Alien 3

The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

Paperback, 432 pages

English language

Published Aug. 16, 2022 by Titan Books.

ISBN:
978-1-80336-113-0
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2 stars (1 review)

2 editions

Review of 'Alien - Alien 3' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Alien is a perfect movie. Aliens is an excellent movie. Alien3 is a good movie (fight me all you want, but I maintain that the Assembly Cut works), hampered by the fact that it came after Aliens, and very few watchers wanted its grim type of nihilism after rooting for Hicks, Newt & others for the nerve-wracking ride that was Aliens. So, here's a novelisation of an unproduced screenplay that does not start with everybody dying, and also seems to give the audience "the same as last time, only bigger", as sequels should. Is it any good?

... It's only barely making it into kinda okay.

I cannot tell if the screenplay would have made a good movie, but it makes a rather forgettable sci-fi novel. The built-in weaknesses in the Alien mythos are somehow harder to ignore in written fomat. Distances, times and scales make absolutely no sense. The …