Mini Review of Alien3--Chock full of spoilers

[urbpan]

A very promising and valuable franchise is somehow sadly mishandled, and good ideas are allowed to become a very average horror movie. The movie's first misfire happens during the opening credits, when all the characters from the previous sequel, except Ripley, are killed off. Soon enough an interesting premise develops: Ripley is trapped in a prison colony with collection of homicidal maniac religious fanatics--and The Alien. Almost as soon as interesting characters are developed, they become monster-fodder. Once the shock has worn off, the viewers are left with less interesting minor characters, on whom no sympathy can be wasted, and who are knocked off one by one in humdrum sequence. Most disappointing is the corruption of Giger's Alien, who is rendered in unconvincing CGI, resulting in a monster that invites comparison to "Anaconda." The sudden and baffling last act appearance of the designer of the "Bishop" android heralds the general unraveling of the story. Finally, whoever decided to muddy the Alien milieu with religious symbolism (especially evident in Ripley's ludicrous chest-bursting plunge into the lava of mount doom--or is it the foundry that the Terminator is destroyed in?) should get out of sci-fi and back into Catholic school. The alternate version seems to improve some of the problems, and exchanges a bad chest-burst dog puppet for a silly-looking fake ox carcass. Once again, the plot is essentially the same as "The Thing from Another World." ("Who Goes There?")