely the convicts, are not interesting or likeable at all in my opinion, they don’t have anything to distinguish them from each other, most of them are all dressed in drab, featureless clothing, all bald, and don’t show much charisma.
There were a couple actors I did recognise, such as the one prisoner who was Roland Tembo in The Lost World, and the Warden who I recognised as Mr. Rottweiler from that one episode of Bottom.
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