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Film: Aliens and Alien 3 

Wow is Aliens an enjoyable film. So much wit. Humor. Full of small character moments. Full of life. In contrast, Aliens 3 incredibly dull and seems half-baked. A promising concept - crash landing into a prison environment where the inmates are devoutly religious, but boy the storytelling just doesn't work. They adopted an almost procedural element early on where Charles Dance (later to be Tywin Lannister) is a doctor who pairs with Ripley to try and figure out why strange deaths and events are occurring around the prison. Spoiler alert: it's an Alien. For some reason, each of them withhold quite a bit of information from each other, but they also sleep with each other. I'm watching the film on Hulu and think to myself has Hulu like skipped ahead on accident or done something weird with the cut? I'm honestly not sure. It feels like when you watch an airplane version of a movie. But maybe this is just the movie? I don't know. They have some other good ideas - back to one Alien, Ripley has an Alien inside her, and the prison has no weapons so they need to fight this Alien with primitive tools. But execution, not just ideas, matters. 

The most noticeable thing is how much less charming Ripley herself is in this film compared with the others.