Nah. I don't see it. I agree that the visuals are strong at times, but that's Fincher's music video experience coming through -- all cool visuals with little substance. While he tries to make us believe character development has occurred, it's really just cool images of Ripley looking haunted, being completely detached from everyone, and then sleeping with a dude to somehow symbolize growth. It's light fare at best.

Whether or not you agree with this, there are serious flaws with the nuts and bolts of the script. First off, Aliens was the perfect sequel. I've never seen a film do more to listen to its predecessor, echoing and completing its themes and character arcs, all while delivering a very different film with its own unique energy. The end of Aliens was a critical moment in the series -- whereas Ripley escapes in the first film, totally alone, she does so in the second film with a makeshift family: a husband figure and a daughter figure. This isn't just a pretty ending; it's the completion of the character's inner journey. To then just have these characters die off camera in the opening credits of the third film was a massive slap across the face which I cannot forgive. If Fincher had intended to send the message the above reviewer infers, that the aliens always win, this could have been done more dramatically and had more emotional repercussion for Ripley throughout the film. Instead, it comes off as Fincher sloppily discarding characters he didn't want to deal with, while Ripley quickly moves on to love again and find an inner conflict that Fincher finds more meaningful (well it isn't really an internal conflict in any sense other than an extremely literal one).

Add to that the screwed up ending in which the Nostromo's log entries start randomly and inexplicably playing -- weird in and of itself until you consider that the escape shuttle playing these logs didn't come from the Nostromo. It came from the Sulaco. Then there's the whole overly dramatic climactic scene which tried waaaay too hard and felt corny as a result. Any time someone yells "Nooooooooooo!" in a climactic moment, the film has pretty much lost me, and Ripley living through the chest burst without any scrap of pain registering on her face, cradling the alien -- that was absurd. Never mind the priest beating the alien with his bare hands and yelling "Is that all you got?"

Do you know how Fincher got the job of directing Alien 3? He told Signorney Weaver he wanted Ripley to be bald, and that's all it took.

MTV era style over substance. That was Alien 3.