JL Shioshita's Reviews > Alien 3

So a few things - I'm a big fan of William Gibson, Neuromancer is one of my favorite books and I love the Alien franchise (give or take a few movies in there). I'm in the minority, but I also like the Alien 3 we got in theaters. I understand people's gripes with it, I miss Hicks and Newt too, but I watched the crap out of it in the 90s on a banged up VHS when my parents weren't looking and it holds a strange place in my heart. That being said, I always wanted to know what William Gibson's script would have looked like. So I read this comicbook as it came out, pumped up and ready to have my mind blown. Well...my mind was blown but not in a good way. Maybe the cold war backdrop would have been more meaningful back when it was written, but now it just seems cliched. The xenomorphs have become things from another planet, and specifically for the comicbook version, the layout and plotting from panel to panel was so confusing. When you take a complicated plot with multiple characters who are all drawn to look exactly the same and have forgettable names, and put them all in a comicbook together that jumps all over the place, I had no idea who was who or what was happening. Ripley's not even in it. I liked the individual covers though, but man, what a weird take. By the end of it, I didn't know what had happened, and I read it twice to try and make sure I didn't miss anything.