Alien Resurrection Review
by Brian Takeshita (takeshita AT Capitol DOT hawaii DOT gov)December 3rd, 1997
ALIEN RESURRECTION
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: ** out of ****
If you talk to some people, they'll say Ridley Scott's ALIEN was the best of the series, which went downhill after that. Talk to others and they'll tell you that James Cameron's thrill-ride masterpiece, ALIENS, was where the series peaked. If anyone tells you ALIEN 3 was the best of the lot, call the nearest mental hospital and tell them you've found their missing patient. Fans of the first two films will invariably join forces to gang up on that installment, directed by music video director David Fincher. Four years have gone by since that fiasco, but the fans' memories have not disappeared, so while the latest movie, ALIEN RESURRECTION, is approached with high hopes, it is also approached with a certain wariness.
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the glue that held the series together, was killed off in ALIEN 3, taking her own life just as one of those fearsome creatures came bursting out of her chest. As she fell toward a fiery pit of molten metal, she seemed to caress the baby alien as her own baby, embracing the enemy which had haunted her through six hours of cinema over fourteen years. A little corny? Perhaps, but it seemed a fitting closure to a series which had garnered a lot of fans and their spending cash. Of course, an ALIEN movie would not be the same without the venerable Ripley, so in this new film, they resurrect her. Hence the name.
In ALIEN RESURRECTION, Ripley is not really Ripley, but a clone generated a couple hundred years later from the first Ripley's own tissue that had been saved from the planet on which she died. The people cloning her are from a military-business conglomerate which hopes to use the aliens for the purposes of research and general killing as the ultimate weapon. This clone seems to pick up right where the late Ripley left off, complete with gestating alien, and the first scenes of the movie show the medical personnel aboard a gigantic research vessel removing the baby from Ripley's chest. Following the operation, the host seems to be doing fine, so hey, they decide to keep her around, too.
The research vessel is commanded by General Perez (Dan Hedaya), who has contracted a freelance freighter crew to deliver a number of people hijacked while in cryo-stasis, whom Dr. Wren (J.E. Freeman) plans to use as hosts to breed more aliens. You see, the alien taken out of Ripley's chest is a queen and by this time is already laying eggs.
The freighter crew is your usual band of misfits. There's Elgyn (Michael Wincott), the tough leader of the group, Vriess (Dominique Pinon), Elgyn's lover and first mate of the freighter, Johner (Ron Pearlman), the all brawn, no brain type, Christie (Gary Dourdan), the techno-wiz, and Hilliard (Kim Flowers), who doesn't seem to be part of the crew for any other reason than he's in a wheelchair and therefore adds a little color to the group. Then there's Annalee Call (Winona Ryder), another member of the group who's apparently just tagging along for reasons which aren't really explained (until later, but those motivations apparently weren't revealed to the crew before she was taken on board). These people react to their surroundings with the predictable suspicion of authority, and of course there's the compulsory scene where one of the visiting crew finds the supply room and loots it. There's really not much we haven't seen before, and you can almost pick out the characters who are going to die within the first hour of the film.
And die they do. Pretty soon the baby aliens are full grown and find a particularly ingenious way of escaping their confines. Shortly thereafter, they are up to their usual mischief, killing here, snatching there, and overall looking really mean. So of course it's up to Ripley to save the survivors by leading them to their only means of escape, the freighter on which our rag tag band arrived. I think it would have been cute for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet to have paid an homage to STAR WARS and have Ripley say, ala Princess Leia, "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought." At least that would have been unexpected.
ALIEN RESURRECTION contains a whole bunch of things you just knew were going to happen, because you've seen it happen in the previous films. >From these re-treads you can publish a doctrine on what not to do when there are aliens on your spaceship: 1) Don't go looking into holes made by the aliens. They will probably grab you from their hiding place just to the side of the hole. 2) If you find some goo on the floor, don't spend time staring at it and going, "Ewww." Instead, run away fast. There's an alien nearby. 3) Don't walk on floor gratings; only walk on solid floors. With gratings, an alien is probably looking at you from below and will pull the gratings away and grab you from underneath. 4) Always assume the alien is right behind you. The moment you think it's not there, it will come out of the darkness, hiss at you, and bite your head.
Most of the performances turned in by the cast are pretty two-dimensional, but it's not really the fault of the actors, given what they had to work with. Most of the characters are paper thin and just fill up slots, with only Winona Ryder given the slightest chance to exercise any real acting ability. Even then, her character's catharsis is decidedly forced, since the reason for her being on the ship are justified only by a flimsy motivation. Sigourney Weaver, however, gets to play her character in a different way than in previous movies. First, Ripley's got all the experience from dealing with the aliens in the past, and therefore she's more intuitive with regard to the aliens' behavior. Second, through the cloning process, Ripley is actually part alien, and therefore can sense where the aliens are and even when the queen is in pain. While intriguing, this limits the amount of fear she has of the aliens and therefore the amount of tension we have as an audience. Sure, we can watch as the other characters get frightened by the aliens, but since they have no depth, we don't really care if they're frightened or even if they live or die.
The aliens themselves are the best they have ever looked, and credit must be given to the creature crew on this one. There are computer-generated aliens too, and they also look a lot better than in ALIEN 3, where shots of the CGI alien were all too fake. One noticeable change from the previous films is that we see the aliens very clearly in this movie, in rooms which are decently lit. Although this helps to show off the wonderful alien artistry, it also somewhat defeats the suspense generated from knowing there is something out in the murky darkness but not being quite able to see it. As a result, we become so familiar with their appearances that they aren't all that scary when they subsequently show up throughout the film.
Altogether, ALIEN RESURRECTION shows that the franchise is running out of plot ideas, and there are only so many times you can take the same person running from the same aliens. While a better film than ALIEN 3, ALIEN RESURRECTION doesn't have what it takes to give the series the shot in the arm it needs, so if there is to be a fifth movie, it's going to have to be something really special.
Review posted December 2, 1997
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