Was there meant to be a hidden subtext, message or a metaphor in this movie?

It's about anal sex, put blantly.

Yup, sorry bout that. I always mix these two.

No problem; always happy to talk Alien.

I'm not familiar with him, but it sounds like he's probably not a critic, at least not a film one. If he was getting paid to write about movies, I doubt he'd hop elsewhere and do it online for free.

I haven't come across Ager's videos yet, but it sounds like he's quite knowledgeable on the subject - likely moreso than I am - and I look forward to checking the video(s) out.

That poison/antidote analysis is interesting. I've never thought of it that way. I'm not sure I think there "should" be an antidote to the terror of Alien, though. Some of the fear-levels of Alien are the cosmic horror thing, and there is no "cure" for existential helplessness, although we obviously do cope with these thoughts as a species. Nevertheless, it's a good analysis, and worth pondering.

I shouldn't say "just" a good action movie as though that's not valuable. I kind of think of Die Hard that way, but I don't mean it as a negative. I just mean that Die Hard knows what it is and goes to the hilt. But, I will own that I don't think Aliens has many deep themes - certainly not as many as Alien.

I will say this, though: Aliens' major theme that I do really enjoy is its bizarre, off-kilter look at motherhood. With Ripley and Newt vs. the Alien Queen, we have this conflict of matriarchal aggression which is interesting. I don't think Aliens explores that "mother" theme far enough - certainly nowhere near as deeply as Alien explores "fear". That's kinda why I consider it a (really good) action movie: it's not that it has no ideas, it's just that it's more concerned with awesome exo-suits and pulse rifles than it is with exploring the ideas it has.

Keep in mind that it's been a WHILE since I saw Alien 3, but here goes...

In a nutshell? I was mostly bored. It kinda made enemies with me right away by wiping out the cast of Aliens. I thought it was kinda cheap of it to just negate the ending of the previous movie like that, and it was a bad move to take Ripley's hard-fought victory away - particularly with Newt. The theme I liked best in Aliens was that oddly-placed theme of motherhood (Ripley as Newt's surrogate mother vs. the Alien Queen) and it was kinda neat. Wiping out that mother-ness made me a bit prickly towards Alien 3 out of the gate.

The next thing is that I love the setting. The space monastery was, and continues to be, a pretty unique place in a sci-fi movie, and it plays into the horror nicely. I know it's like a prison thing, not a monastery, but it's also a monastery, and it's cool. I would have liked more lore and exploration of the setting. Not all the answers, not extensive backstory, but just, yeah, a bit more.

The supporting cast are forgettable. First, I know they're going to die, so it's hard to get attached. Second, they were off-putting and I didn't want to get to know them. This is a big problem. Every time I watch Alien, I feel horrible when Lambert gets it. She's *so scared* and, of course she was. I feel bad when the original crew die because I like them. Not the inmates. And, again, I barely remember them at all. I had the same reaction to 9/10 of the cast of Rogue One: didn't care about them, so I don't care about the movie. Okay, Ripley's great, but...that's it.

I like the resolution with Ripley's actions - that was unexpected, and basically the only departure from the Alien franchise's formulae. The rest was bog-standard. I didn't like that "Bishop" was the Weyland-Yutani guy. I thought it was a shoehorned excuse to mash the actor back in, and I couldn't help but think, "You know how you could have gotten that actor in the movie? Not killing him before the movie started."

I will asterisk this whole thing with this: I know a lot of people love Alien 3 and find hidden depths there. It has been ages since I've seen it, and I only watched it once (because I didn't care for it). But, I wouldn't be against a re-watch to reconsider my position, knowing that this film does have enough fans that love it.

I seem to recall reading about Dan O'Bannon studying fear or researching the nature of fear or something. I think a lot of it was quite deliberate. Some of it was undoubetdly subconscious. And there's the question of "deliberate vs. accidental" that has to pass through three people's processes that we're talking about here: O'Bannon, Ridley Scott, and HR Giger.

It's my opinion that, between the three of them, most of it is deliberate. Giger's work is obviously sexual, and Ridley Scott must have known he wanted to employ that aspect. Other aspects are obvious like fear of the dark. I think the existential fears and fears of parental (or deity) abandonment are/might be unintentional, but they probably came out of Scott et al. trying to tap into the isolation and loneliness (which is deliberate) and the terror of that. (Ie, they are cut off from "mother" and alone). But even there, naming the maching "MOTHER" seems far too deliberate.

If nothing else, Scott is a brilliant filmmaker, and while he doesn't hit the bullseye every time, this is a guy with a track record of brilliance, if not genius. It's more likely that he was being meticulous than just falling arse-backward into good ideas.

So, until I see interviews where Scott (or whoever) says, "Yeah, they were all idiots; they had no idea what they were making," I'm going to go with Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation here is that these great artists were doing their jobs.