Ripley: You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else.

At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Newt, and Hicks managed to survive a second Alien attack–this time with a lot more violence and space marines–only for Newt and Hicks to die off screen, replaced by body doubles in Alien³.

Not even kidding.

Other than, I actually did enjoy this movie. It messes a bit with cannon, making the Alien a bit less a force of nature, which I’m not sure if I cared for. Unfortunately, that does mean that it feels like you could have replaced the Alien with a number of different movie monsters and it would have worked just as well.

The setting though–a prison colony/mining world way way out in the middle of nowhere–I’ll admit was pretty cool.

Ripley: This is a maximum security prison, and you have no weapons of any kind?
Andrews: We have some carving knives in the abattoir, a few more in the mess hall. Some fire axes scattered about the place - nothing terribly formidable.
Ripley: That’s all?
Andrews: We’re on the honor system.
Ripley: Then we’re fucked.

The religious subplot they’ve got going on is an interesting contrast to the corporate/survival bits we’ve had up until now, even if I think they could have done a bit more with it.

Dillon: Do you have any faith, sister?
Ripley: Not much.
Dillon: Well, we’ve got a lot of faith here. Enough even for you.
Ripley: I thought women weren’t allowed.
Dillon: Well, we’ve never had any before. But we tolerate anybody. Even the intolerable.

Overall, the weakest of the three I’ve seen so far by a decent margin. We’ll have to see where they go from here.

Given that ending… I’m not really sure what to expect!