Hey you know what Alien3 isn't that bad... well maybe I should qualify that, its riddled with significent issues, but in and of itself its a good film, full of great performances, from a top cast, in large spoilted only in comparison of what its a part of.
I'd not watched this one for years so was my distaste for it, but when I saw it was finally on Disney+ I figured what the heck it was due a revisit, after all I couldn't really remember what I disliked about it. Watching the first reason is clear straight away. Now normally I'm all for films taking story off in different directions and trying new things, but the dismissal of Newt, Hicks is just poor storytelling. You had great characters, folks were invested in. If you wanted to remove them from the story, that's cool step completely aside from that story.
To just kinda handwave them away in such a final way was poor. Its as if the producers and various writers fell down a trap and no one had the courage to say STOP, just take a sec let's not do that. Still they did and so be it, just puts a downer on the movie from the start, which is already viscually downbeat, which sounds a good thing, but takes things too far. Sure anyone can die, the stakes are raised, but its done in such a way as to actually dismiss the tension, not crank it up.
There lies the second issue. The first two films gave us charismatic cast of characters we quickly invested in and engaged with and so as they started being killed off we cared and it mattered. Good, bad, incompetent the people being slaughtered mattered to us. Now there is a similar cast this time, realised by a wonderful actors, but you aren't made to care for them. However good the performance we aren't really given a reason to engage with the folks being picked off. There are also just too many thrown at us to really give any time to develop. So we just have Ripley, who we know will... oh... that's actually one really good aspect.
Finally its good that they didn't try to top the scale of Aliens as that might have got silly, but it doesn't really add anything to the mythos of the series. It kinda goes back to the first film, kinda takes elements of the second, but ultimately really does very little . It leaves it feeling like a bit of a shoulder shrug of a film. We didn't know what to do but knew we had to do something, so ... well that'll have to do.
Its a shame as its not a bad film, some really hocky dialogue aside. Its just not a good film in the context of what's go before. The end is a little chaotic to really know what the plan is. The alien needing a second death, while a bit silly, is pretty fun. The Corporation is bad bit at the end is successful (and maybe points to what the focus of the film should have been, after all the best zombie movies are when the people involved show they are the problem). Ripley's end is satisfying... and any film that does a call back to Ralph Brown saying "No need to be sarcastic" in Withnail is hard not to love. Throwing in Hudson lines from Aliens is more of a problem! So yeah ultimately this isn't the horror show I though it was and might give it another go.
Its certainly given me the courage to try Resurrection again...
