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 alien biology is even more bizarre than earlier, and expanded in rather silly directions. First the alien was a slasher hiding in the dark, then it was the Viet Cong, and now it's ... a zombie virus? Really? It is possible to take a metaphor so far it loses all sense.

There is a noble attempt to expand the world at least a little, which I approve of, even if bits of it like the space communists feel a bit silly and dated. However, at least in this novelisation, there are constant flahbacks to dialogue in Aliens, which feels pandering. The pacing is also somehow off; a lot of the first part reads like a suspense story, but seriously -- this is Alien, we all know where this is going.

Still, it's got Newt, Hicks and Bishop doing their thing, some new characters I actually got to like, and Pat Cadigan writing like the competent pro she is. So it's not all bad, but it's not really good.