[Alien 3] just doesn’t have the same tension and visceral impact that the first two movies did so well.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 15, 2024

The movie folds back upon its previous incarnations again and again, never attempting to advance its twice-told tale, content merely to retell once more. What's on screen seems aimed more at making money than making myth.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2024

It is dark, cramped, sweaty; Ripley does struggle with external and internal "monsters." But the movie is capable of cheering you, too, for its intelligence, its lack of superficial, groundless flash and for its spare, appropriate use of violence.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 6, 2024

The truth of the matter is that Aliens was the logical last act of this saga, establishing a satisfying thematic, dramatic and psychological coda that should never have been disturbed. Alien 3 succeeds only in leaving a very nasty taste in our mouths.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 6, 2024

Alien 3 is the most artful entry in the drool-beast series. It gets serious points for cinematography, editing and design. But it hardly generates the requisite shocks its predecessors have so skillfully delivered.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 6, 2024

One assumes that Weaver received enough combat pay to compensate for playing the now understandably cynical Ripley in this bleak and pointlessly grueling movie.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 6, 2024

It does succeed in rounding the three movies off, not smashingly but interestingly. It drives us into the wall, throws Ripley into a blind alley from which, at last, there is no escape hatch.

| Aug 6, 2024

This third (and, I would guess, last) installment does what few sequels do. It actually extends the story into its logical destination rather than merely recycling familiar characters and situations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 6, 2024

Even though the regal Sigourney Weaver holds her shaved head high all the way through to the end, Alien 3 is a sad way to say goodbye to Hollywood's nastiest screen monster since Jaws.

| Aug 6, 2024

The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered.

| Aug 6, 2024

Like his predecessors, Fincher tries to take the series where no man has gone before, and somewhat succeeds. Unfortunately, he also takes some turns where no man wants to go.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 6, 2024

Alien 3 banks on the success of the earlier films. It has to, for it has little to offer of its own.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 6, 2024

The result is a very strange Alien movie, far more cerebral and less scary than the first two but successful nevertheless. And still not nice.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 6, 2024

Completing the unforeseen trilogy, this is a sad and incoherent non sequitur.

| Aug 6, 2024

The result is a movie that is unusually brave for a "3," but not particularly diverting.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2024

In spite of all its troubles, the resulting film is actually a presentable piece with imaginative production design and special effects of considerable panache.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 6, 2024

It gets the job done. And as movie sequels go, it's positively brainy.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 6, 2024

The magic is gone. First-time director David Fincher ends with a completely incomprehensible chase lasting about a quarter of an hour, and a bevy of writers couldn't come up with two interesting characters among them.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 6, 2024

You expect more from this kind of movie than the low-budget crud found in a video store horror section. But this is a big-budget bomb.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 6, 2024

Instead of trying to outspectacle Aliens, this third chapter in the science-fiction saga takes us down a menacing, twisting side path that is as fascinating as the first two movies.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 6, 2024