By Jason Haskins
This is what happens when the studio interferes with everything in the filmmaking process. Sure, they struck boldly with the Alien 3, which was easily the worst film of the franchise, but they happened to take interesting ideas and a script by Joss Whedon (of Firefly and Buffy fame) and the genius of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) diminishing all of the capacities that would've made the movie good.
Let's talk about the story.
After the ending of Alien 3 where series heroine Ellen Ripley (spoilers) throws herself into the flames so that her unborn alien child couldn't be born and so that The Company couldn't experiment on her, Ripley has been cloned! Huh. So, after eight cloning procedures one actually "revives" Ripley and she's born again 200 years after the events of the third film!
...with the alien embryo inside her (...?). The Company completes experiments to breed more of these aliens for government projects. Enter some space pirates and a whole mess in outer space where the aliens get out of their containment tanks with no one to save them and you have the plot of Alien: Resurrection where Ripley isn't really herself and must toy with whether she's alien or human. Huh.
Some of these ideas are pretty good. By that, I mean that some of the set-up works interestingly. Bringing The Company back to see where their experiments would go was interesting and I dug Brad Dourif (Chucky!) as the jerk scientist guy. There are a few cool action scenes such as an underwater escape with aliens trailing the ragged group like sharks. Granted, this part was fairly stupid and wasn't as thrilling as it could've been, but the possibilities were pretty cool.
Now for some of the ridiculous ideas. The whole cloning premise was so ridiculously stupid that I almost couldn't handle it. It was one of those factoids I must've blocked out from my consciousness because of how long it had been since I've seen this movie. Some of the foolish ideas presented included this relationship between Winona Ryder's character, Annalee, and Ripley.
The group of space pirates were walking clichés and there's one scene that was so effing ridiculous that I was frustrated--an act of sacrifice for no reason and could not have been explained. Then there's a basketball scene and some weird sexual stuff with Ripley and aliens and vulvas and a ton of weird imagery. The movie is strange; strange to the point--well, it was done by a Frenchman--but strange to the point where I couldn't tell whether I dug it or not. Ripley is simply crazy and not the same hero we grew to love in the first few films.
The ending of the film is definitely weird--alien baby, baby!
Now, you'd think that I wouldn't really dig this movie, but for some reason I did--and I can't really explain it. The direction isn't amazing--Jeunet's style didn't carry over into this flick, for some reason. If the movie had been more like The City of Lost Children with aliens I would've totally been on board, but he seemed restrained here and kept back from his full potential.
The movie is actually pretty fast paced (even the special edition of the movie, which is a tad bit longer) and keeps thing interesting by throwing in clichéd action scenes that are pretty good. Long gone are the horror factors, but the movie still delivers some pretty terrifying aliens full of slimy goodness we've always loved. The special effects were definitely an upgrade from the crap we saw in Alien 3 making the experience much better.
The acting is mostly what you'd expect from a film of this caliber, but offers some more interesting stuff than the previous film. Ron Perlman plays the typical macho guy, there's a disabled guy that's a lot of fun, and Michael Wincott has a small role--I'll watch anything this guy does. Winona Ryder was not on her A-game and seemed to sort of sleepwalk through the movie what with the bad lines written for her. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley was very weird and different. She was creepy and scary, but sort of hot in this weird way as her character embraced her sexuality in this movie instead of being this masculine hero the series built off her.
Alien: Resurrection (1997) wasn't terrible and was actually quite watchable. I think that it's much more interesting and more fun than the third film and at least tries to put forth some new ideas despite how bad most of them are. I wished that the script had gone in a different direction and had the aliens invade Earth, which would've been cool, or some of the ideas that were presented in earlier drafts of the script, but alas we are left with this cloning scenario that bugged me all the way through. This is a movie of give and take with a lot of things that tarnish the experience, but it's still just a mediocre watch for a rainy day and has actually stood up over the years surprisingly well.
3 out of 5 Stars
© Jason Haskins, 2011
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