This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Jandy Hardesty’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
There were things I liked about this film - the rusty, derelict look of the prison, the characterization of Clemens (and of the crazy guy, Golic), and especially the effects on the creature, who is given more screen time here than in Alien and yet it works beautifully. Most of the scenes with the alien on-screen were great. In concept, I liked the endlessly downer aspect of it, especially in contrast to the survival-at-all-costs and balls-to-the-wall action of the first two films. But it also felt like a kick in the pants ALL THE WAY THROUGH, and I can't say I enjoyed that, even if I appreciated on some level just the mere fact that it was different from the first two.
The biggest problem I had with it is just that it's friggin messy, and not messy in a glorious way. Messy in a confusing, what's going on, who are these people and why do I care, and oh my god, why does it take TEN HOURS of apparent screen time to get anything done at all. We watched the extended cut, so yeah, it's 30-40 minutes longer, I guess, but I'd heard this was actually supposed to fix the pacing issues and give us more characterization and more reason to care about all the inmates. I still couldn't differentiate any of them except Golic from all the others, and I had no empathy with any of them.
I still cared about Ripley, I guess, but she was so much at the end of her rope (understandably so, and I appreciated that shift in her character from "never say die" to "to hell with it") that I couldn't care much about her survival or lack of survival either, because she didn't. The only thing I cared about, in fact, was seeing the warden get eaten so he would shut the hell up. After that happened (sorry, spoiler), I had trouble staying interested at all.