Alien 3 Review, Part 1

How to destroy a franchise in seven minutes

Photo by Mikita Yo on Unsplash

No sense in burying the lead. This one is awful. But it’s important to understand how and why it’s awful. Alien 3 manages to destroy the entire franchise with remarkable speed. I’ll explain how as the reviews go on.

We start off with a credit sequence, and already things feel off. Ripley and the surviving members of the previous film are still in their cryobeds, but something else is aboard the ship as well: an alien egg. This egg is seen hanging upside down, almost at eye level. Already, we have a plethora of problems, so let’s dive in, shall we?

The previous movie, Aliens, established that it takes a queen to lay these eggs. Now, we don’t know exactly where the cryobeds are located on the ship. We can infer that they are not on the shuttle Ripley and the others used to escape the planet where the queen was hiding because the queen was hanging on the outside of the spacecraft, and she was too big to fit inside the shuttle anyway. So, that leaves the hull. Frankly, she didn’t have time to lay an egg because the moment Ripley and Bishop leave the shuttle, the queen attacks them. But even if she laid the egg in the hull, how did it get into the same room as the cryobeds? Bishop was the only one who would’ve had any motive to move the alien egg closer to their beds, since he was an android built by The Company, but he was ripped in half, and Ripley had to carry him around. He could barely smile by the end of the film let alone hang an egg up like a Christmas ornament.

The second issue is that the queen ripped herself from her embryo sack. Presumably, she would need this sack to grow the eggs. If the eggs could be grown inside her, then why would she need the sack to begin with?

Lastly, the egg was easy to spot. I’m certain Ripley would’ve done a final sweep because she’d just finished fighting a giant queen and was going to be asleep inside the ship for weeks. Plus, I’m pretty sure she would’ve checked the ship the same way a mother checks the closet for monsters because there’s a little girl on board who had been running from the aliens for who knows how long.

All these problems emerge after one frame. It doesn’t get any better. As the credits continue to roll, we see the egg that shouldn’t be there hatch. One of the little spider variants comes out of the egg and heads straight for Newt’s cryobed. Newt is the little girl who Ripley spent the majority of the second movie trying to save. She’s basically the stakes for the sequel, and that’s important. We see the glass crack on the cryobed, and a small amount of the creature’s acidic saliva melts a portion of the bed’s frame, then continues eating its way into the ship. This creates an electrical fire, which causes the ship to begin to crash. This is just lazy writing. We’ve already had ships malfunction in the sequel. Ripley was supposedly drifting through space for years because of a random accident. If space travel were really so dangerous in this universe, nobody would go.

An emergency launch sequence is activated, and I have to spoil a portion of the movie at this point — not that it really matters because the last thing I want is for you to watch this dumpster fire — because these events are important to understanding why the film doesn’t work later on.

While the cryobeds are being moved to another shuttle, we see that the alien has latched to somebody’s face. It got inside one of the cryobeds. We are led to believe that it has grabbed onto Newt, but when we see her cryobed later, while the bed is damaged, the alien has not broken through the glass. So, who did the alien latch on to? Surprise! It was Ripley. What a twist! But here’s the thing: Ripley’s bed isn’t damaged at all. In fact, she later uses the bed to scan for the embryo growing inside of her. So, although her bed was undamaged, the alien somehow managed to crawl inside and lay an embryo inside Ripley. There are so many problems with this that I want to scream, but it’ll have to wait. We have more bad writing to wade through.

So, the alien has laid its egg in Ripley, and the ship’s computer moves the cryobeds into another shuttle and ejects it into space. This shuttle carrying the beds drifts to a prison planet and crashes in the water. Everyone, except Ripley, is killed during this crash. So, everything our hero fought for in the second movie has come to nothing. This one choice completely ruins the stakes of the second film. Anyone who was invested in those characters and wanted to see them again was sorely disappointed, if not outright mad. They did kill a little girl after all. And what’s remarkable about this is that the writers were absurdly proud of their choice. They go to great pains to show Newt’s corpse several times throughout this film, and they don’t just show it; they show this little girl’s dead face frozen in a scream of agony, even though one of the characters says later that Newt drowned in her sleep and didn’t feel a thing. It’s as if the writers were like, “See that! We killed the little girl you liked! Look how edgy we are!”

This idiocy aside, what is the point of having an ejection sequence for cryobeds if the escape shuttle is going to crash as well? That’s two major malfunctions in one movie, and we’re not even past the first act. Who designed the spacecraft in this universe?

It gets worse. So, the shuttle crashes, kills everyone except Ripley, and a group of men retrieve the wreckage. They find Ripley alive and remove her from the ship. One of the men has a dog, and the dog stays behind. Guess what? The spider variant is still alive! I can grudgingly allow for Ripley to be the sole survivor . . . again. She was safe, relatively speaking, inside her cryobed. But this parasitic alien has been roaming free in the shuttle. Not only was the impact unable to kill the thing, but remember how Newt drowned? Well, guess what? That means the shuttle compartment had to fill up with water as well. Shouldn’t that have drowned the creature too? Perhaps not. There’s no rule that says the alien’s breath air. However, the real problem with this is that the alien has already planted its embryo inside Ripley. The previous two movies both show these parasitic creatures dying after planting a single baby alien. It’s one of this franchise’s hard and fast rules. So, the beast should’ve curled up and expired. It didn’t, so when the dog shows up. It plants a second embryo inside the unfortunate canine. Then the spider variant died. I guess.

Just as an aside, I should point out that in order for Ripley to avoid drowning with Newt, her cryobed would have to be completely sealed. Yet the parasitic alien managed to climb in and out of Ripley’s cryobed without breaking the seal. This is impossible, of course, and the plot hole only serves to prove this film’s lunacy.

By the time we reach this point in the movie, seven minutes have passed, and already, the entire franchise is ruined. We’ll discuss why in the next review.