Alien: Resurrection

Rating

Director

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Screenplay

Joss Whedon

Length

1h 49m

Starring

Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser

MPAA Rating

R

Review

There’s a point in a franchise’s life where innovation stagnates and creative sparks fizzle. Alien: Resurrection has provided an able example of when a franchise reaches that point, yet can it point towards a way out?

It took two films to suck the life out of what started out as one of the great science fiction franchises. Alien and Aliens were tremendous achievements. One a newly defined vision of the sci-fi horror crossbreed and the other an enveloping sci-fi thriller. With Alien 3, the magic had started to fade as the series began to shift its focus towards nifty action pieces and predictable plot twists and with Alien: Resurrection, that magic was fully drained.

A ludicrous story resurrecting Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) through a cloning project and attempting to bring into stark contrast the ambitions of scientists to study this mysterious and powerful alien race. They want to understand and control the lifeform, but haven’t the foggiest clue how. Ripley, as a super-strength clone, loses all of the humanity that made the character great. The strange part is all of the failure lies in the hands of screenwriter Joss Whedon, one of his earliest endeavors. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet does what he can with the material, but an outlandish script isn’t easy to save and for a director of small, indie-flavor features like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, you can’t expect much out of his work on a sci-fi epic.

Weaver does look like she’s having fun, but the rest of the cast is fairly innocuous with Ron Perlman and Dan Hedaya sitting near the bottom of the talent heap, with forgettable characters played by Gary Dourdan, Kim Flowers, J.E. Freeman, and Raymond Cruz barely registering as anything other than fodder. Brad Dourif, who plays a prideful scientist in the film starts off fairly sane, but his casting becomes more evident as the film progresses, yielding one of the creepier and more bizarre segments in the film. And Winona Ryder has been better, but considering the plot twist involving her character, she does a pretty solid job.

One of the most important things about a sci-fi horror film is having characters that resonate with the audience and for whom they can root. Alien: Resurrection struggles to create those kind of characters with an excessive number of disposable figures whose passing generate no tears. Even when a vaunted cinematic character like Ripley doesn’t have any emotional resonance, the end result is almost a waste of time.

Can the franchise survive? Subsequent films have already proven that it can’t even when the original director (Ridley Scott) makes an auspicious return. What would behoove creators of subsequent features is to scale everything back. What made the first two films so engaging was their smaller scale, especially the first film. By giving it all a claustrophobic feel, you pull the audience in deeper than a larger, more robust environment. The Alien series doesn’t have the history to support a Lord of the Rings-size adventure, so reducing the scale, making the audience familiar with the characters more intimately, and keep the tension high. That’s what gave this series potential and it’s time it got back to that foundation.

Review Written

June 20, 2023

Editor’s Note: After writing my full review of this film, I discovered that I’d already done a full review on it. Please see the below.

Original Review

Long-running film franchises often come to a dull thud at the end of their run and Alien: Resurrection is no different. A marked decrease in quality marred what seemed like an ill-conceived notion from the start.

Like each prior film, Resurrection was set not long after the events of the prior film and featured an overzealous scientific team struggling to rebuild the quite-dead Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) fro her DNA. In their eighth trial, they succeed, creating a stronger, more disconcerting version of Ripley than we’d ever seen before. And with that, much of the mystique and power of the character was robbed of its meaning. Here, we had little more than a clone with amazing physical prowess battling her longtime foes, but without the emotional recrimination, self-doubt and vulnerability that made her such a quintessential character.

Joss Whedon, who would later develop quite a career as a sci-fi aficionado and quality program and film creator, takes a hamfisted approach to the script of Alien: Resurrection turning it into almost a self-parody. Whether it’s the ludicrous sensuality of a scene late in the film where Ripley falls into the loving embrace of a large alien or (spoiler warning) the evolution-developed human-alien hybrid, there’s a sadistic pleasure he seems to take with disassembling a great science fiction property and crafting something that might have been better suited with a laugh track.

Unlike his predecessor, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet had experience in the genre, with the critical favorites Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. What became obvious with Alien: Resurrection and his later work on Amélie, was his desire to infuse his work with surrealist dark humor, which is at odds with the tone set by the prior films. That dichotomy keeps the audience from forming any level of psychological connection with the film, which might not be as bad as it seems.

Were you to take a film like Alien: Resurrection out of its franchise and look at it as a stand-alone feature, dependent on little information to form an appreciation of the work, it almost succeeds. Because of its audacity, the film seems like it might work when taken in comparison with the other films in Jeunet’s oeuvre. It is a grim, yet sometimes amusing look at a frustrating future where the pursuit for scientific discovery is more important than the preservation and support of human civilization. And even if it were a solitary film, there are still issues that arise, particularly among the actors.

Weaver has her first flop in the role of Ellen Ripley. Although she plays the character in tandem with Jeunet’s vision, it doesn’t hold well with the personality of prior Ripleys. Yes, she is a clone of the original, but she has the memories and knowledge of the original and, were the cloning process truly effective, she might also have had the humanity of dead Ripley. And had the film focused more intently on exploring the new Ripley’s emotional and psychological development in lieu of her physical superiority, it might have been a more intriguing film. This isn’t Weaver’s fault necessarily, but she goes along with the plan and seems to take a teensy bit of pleasure in the absolutely devolution of Ripley.

As far as the rest of the cast, frequent Jeunet thespian Ron Perlman arrives in yet another film to ham up the festivities. Apart from his performances in Drive and Hell-Boy, the latter of which played very well into his performance style, he has never been a very creative presence. His performances never break out of his comfort zone and even there, he seems more a caricature than a character.

Gary Dourdan and Dan Hedaya are equally ludicrous, both seeing if they can be more irritating than the other, while J.E. Freeman is just another company tool with the acting capability of a vainglorious pitbull. The only actors that seem to come off better than expected are Brad Dourif as the slightly off-his-rocker scientist who treats his alien subjects almost like children than dangerous critters, yet taking sadistic glee in attempting to condition them using jets of freezing gas. The other is Winona Ryder who might seem rather wooden at first, but as her character’s nature is revealed late in the film, her performance gains momentum and believability. That hers is the only truly humane character in the film speaks volumes about how far off course the feature drives.

While David Fincher’s prior entry in the series, Alien 3 isn’t nearly to the quality level of its two predecessors, it seems something akin to a classic in comparison and might even rise a bit in my estimations with so compared. Alien: Resurrection almost works when you don’t look at it as an Alien film, but as a part of a beloved franchise, it falls far short.

Review Written

June 8, 2012