Alien³ (R)
20th Century Studios; Dread Central (anthology); IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia; Xenopedia
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This came out in 1992, when I was 16 years old. I have a vague memory of wanting to see it, and almost a sort of shadow of a memory that maybe I did see it in a theater, but I expect that memory either crossed over from some alternate universe, or else is just another example of my memory being generally unreliable. I finally did see it, almost certainly for the first time, in 2017. And there's nothing memorable in it that I couldn't have just seen in a TV commercial, or something. Anyway... it apparently wasn't as well received as the first two movies in the franchise, and I can understand that. But I also don't think it was a bad movie. It was okay. And I'm glad to have finally seen it.

So, Ripley and the other survivors of the previous movie crash land on a penal colony planet called Fury 161. Alas, Ripley is the only survivor of the crash. (I am really sad about Newt, okay?) I guess there are about 25 prisoners remaining, all the others having left some time ago for a reason I don't remember and don't care about. There are also two overseers remaining (Superintendent Andrews and his assistant, Aaron), plus a doctor named Clemens. The doctor becomes very close to Ripley. The most important inmate is a guy named Dillon, who is basically the spiritual leader of the prisoners. (They all follow some vaguely defined religion that I think they made up themselves at some point.) Anyway, Ripley convinces Clemens to do an autopsy on Newt, fearing that she might have been infected by an alien. The doctor finds nothing, but Ripley still insists that they cremate the bodies of both Newt and Corporal Hicks. (She doesn't tell Clemens about aliens, instead saying they were possibly infected with cholera.) Meanwhile, it turns out that there was a facehugger aboard Ripley's ship, but instead of infecting a human, it did so to a dog. (This supposedly made the xenomorph that eventually emerged look different from the previous ones, but personally I never saw much of a difference.)

Well, of course the alien soon starts killing people, and Ripley has to work with the prisoners to try to stop it, even though they have no weapons. (They do, however, come up with a clever- yet very risky- way of killing it, using what resources are available.) Also, the Company has sent a "rescue ship" to get Ripley, and of course she knows the alien will have to be killed before the ship arrives, since they'd just want to study it and weaponize it for their own purposes. The plot gets even more complicated than that, for a reason I don't want to spoil. But the movie definitely has a sad ending.

Incidentally, I have no idea why the title is styled with the "3" as a superscript. There's nothing "cubed" about the movie, as far as I can tell. I suppose they just thought it looked cool. *shrug*