Alien 3 (1992)

 Thirty years ago I went to the movie theater with my bestest buddy Cerpts from The Land of Cerpts and Honey to see Aliens 3 along with my significant other at the time (not the Horror Honey I am sorry to report) and Cerpts' flavor of the month.  At the time I hadn't seen the second part of the trilogy but what can you do when the other three outvote you.  So off to see Alien 3 we went.  The film was directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven, and Gone Girl), with this being his feature film debut.  Sigourney Weaver once again plays Ellen Ripley a warrant officer originally onboard the Nostromos.  

After the events of the second film, Ripley is in an escape pod which crash lands onto a penal colony.  After being rescued, Ripley awakens to discover she was the only survivor on the pod.  The only human survivor anyway.  Also starring is Charles S. Dutton (A Time To Kill and Secret Window) as Leonard an inmate and spiritual leader of the colony.  Charles Dance (Game of Thrones and Last Action Hero) as Clemens an inmate who also serves as the prison doctor.  Paul McGann (Doctor Who and Withnail and I) plays Walter Golic a mass murderer and the most violent inmate in the colony, and Lance Henricksen (The Terminator and The Quick and the Dead) as Bishop, an android who was on the escape pod with Ripley.  Bishop was also in Aliens, the second film of the series.  

Due to an impending writers strike the original script was rushed and then quickly canned.  Several more attempts were made to write a script for the third film and in the end the finished product turned out to be a sort of Frankenscript as it contained several different script ideas and plot points taken from several of the previous versions.  In fact filming began without a finished script in place.  Although the highest grossing film of the first three it is not the best of them.  For a few years I doubted Fincher's ability as a film director and hoped he would remain directing music videos which he did prior to this.  After seeing Seven and Fight Club I realized it wasn't Fincher's fault.  It's difficult to put perfume on a pig!  The aliens are always cool, and Weaver is great, as usual, as Ripley.  Everyone else does a good job as well here but it is severely handicapped by a crap script and filled with too many long chase scenes.  The filming is great, in fact Roger Ebert once called this "...the best looking bad movie" he has seen in a long time.  I can only give this three facehuggers out of five and can report that this is the weakest of the first three films.