Alien Resurrection Review
by "Luke Buckmaster" (bucky AT alphalink DOT com DOT au)April 30th, 1998
REVIEW: Alien Resurrection (1998)
by Luke Buckmaster
1 star out of 5
I won t even pretend that I have seen the other 3 alien films. I saw glimpses of Alien and Aliens and fragments of Alien 3, but I have by no means actually sat down and watched any of them. So take my opinion from an unbiased and impartial perspective: Alien Resurrection is not worth the large bag of lollies I was munching into after a hard day s work.
I didn t just dislike it so much because the plot was awful; most of the acting was very average or the special effects got tiresome after 5 minutes of painful viewing but also the fact that every tedious ingredient thrown in attempts to give this pointless dribble some meaning.
Sigourney Weaver, who s role in Alien earned her an Academy Award nomination, plays the character of Ripley, who died fighting against extraterrestrial scum in Alien 3. 200 years later, scientists use a sample of blood found at the site of her death to recreate Ripley - including the alien that was stuck inside her. In no time they remove the alien from her body and separate the two; yet Ripley is now not completely human, possessing strange amounts of strength and being able to withhold greater pain than a normal being. I m sure someone can explain exactly why this is so, but for now we ll just ignore it and move on.
Why, you ask, would Ripley and the alien inside her be recreated? Well, the smart little lab researchers believed that they would be able to discover many advancements in science from studying the alien creature. These were the same people who said they could control the alien and that their was no danger in their research. They (yawn) were wrong.
It doesn t take a genius to figure out that the rest of the film is a continuous cat and mouse chase between the humans who die off one by one and the aliens who open their mouths on every possible occasion to show off their frightfully scary un-flossed teeth.
There s a little saying that goes something like this: If you re going to make a bad film, do it well. I have seen plenty of disappointing and underachieving movies, but they are not the ones that really bother me. Alien Resurrection, a good example of a film that really gets up my nose, is not so much a discouraging experience but an off putting one.
There is no way to describe why the Australian MA rating was given to this film other than unnecessary and repulsive gore, which attempts to distract us from the wandering-but-not-going-anywhere plot. In one scene my stomach churned as I witnessed a mawkish looking alien put its hand on a characters head and literally ripped most of his face off. Another one featured Ripley sticking a knife through her hand just to impress someone she was talking to. Fair enough if it were in a horror film or even if it bared any significance to the story, but this is unfortunately not the case, and this sort of bizarre gore is inexcusable.
If you think I m struggling to find one good aspect about the film, then you thought right. One exciting scene is a credit (and the only part remotely worth seeing) to the film, in which an alien chases two men (one a cripple) up a tall ladder with interesting results. But of course after that thrilling scene Alien Resurrection had no problem in returning to its pathetically low standard, and ends up crashing into the shores of movie dullness more often than Japanese kamikaze jet fighters fall off their skis.
So in a film where the one liners come as bad as Earth man, what a shit hole and the primary means for one mans strategic attack is to bounce bullets off walls to hit an opponent, its no wonder why Alien: Resurrection turned out to be as off putting and clumsy as it is.
Oh, and in case you re wondering about my bag of lollies the less I enjoy a film, the more I eat. So all the lollies were gone in 15 minutes; but however empty the bag turned out to be, it was still a long way ahead of the movie
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