 Get ready for a whole new breed of Blu-ray with the Alien Anthology. Four powerful films....eight thrilling versions....together at last in dazzling, terrifying, high-def clarity and with the purest digital sound on the planet. Over 60 hours of special features and two bonus discs, including never-fore-seen content and the totally immersive MU-TH-UR mode Blu-ray interactive experience, make this the ultimate Alien movie collection your Blu-ray player has been begging for. The Alien Anthology includes: Aliens Alien3 Alien Resurrection Plus all the EXTRAS listed here. (on Disc 5 and Disc 6) Which brings us, of course, to Alien 3, the much-loathed dark horse of the franchise. Here, Ripley's escape pod crashes onto Fury 161, a penal colony/smelting facility operated by bar-coded prisoners of a quasi-monastic order. Straight away, the film alienates fans of the second movie— if you'll pardon the pun—killing off all the surviving characters besides Ripley. Of course, an alien egg was conveniently stowed away on the escape craft—I still have no idea how it got there—and havoc inevitably erupts in the prison. Basically, Alien 3 is more of the same, but with a few obligatory new ideas, like having Ripley unwittingly become the host for an alien queen embryo. Little about the movie works, in any conventional sense, and though it strives for both, there's neither the suspense of the first film nor the all-out action of the second. There's a moment here when Ripley says to one of the creatures, "I've known you so long that I can't remember a time when you weren't in my life," and this seems indicative of the film itself—stale, too familiar, passionless. And yet—and I don't think I'm alone here—while I recognize that Alien 3 is a frequently incoherent mess, it's at least an interesting, sometimes beautiful mess, and I have a certain underdog appreciation for it. I like Golic (Paul McGann), the pariah who bears a thematic similarity to Dracula's Renfield—he's fascinated with the alien creature—and I've always enjoyed the film's bleak tone and religious sub-current. If only a better script could've been crafted out of these occasionally effective elements. Once you know the back-story, though, the film's lack of cohesion makes more sense. Alien 3's production was a legendary disaster. When Renny Harlin dropped out, Fox handed the reins to hotshot commercial and music video director David Fincher—later of Fight Club, SE7EN, and Zodiac fame—but the studio and the young would-be auteur butted heads constantly over funding and creative control. To make matters worse, the script had gone through numerous revisions and hadn't even been completed before shooting. Fincher abandoned the project during the editing phase, and the film that was released to theaters was critically mauled. While the 2003 "Restored Workprint Version" makes some improvements to the plot and characterization, Alien 3 is still a jumbled assortment of half-baked ideas that lack a singular creative vision. Cast Notes: Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley), Charles S. Dutton (Dillon), Charles Dance (Clemens), Paul McGann (Golic), Brian Glover (Andrews), Ralph Brown (Aaron), Danny Webb (Morse), Christopher John Fields (Rains), Holt McCallany (Junior), Lance Henriksen (Bishop II), Christopher Fairbank (Murphy [as Chris Fairbank]), Carl Chase (Frank), Leon Herbert (Boggs), Vincenzo Nicoli (Jude), Pete Postlethwaite (David). IMDb Rating (11/05/10): 6.2/10 from 66,937 users
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