The Morning After: Jun. 4, 2012

Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Alien: Resurrection

It took two films to suck the life out of what started out as one of the great science fiction franchises in history. 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, attempted 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 for 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 creeper and more bizarre segments in the film. And Winona Ryder has been better, but considering the plot twist involving her character, I’d have to say she does a pretty solid job.