"The Bitch is Back"

Alien3
I fully admit that I went in to Aliens 3 with low expectations. I just expected it to be a bad movie, or at the very best simply an okay movie. As it turns out, my expectations were exceeded. The story of Ripley is carried on rather nicely here.
Something that is nice about the Aliens movies is that they each pick up where the last one left off. There is no time gap, kinda. The second movie is 60 odd years after the first movie, but she was frozen for the entire time, so it was like it was only seconds later. The third movie takes place shortly after she left the planet from the second movie. Of course, the ship they were in crashed (she was with a marine and a little girl) onto a prison planet and she was the only survivor. Well, her and an alien that somehow managed to cause the crash.
This movie’s strength was the characters. I found myself drawn into the story and sympathising with the characters. I don’t mean I felt sorry for them, I just mean I felt for them, whether I hated them or liked them, they made me care. The characters were the few remaining prisoners who had decided to stay after the prison was shut down, plus a warden, his lackey, and a medic. I especially liked the medic and thought he did a good job. He was very believable. I was genuinely sad to see him die.
And it’s not even that I sympathised with the characters, but I thought they were characters that were believable and played out in a realistic manner. There were a few more ‘amusing’ moments in this one, almost the standard witty action movie dialogue, but it never quite got that far.
Not everything was all good, though. The special effects were especially distracting. It’s not that they were bad, because they really were quite good. However, this movie was made in the early 1990s, when CGI was new. The alien was often animated that way, but it was still at the stage where CGI characters didn’t really look real. They looked, well, animated.; slightly shiny and like they weren’t quite part of the scene; too smooth and not textured enough. It was well animated, and in a movie that was all animated like that it probably would have fit right in, but it was out of place. On the other hand, if movies like this hadn’t been made, then special effects wouldn’t have been pushed forward as fast as they have been, and we wouldn’t have the awesome special effects and CGI characters that we have now. Then movies like Star Wars may have had to rely on characters and story. Well, okay, so maybe the special effects aren’t all good, but they aren’t all bad.
For some reason, the setting for the movie also bugged me a little. Not the physical setting, but the fact that her ship had crashed into a sparsely populated planet that was completely cut off from the outside universe. It just seemed a little too contrived for my taste, kind of like the same sort of thing seen in a thousand other movies a thousand other times. It was perhaps the biggest and most blatant cliché to appear in the Alien tetralogy so far (I found the word for a four part series. Yay!). Although I haven’t quite watched the fourth one yet, so who knows what it will be like. I have seen it before and I remember kind of liking it, but I don’t really remember much about it.
One part that did amuse me was when the doctor was trying to get information from Ripley, before they knew there was an alien on the planet. After performing and autopsy on he girl that had crashed (and died) on the ship with Ripley, he asked her “Now that I’ve gone out on a limb for you, damaged my already less than perfect reputation with the men and briefed you on the humdrum history of Fury161, can you not tell me what you were looking for in the girl?” Without a second’s pause she replied “Are you attracted to me?” Now THAT’S question avoidance.
And later, she was talking about knowing where the alien would be, she gave the reason that, “it’s like a lion. It sticks close to the zebras.” The man with her looked confused for a second and said, “Zebras? Oh right.” It was played pretty well, and made me chuckle.
Really, many people seem to be disappointed with this movie, but I thought it was not bad. If you liked the first two, you should enjoy this one, though it probably won’t be your favourite. If you didn’t like the first two, then there isn’t a whole lot in this movie for you, but I recommend that you give it a shot. You might be entertained.