The third part of the alien quadrilogy was viewed by yours truly and some of my friends on Friday night. It was, without question, one of the worst decisions I have ever made in my entire life.
Sigourney Weaver refuses to leave a series that has some of the worst screenwriting in any movie series ever made. Alien 3 or Alien cubed, depending on how you want to read it, starts with Ripley, Newt and Bishop from the last movie on an escape pod after their latest escape from the alien-populated planet LV-426. The pod crash-lands on Fiorina 161, a small penitentiary of all-male inmates. Bishop is torn to shreds and Newt dies, leaving Ripley as the only survivor. People start dying and Ripley suspects aliens.
This plot sounds similar to some of the Riddick movies, specifically Pitch Black. People start dying and even though no one likes Ripley, they are forced to follow her as a leader.
The pace is even slower than in the first two. Dialogue between characters that in no way furthers the plot or does anything relevant for the movie is always happening. Why they are so focused on the dialogue in these movies, I don’t know. I don’t think most of us care about the characters in these alien killer movies and if we’re supposed to care, the filmmakers don’t try hard enough to make us care. They also expect us to wait for a whole two and a half hours so that they can do that. While the normal running time is 114 minutes, we watched the special edition, which was also one of the worst decisions of my life.
Everyone on the planet is British and it’s annoying. They have plenty of cuss words intertwined because apparently hearing British people randomly drop the f-word is hilarious to director David Fincher. The only problem is that it’s not. I don’t care about the characters at all and I got so bored with this movie that I started yelling at the TV, asking for someone to die already. We don’t care about the stupid dialogue! I don’t even know most of these characters’ names!
There are a lot of plot holes and some of the things that happen just don’t seem plausible.
All the scenes with the alien are dumb. Every death scene is the same. A quick zoom in of the alien’s face, the person gets pulled up and blood gets splattered on the wall. Next death is nearly identical. The whole point of horror movies is to make them suspenseful. You don’t want the audience to see what’s going to happen before it happens. You don’t want to make it overly predictable. This is one of the most predictable movies I’ve ever seen and it leaves me with a strong feeling of loathing.
Once again, if you’re new to my blog, I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.
90-100 It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Iron Man 3, World War Z, 42, Just Go With It)
80-89 It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (Man of Steel, Monster-In-Law, White House Down, Jobs, The Truman Show)
70-79 It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too. (Shaun of the Dead, Sharknado, The Usual Suspects, 21 Jump Street, Escape Plan)
60-69 It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (Pacific Rim, The Long Kiss Goodnight)
50-59 This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (Road to Perdition, Total Recall, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Along Came Polly, Aliens)
40-49 This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Patriot Games, The Great Gatsby, Pitch Black, Alien)
30-39 Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30’s ironically define the 1930’s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (The Contract, Pride and Prejudice)
20-29 What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow. (The Sum of All Fears)
0-19 Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.” (Midnight Cowboy, Dark Fury)
My score for Alien 3: 5.
THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE I’VE EVER SEEN!!! The characters and character development sucks, the action is extremely limited and lame, and it takes forever for something relevant to happen. It’s like a newborn puppy trying to run when it’s chained to a tank! It’s dead! This movie was so bad that I couldn’t even watch all of it! Every time someone started talking, I fast forwarded because I really just wanted the movie to end already!!! IT’S SO FREAKING STUPID!!! How did this movie get 6.4/10 on IMDb and 42% on Rotten Tomatoes???!!! THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER!!! AAAHHHHH!!!
*SPOILER ALERT* IF YOU DON’T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED, STOP READING!!!
*SPOILER’S EDITION*
First of all, Ripley won’t tell the doctor why she wants an autopsy done. If there’s a possible alien walking around, the sooner everyone knows about it the better.
Ripley decides they have to trap the alien in the toxic waste room, which has only one exit. They cover the air vents in flammable slime only to have one of the guys spreading the stuff in the air vent get attacked by an alien and drop his flare, which lights everything on fire and kills half of the inmates. However, the alien is trapped and there’s no way for it to get out. Well there’s this one crazy inmate tied up to a bed and he talks one of the other inmates into letting him go. He unties him and the crazy one hits him in the back of the head and knocks him out. The crazy one says, “I want to see it again.” WHAT?! He goes down to the vat and slices the throat of the inmate guarding the door, opens the door and walks in. The alien runs out of the room shortly after. We never see the crazy one again so who knows what happened to him. Yeah, he probably died but I would have liked some confirmation. Why the hell did the guy need to see the alien again? I would have liked a better explanation then “oh, he’s crazy”.
Ripley’s not feeling well and gets a cat-scan, which reveals that she has a mother queen embryo in her stomach. She realizes that’s why the alien didn’t kill her after killing the doctor, Clemens, because it knew that she was raising a queen. Ripley finds Dillon, the leader of the inmates and asks him to kill her. WHAT?! You just found out that the alien won’t attack you, which means that you can just walk up to it and stab it in the face, killing it yourself without anyone dying, and instead you ask Dillon to just kill you, which would effectively be like hanging themselves? How is Ripley still alive when she’s so stupid?! Dillon has to remind her how to use her brain, refusing to kill her until she helps the inmates kill the alien. Ripley realizes she’s stupid and agrees to help, only she doesn’t do anything! Rather than just walking up to it and killing it, which we already know is possible, Dillon and Ripley decide to try to lead the alien into the molding facility so they can drop hot lead on it. Once again, they don’t need to make this plan so damn complicated. All they have to do is give Dillon’s axe to Ripley and she can go kill it because it won’t attack her, but no, that would make sense and mean that the movie would end a whole half hour early, and we want to make sure the audience is bored out of their minds for as long as possible. So the group runs the alien through a bunch of doors, so many that the audience doesn’t even know which way the characters are going. The doors continue to shut until an inmate runs into one and then the alien kills him because the inmate doesn’t have anywhere to go. This game of cat-and-mouse is going to end the same way every time for the next fifteen minutes but the inmates continue to play it anyway because everyone is stupid. Eventually, Ripley finally decides to intervene and she traps the alien in a corner and starts battling it and the alien refuses to attack Ripley. “Finally,” I said to myself, “it’s about time someone in this movie displayed some sort of intelligence.” But wait! Dillon decides he doesn’t want to end the movie so soon and is more interested in killing it with the molten lead even though it can be ended right now, so he pulls Ripley away from the corner and runs away with her, allowing the alien to get out of the corner. Ripley gets to the molten lava lever and Dillon stays behind in the mold to draw the alien in, making a sacrifice that he didn’t have to make if he would have just let Ripley kill the alien in the corner five minutes ago. It makes no sense and it was a HUGE waste of time.
Alex has told me the fourth one is even worse than this one, but I don’t know how that’s possible seeing how bad this one was. I hope he’s wrong, but I guess we’ll all find out when I write my review on it. Until next time guys.
wordsofwistim 