Alien Resurrection Review
by "Rob Perry" (RPerry AT lonet DOT ca)December 1st, 1997
ALIEN: RESURRECTION
108 min., Rated R, Colour
Review by Robert Michael Perry
This fourth, and seemingly innocuous, installment in the "Alien" franchise marks the return of Ellen Ripley, cloned by scientists apparently 200 years after her quazi-religious death in ALIEN 3. Why? To revive the tiny alien fetus living inside of her, with hopes of using its DNA to breed a new batch of aliens. However, the film, with all its clutching ambition develops into just another in an endless variation on 1950's style Horror/SF, dressed up with no place to go. At least the first ALIEN knew what it was and where it was headed.
But amidst the familiar rank claustrophobia that permeates the movie's every corner there is a glimmer of an idea here, a possibility of delving further into its inherent seductive terror: By bringing it all back again, mankind is essentially inviting back the devil. It is the Frankenstein myth reborn in the darkness of space, inspiring a range of possibilities: What reason would they have after such a long time to do this? Have they encountered the alien species in the interim? Has humanity grown beyond war and profit to encompass more high-reaching possibilities for alien study? In other more pleading words, has anything changed?
Apparently not, since the initial premise, like so much well-worn machinery, is discarded - except for a few incongruent interludes - after the first act. Scientists, we learn, just like those "company" executives in the previous films, are greedy and get what's coming to them. As Ripley states, once revived and told of their plans: "They'll breed. You'll die." If only Victor Frankenstein had had such sage advice he may never have gone to Ingolstadt.
Given then that the film has no intention of furthering our knowledge of this universe, we are left with the conventions of the universe itself reinterpreted. Certainly, the director, French stylist Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is capable of this. He was, after all, the manic visionary that gave us the wonderfully bleak DELICATESSEN and the fantastical bizarre masterpiece CITY OF LOST CHILDREN. His strengths are essentially visceral, not intellectual, and as the premise falls away to contrivance, we await his ability to dazzle us with new visual stimulation. Jeunet has the gift (one shared perhaps by directors like Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton) to find humour in the grotesque, pleasure in the sadistic nihilism of the world. And this is what we see emerging. There is no doubt the "Alien" franchise could use some of this; after Ridley Scott first turned out its lights, James Cameron flexed its muscle, and David Fincher eroded its landscape, what was there left to do but laugh at the whole sloppy mess? But while Jeunet is doing weird best, he just can't seem to think of a punch line. At first, you sense his pleasure in the material's visual possibilities; he sees the entire situation, indeed the concept itself, all as a nightmarish joke. But he doesn't have much affection for the material to make the horror comic. Rather, he is left to dabble in moments, at his best when concocting clever variations on what we know of the "Alien" universe: deploying acidic blood as a tool rather than a hazard; suspending test subjects over a series of alien incubation pods, and never actually showing the results.
But consider, for instance, the potential in a scene where the lead scientist Gediman (played by the always comically creepy Brad Dourif) watches the movements of one of the many aliens he has bread in a sealed chamber. He and the creature mimic one another, as if reaching a cognitive understanding; one is jailer, the other jailed, but there is a moment when something more might be happening, an epiphany, some primal exchange of intelligence. The scene is both funny and frightening, partly because of its execution, and partly because of its implications - disturbing in its hilarity, the furthering relationship between human and alien. But as the scene progresses it becomes mechanically obvious that there's no such intent behind it - it's there merely to scare.
A similar thing happens later in the picture. Everything has invariably gone to hell, and a mixed bag of space pirates (including a uncharacteristically ineffectual Winona Ryder) follow Ripley through the bowels of the space station to safety. Conspicuously, the movie pauses for a moment allowing the cloned Ripley to discover the seven previous attempts at cloning her DNA. The grotesque carnival of pickled mutants echoes the imagery of CITY OF LOST CHILDREN - you're almost waiting for one of them to open their eyes and say hello. But the seen is, I assume, intended to be serious, affecting, as Ripley shares familial agony with her aborted sisters. Regardless of its purpose, it is perhaps the only truly haunting segment in the film, but like earlier scenes it promises much and delivers nothing. Perhaps if she'd laughed at it all, tearfully, painfully thrown her arms in the air to her whole living purgatory, the scene might have paid off. Instead she destroys it in a belch of rifle-flame and the scene closes with an impotent one-liner. And again the whole scene is rendered vacuous.
Weaver herself is part of the problem. As Ripley, she seems to slither through the film as if eager to shed any emotional skin that might be left from the previous three pictures, enabling her to stand outside of it all, making one venomous quip after another. As a result, the few moments of intimacy she allows herself - the most laughable involving a caressing sequence between her and an alien queen - appear all the more uninvolved. To be sure, Weaver has a presence, but the emotional conviction she gave the previous pictures underscores how little she seems to care about running away from the bogeyman one more time; she seems tired. It's probably the best motivation to take, however, certainly the most genuine.
As the picture winds up to its second half, and the obligatory machinations of the genre start doing the pumping, all this seems little more than an abortive exercise. Of the plot beyond this point there is little else to say, except that it is retread of old material, less inventively concocted, and self-consciously executed. But what else can there be? How many times can characters slide under doors and crawl along air ducts before the whole thing registers with little more effect than a video game? In the end the brief stabs at comic invention and true menace give way to the grotesque veneer of the "alien" concept. The climax of the film, centring on the birth of a new alien personifies this notion. The product of human/alien breeding - thanks to Ripley and the greedy scientists - it assumes to be the culmination of both, but possesses the qualities of neither. Like some poster-boy for "Phantasmagoria" magazine, it's simply grotesque.
Ridley Scott's original ALIEN was also gory, but suggestive, it played with shadow and light as much as with pyrotechnics, latex, and goo. It had a Gothic beauty. The designs by H.R. Giger were truly original - symmetrical, mechanical, yet hauntingly, frighteningly organic, infused with a horrifying sexual certainty. ALIEN exploited this; seeing the alien's ship for the first time you could sense there was a logic to it, an almost invasive design. Yet as each successive film in the series has emerged, the design has grown increasingly sloppy. ALIEN: RESURRECTION takes this slovenly progression to its ultimate gooey apex; the human/alien hybrid creature looks the antithesis of what Giger intended. Or maybe that's the punchline.
copyright 1997 Robert Michael Perry
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