Alien³ (1992)

Picture the scene: you've just survived hell. You've fought through corridors crawling with creatures, you've watched people you care about die, and somehow, against all odds, you've made it out. You close your eyes in hypersleep clutching the people who made it worth surviving for. Then the film opens, and within the first few minutes, they're gone. Not killed on screen in some dramatic fashion, not given any kind of send-off. Just dead. Reported as dead. A sentence of dialogue and a brief funeral pyre, and that's your lot. That's how Alien³ treats Newt and Hicks, and honestly, it's one of the most deflating opening moves in franchise history.

I'll give the film its due where it's earned: the idea that the xenomorph takes on characteristics of whatever host it gestates in is genuinely brilliant. It's the kind of world-building the series needed, a proper biological twist that opens up real possibilities for the mythology. A creature born of a different animal moves differently, hunts differently, feels different. That concept alone shows there was a creative brain at work somewhere in the development of this thing.

But one strong idea doesn't save a film, and Alien³ has a lot of ground to make up. Coming straight off the back of Aliens, the drop in quality is sharp and it stings. James Cameron's sequel was relentless, tightly wound, packed with characters you actually cared about. This one strips all of that back and replaces it with something relentlessly grey and bleak. And look, I don't mind bleak. Bleak can be powerful. Bleak with purpose is something I'm very much here for. But bleak that just sort of sits there, without enough tension or character dynamism to justify the misery, is a much harder sell.

The prison planet setting had genuine potential. A rough, isolated, religious community of male convicts, no weapons, no marines, just desperate people and something terrible hunting them. There's a raw, claustrophobic story in there somewhere. You catch glimpses of it. But the film never quite commits to making you care enough about the men in those corridors, so when they start getting picked off there's less dread and more resigned acknowledgement.

Sigourney Weaver, to her enormous credit, is still magnetic. Ripley remains one of the great screen heroes, and Weaver carries weight here that the script doesn't always deserve. She's doing serious, considered work in a film that keeps undercutting her with murky plotting and a supporting cast that's hard to keep track of, let alone invest in. The character dynamics that made the first two films so compelling, that real sense of a group fighting together, just aren't there in the same way.

There's been plenty said over the years about the troubled production, the directorial difficulties, the rewrites and the studio interference. You can feel all of it on screen. Alien³ has the texture of a film that was pulled in too many directions and never quite found its footing. It's not unwatchable, and I want to be fair about that. There are moments, images, ideas that flicker with something interesting. The host-variant concept alone is worth the price of admission on a pure mythology level. But as a follow-up to two stone-cold classics, it's an undeniable step down.

If you're working through the franchise chronologically, as I have been (and you can read my thoughts on Alien (1979) and Alien Resurrection (1997) elsewhere on the site), this one sits uncomfortably in the middle, neither worthy of what came before nor quite the disaster its reputation sometimes suggests. It's a frustrating watch precisely because you can see what it might have been. What it actually is, is a film that made some very poor decisions early doors and never fully recovered from them.

Two and a half stars.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1992  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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More with Sigourney Weaver: Avatar (2009) · Alien (1979) · Alien Resurrection (1997) · Aliens (1986)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
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