Alien Resurrection Review
by Gerthein Boersma (gerthein AT wxs DOT nl)December 15th, 1997
NOTE: This review contains information that some may consider to be spoilerish, and those who are yet to see this film and want to know as little about it as possible before doing so are advised not to read any further.
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Alien Resurrection (aka Alien 4)
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Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
In resurrecting the character of Ellen Ripley (Sigorney Weaver), lead character of the Alien-series, the writers of Alien Resurrection fully intend to have their cake and eat it. Presumably thinking that, since audiences will have to suspend their disbelief anyway to allow them to bring back the deceased heroine, they should also be able to swallow that the Ripley clone is, for all plot-purposes, in the same state as she was in before she died: not only still pregnant with an alien queen but also, with help of the shared hive-mind of the alien DNA that she carries inside her she also has most of her pre-death memories (s-t-r-e-t-c-h) .
Scietists of an organization that is in actuality The Company from the previous installments in all but name (to make it believable that the film takes place 200 years after the third episode, you'll understand the writers at least had to change a few tags) have succeeded, on board of their huge space-lab (that despite its enormous size employs only 49 people) not only in creating a clone of Ripley, but more importantly, in getting ahold of that alien queen that has eluded their equally evil predecessors for so many decades. Living, human cryo-stored host bodies are smuggled in, unscrupulously impregnated by the "face hugging" aliens that emerge from the queen's eggs, and soon enough, a dozen of fully-grown creatures are ready for action. Needless to say, the monsters escape their cages, and once again Ripley, this time accompanied by the motley crew of smugglers that unsuspectingly delivered the host bodies to the scientists, can clean up the mess.
The first Alien film was an undisputed classic, the second a spectacular and tremendously enjoyable film, one of the few sequels that approach the original's quality, even surpassing it in some areas. So after the bleak, empty failure that was the third installment, 20th Century Fox had a lot riding on Alien Resurrection: it had to work, or the once mighty franchise was as good as dead. Fortunatly, the filmmakers, headed up by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of the Lost Children) made this important installment with a keen eye for what went wrong in the third one. And to give credit where credit's due, they do manage to fix most of the problems that plaqued its predecessor. Unfortunatly, they forget to do much else.
Perhaps Alien3's most destructive failure was that its human characters were so incredibly dull and uninteresting that no-one could be bothered to tell them apart, let alone care whether or not they lived or died. In Alien 4, this problem is corrected, but unfortunatly it is done with so much zeal that the heroes of Alien Resurrection are the other end of a very large scale: every single character now has a gimmick, a trick, a neat twist, and as such they seem too "assembled"; more like the pixellated champions of a computer game like Street Fighter II than the champions of an installment of a classic movie-series. Granted, they may have bags of instant-character, but they are seriously shallow as well: the robotic mechanic Call (an adequate Winona Ryder), for example, can't hold a candle to female characters from Alien and Aliens in terms of depth and ability to hold audience interest. Nevertheless, characterization remains undeniably an improvement over Alien3. Certainly, Ripley's character remains interesting; Alien DNA now mixed with her own, she has animal instincts and even more of an attitude than usual. The lead scientist (a good turn by genre-actor Brad Dourif) says it best when he refers to her as "something of a predator" and Weaver certainly plays her 'new' role adequately.
But rather than focusing on what went wrong in part 3 and fixing that, it would have been nice if the filmmakers would have looked at what went right in parts 1 and 2 and had expanded on that. The first two films were filled with original, exciting action-and suspense sequences. Alien Resurrection has only one that's comparable to the best of those: a beautiful underwater-chase and subsequent sweaty-palmed ladder-encounter. And even that scene has a disappointing climax, with one of the Street Fighters falling a few feet down into the water but, inexplicably, never resurfacing. Oh, and in the meantime, Ripley is also briefly attacked by an impregnating "face hugger" alien -- possibly a nice lead-in for episode number five.
Other scenes that, while not classic, are not at all bad include a short sequence in which the cryo-stored human hosts are impregnated under authorization of the very evil scientists, the evacuation of the station when the alien menace first breaks loose, and a sequence near the end in which the (otherwise decidedly lacklustre) villain scientist is killed by an impregnated surviving host that's about to "chest-burst". Other than these, the film seriously lacks in the all-important department of great action: it has a few other contrived sequences but nothing particularly memorable. The aliens themselves aren't particularly threatening, strenuously holding back whenever the script needs them to, and since it needs them to so very often, they loose almost all of their punch -- for a lesson in How To, Jeunet could have looked not only to the originals, but also to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, in which the velociraptors were consistantly threatening, and the film therefore consistently suspenseful (how embarrasing that an Alien film would be outclassed by a PG-rated Spielberg outing in terms of sheer horror). And I won't give away the climax of Alien 4, not merely because I don't want to spoil it for those who are yet to see the film, but rather because it's so ridiculous in every fashion that it's just not worth talking about.
There *are* some interesting scenes in Alien 4, but they are mostly the non-exciting ones. The scenes showing learning process of both the aliens and Ripley (yes, she *has* forgotten a few trivial things that she needs to re-learn -- like language) are well done, as is an intriguing (albeit somewhat oddly inserted) encounter between Ripley and her clone 'sisters': apparently, the new Ripley was the eighth attempt at a clone, and the ones among the first seven failures that we get to see are decidedly Geiger-esque (despite him having little to do with their design) and look horrifyingly great (production design is high overall: the huge lab-ship is impressive, the sleek smuggler's ship has a lovely japanimation-look). Another scene, in which Ripley shows that she can now play a mean game of basketball, goes a long way in establishing not only her 'new' character, but also that of her fellow street fighters. All these scenes can't conceal, though, that the plot is incredibly thin, despite attempts at a a 'different', more artistic Alien film, with 'kinky' moments and a ham-handed underlying mommy-and-child theme.
All in all, it sounds pretty terrible, doesn't it? Then let's sum up the strengths again: nice new characters which are well acted (Ron Perlman's tough guy Johner being my personal favorite, with Micheal Wincott -- as smuggler leader Eldyn -- also managing to impress in his short time on screen), some beautiful design (obviously, a lot of money was spent here), and a handful of pretty good scenes. Other than that, though, Alien 4 is an enjoyable but decidedly unspectacular and very shallow alien-battle romp, scarcely better than the far less pretensious (if more clichéd) Alien rip-off 'The Relic' of yesteryear. As such, it's much more entertaining than the third one, and certainly worth seeing for the starving fans of the sci-fi horror genre, but it is ultimately nothing more than a B-movie in fancy big budget clothing, and as such does the fans of the series few favors.
Ripley may have her full memory back, she's nevertheless appearing in a very forgetable film -- a film that's not bad in its own right, but in not exceeding mediocrity still fails to bring the series back on track. Yes, Fox can rest assured that Alien Resurrection doesn't immediatly kill the weakened franchise like another bad Alien film would have, but surely that franchise must now be considered to be living on borrowed time. One more outing like this and it's dead beyond resurrection.
Gerthein Boersma
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