Entry 50.4: Alien Resurrection (1997)

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

"Witness the resurrection."


 

In this, the penultimate installment of the Alien franchise retrospective blow-out extravaganza celebration...of sleaze, I take to the stars yet again for the (unfortunate) chronologically-final entry in the series, Alien Resurrection.

200 years after the events of Alien3, military scientists aboard the research vessel Auriga have succeeded in cloning Ellen Ripley and have extracted the queen embryo from her abdomen (don't think to hard about it).  A group of space pirates arrive with a cargo of kidnapped, cryogenically-frozen people, and soon the military has bred itself a squadron of aliens.  Stowing away with the pirates is android Call (Winona Ryder, Beetlejuice, Heathers) who has somehow learned about the experiment and has come to stop it.  Predictably, the aliens outsmart their human captors and slaughter most of the scientists and soldiers aboard the Auriga, leaving Call and the pirates to fight their way free with the help of the cloned Ripley who, thanks to some DNA merging in the cloning process, now has acid blood and superhuman reflexes.  The alien queen has changed, as well; she now has a human womb and gives birth to a slimy, confused "newborn" human/alien hybrid.  Can Ripley overcome the "alien" portion of her nature, kill the fuck out of this pathetic creature and save her new friends?  What do you think?!

I really don't like this movie.  There's some interesting drama that could be mined from the idea of a character who willingly sacrificed her life being resurrected against her will and having to deal with the ramifications of that unwanted "second life," but screenwriter Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers-still very early in his career) does very little with that concept.  In fact, his script isn't really about anything.  NONE of the characters in the movie have any motivation whatsoever for the actions they take.  WHY does the military keep the cloned Ripley alive, knowing that she's going to be trouble, when all they want is the alien?  WHY are they so desperate to get their hands on the aliens that they've been continuously trying to clone Ripley (with several teams over six generations) for 200 years?  How much does 200 years of continuous research cost?  They only want the alien as a weapon...Surely SOMETHING else has come along in 200 years that's less costly/requires less effort?  After the aliens break free, WHY do the pirates stick around to fight them/help Ripley?  These are fucking sociopaths who had no problem kidnapping human beings in hypersleep and selling their still-living bodies for a military experiment...Why does any of them give a fuck about the mayhem the aliens might cause?  For that matter, why does Ripley?  Why does the great character actor Michael Wincott (The Crow, Dead Man) walk down a hallway alone for NO other purpose than to get killed?!  WHY is a lengthy, awkward, overly-expository bit of dialogue devoted to explaining that Call is an advanced "auton (an android designed by other androids)" when it has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING else that happens in the movie?  The characters are all interchangeable; Whedon's dialogue follows an exposition-one liner-exposition pattern and much of it seems randomly assigned.  The first three films weren't great character studies, but we at least got the banter between Parker and Brett in the first film and Hudson's cowardly rantings and Vasquez's steely bravado in the second.  Hell, even Alien3 managed to sketch a couple of memorable character with the dumb-but-earnest Aaron and the snarly, sarcastic Morse.  Here, only Ron Pearlman (TV's Beauty and the Beast, Hellboy)'s Johner rises above the rest, and that's only because he's the "dumb guy."  Whedon seems hell-bent on writing an Alien film for the mid-late 90s, one filled with vapid, detached "ironic" humor.  He forgets, however, to give it any semblance of story.   

Whedon's script isn't the only problem here, however.  Jeunet (The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) spoke no English when he signed on to do the film and had to direct his actors through a translator.  Jeunet is a fine filmmaker, but his brand of dark fairytale/sinister whimsy doesn't fit the Alien universe.  Cartoonish fish-eye lens shots, canted camera angles and exaggerated 
POV sequences help rob the film of any sense of dread.  Due to a combination of the weak script and the directorial language barrier, a great cast including Wincott, Pearlman, Brad Douriff (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dune) and J.E, Freeman (Miller's Crossing, Wild at Heart) either flounder around looking confused or chew the shit out of the scenery.  Ryder, meanwhile, cast for her "Gen X It-girl appeal," just seems bored.  Because Alien3 underperformed at the box office, this film was given a lower-than usual budget (relative to inflation, of course).  As such, the sets tend to look cheap and stagey and the CGI alien effects look like PS2-era video game scenes.  On the plus side, ADI's redesigned alien suits are decent looking (they're browner and fleshier than usual, a nice reflection of the high levels of human DNA allegedly present in them).  Their newborn design, however, is a shapeless, slimy ugly piece of shit that looks like a cancerous testicle with eyes.  I hate it.  As an aside, it was originally designed with visible human reproductive organs, which the MPAA demanded be cut prior to release.  Some poor intern at ADI had to spend weeks on digital alien fruit basket removal...

So, yeah...This one's no good and it leaves a sour note in my mouth as the conclusion to the series.  I'll end on an up note, however; Sigourney Weaver OWNS every scene in the damn movie.  She plays alien-hybrid-clone Ripley with a feral grace reflective of the creatures themselves.  It's a noticeably different take on the character, and it's brilliance stands in stark contrast to the shitty film around it.