Alien - Alien 3

The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

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William Gibson, Pat Cadigan: Alien - Alien 3 (Hardcover, 2021, Titan Books)

Hardcover, 432 pages

Published Sept. 7, 2021 by Titan Books.

ISBN:
978-1-78909-752-8
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2 stars (2 reviews)

2 editions

reviewed Alien - Alien 3 by William Gibson

Disappointing from two greats

2 stars

This was a grind, to be honest.

I had previously read the script, and found it very generic, surprisingly so for Gibson, who is one of my favourite authors.

I had hoped that Cadigan might lift things, do something interesting with it. I don't know her work as well, and so don't know if she was deliberately writing as if for a late 80's, but it felt that way.

Badly edited I felt also, there was some repetition, and just a dragging on that should have been dealt with better.

Don't recommend, I'm afraid. There is better work from both to warrant your time.

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 …