Alien 3 (DVD)

In a moment of boredom and unwilling to sit through Jeremy bloody Kyle yet again I shuffled through my DVD collection and, fancying something in a sci-fi vain, settled for 'Alien 3: 2-Disc Special Edition'. Not the best movie on the shelf but one I hadn't seen for a while. Unlike Jeremy bloody Kyle! This, the third instalment of the 'Alien' saga, sees Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as her emergency evacuation pod crash lands onto Fiorina 161, a desolate planet inhabited by the former inmates of a maximum security facility. It is not long before she realises that an alien was also onboard the craft and has now taken refuge in the mining facility. With no ...  Read the complete review

Any list of great sequels would have to include the 1986 film Aliens, a rollercoaster follow up to the Ridley Scott classic with great characters and bravura direction by a young and inventive James Cameron. The only problem was that, somewhere along the line, if 20th Century Fox wanted to wring more money from the franchise (and of course they did) they had to come up with a way of topping it - or least making a film good enough to stand as a blood relative to the first two. The possibilities were endless. The aliens somehow end up on earth? A trip to the alien homeworld? However endless these possibilities were they passed the studio by completely. Instead we got a ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears in part on The Student Room and Flixster Alien 3, although the worst of the initial four films, is still a solid action film thanks to the presence of Sigourney Weaver in her most famous role, as badass soldier Ellen Ripley, and also thanks to the direction of David Fincher who, despite numerous fallouts with Fox over the film, still managed to knockout a solid film, that is considerably better if you decide to check out the Director's Cut, which remedies the normal film's numerous problems, pacing and otherwise. The film opens as Ripley, Newt, and Hicks return from the stasis they were put in at the end of the second film. ...  Read the complete review

Few films have had as much troubled production as Alien 3. Director David Fincher was brought into the project late into its development; there were numerous creative differences in scriptwriting; not to mention all the pressure of living up to the successes of the two near-perfect blockbusters that preceded it. Fincher reportably disowned the film before editing even began. Deep in hyper sleep, Ripley, Newt, and Hicks, crash land in their escape pod after an onboard fire on the Sulaco spaceship. Ripley is the only survivor, and when she finally comes around she is suspicious as to what actually started the fire in the first place. Unluckily for her, and ...  Read the complete review

Calling Ripley, calling Ripley.... Dear old Sigourney, you feisty vixen, you'll be famous for ever for one reason and one reason only. Forget 'Working Girl' (I wish) and 'Gorillas In The Mist' (if only), Ms Weaver's claim to fame is undoubtedly down to just one thing - her lengthy, slip-slidy and very slimily unpleasant relationship with old Long Head Double Jaw Dribble-a-lot, the ALIEN. Old Leather Head's a mite long in the tooth now and any pretence of mystery and dark shades have long since gone and the Alien series now relies exclusively on the suspense of how many people are going to survive the onslaught and how ...  Read the complete review