Absolutely awful.

Why is it so damn hard to create a decent script for either the Alien or Predator franchises? And even tougher when you throw the two of them together? Honestly, I consider only the first two Alien movies watchable. The rest are trash. I'd long considered Alien 4 to be the worst of the lot, with 3 just a shade behind it.

Now, I consider this the worst. I mean, at least the movies had Ripley.

This is an incoherent mess, with way too much technobabble and a whole other federation of humans subplot that could easily have been excised, and should have been.

I don't know what happened to William Gibson. His first seven or eight books were great, but then I just found nothing to love in anything afterward. This unfilmed screenplay does nothing to change my mind.

Awful. Just freaking awful. ( )

This is a recent graphic novel adaptation of Gibson's "lost" script for Aliens 3, almost (?) entirely discarded by the time the final film was produced. It's not as confusing as the film but it's quite confusing. The narrative moves between two different groups/locations but I was unclear which one was which. And the action was often confusingly illustrated so it was difficult to understand exactly what was happening. It feels a lot like an Alien movie (one reviewer also said this, but distinguished from an Alien comic, which I guess is a thing, but I'd never have paid attention to that). ( )

Companion Piece to "Alien III: Audible Original Drama" (2019)
Review of the Dark Horse Books graphic novel edition/adaptation (2019) of the unproduced William Gibson screenplay (1987)

This Dark Horse graphic novel collects the material from the five floppy comic books William Gibson's Alien 3 #1 to William Gibson's Alien 3 #5 released earlier this year. It also includes a 2 page Introduction/Foreword by William Gibson which provides additional background about his original work on the screenplay. There is also a section of original sketch and concept art. I am assuming these 2 latter sections are bonus material that were not included in the floppy comic books.

The William Gibson introduction is quite fascinating as it provides an insider's view to the screenplay process and the Hollywood machine. Gibson produced the work as a writer for hire and wrote his script according to a treatment (a proposed film synopsis) that he was provided. The decision to leave Ripley in a comatose state for most of the proposed film was therefore not his, but was simply according to the treatment he was responding to. In the end the script he provided did not meet the expectations of the producers as he did not really give it any so-called "cyperpunk" edge that they had thought he would bring to the table. After that early script and several later ones were rejected, the film was finally produced as Alien³ (1992) (the novelization of the David Fincher movie).

On the whole I really preferred the Audible Original adaptation as the audio producer Dirk Maggs managed to give Ripley an increased cameo role and also gave more prominent roles to Bishop and Hicks (who were voiced by original Aliens actors Lance Henriksen and Michael Biehn respectively). The graphic novel adaptation does follow the same plotline but I often found the panels confusing and the life-cycle of the alien creatures was all out of wack with the Alien/Prometheus canon. That might have been the case in the audio as well, but it did not jar as much as in a drawn visualization. Bishop was drawn somewhat like Lance Henriksen, but the Hicks character was very generic and did not strike me as anything like Michael Biehn. ( )

Not sure if this was a novella or a short story, nevertheless it was a free Audible download that I listened to. I takes off at the end of the Aliens movie plot -- with Ripley, the android Bishop and the surviving marine Hicks rescuing the young girl Newt. From there the story is fairly predictable in that you have space travelers being threatened/killed by the aliens in a variety of forms that just keep coming at the humans, time and time again. The Ripley character plays a fairly minor role. ( )