Wikio

Alien Resurrection

Baby on board!

1997

Review: October 2, 2009

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedeya

Sure, if you like.

THE SETUP:

Ripley is cloned and so is the alien inside her. Things get familiar from there.

DISCUSSION:

I saw this when it was out at the movies, really liked the first half, then couldn’t believe how badly the second half sucked. I can’t really recall how I became interested in seeing it again, but now I have, and it seems that my reaction hasn’t really changed. This is the fourth Alien film, the one no one really wanted after the suckage of three, although hopes were momentarily raised by having it be directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, especially based on his Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, both of which had fantastic visuals and existed in a cold, dank world very similar to the typical alien environments. And the script is by Joss Whedon, who went on to create Buffy. So it could actually be good! Only it wasn’t.

This is from the “Alien Quadrilogy,” which is specially meant for people of limited vocabulary who don’t know that there’s already a word meaning “four related works,” which is Tetralogy. Since I chose to watch the “Special Edition” of the film, director Jeunet comes on first thing and tells us that there is no director’s cut of this film because his complete vision was up on screen the first time—despite how it sucked. Actually that last part is my comment. But they did add a new credits and restored an original ending. The new credits open with what looks like an alien mouth, but we pull out and it’s actually a big fly. Then it gets squished, then we see one of the holdovers from Jeunet’s City of Lost Children wipe the fly off, then that whole thing pulls out to reveal all this is happening on big ship made out of really budget-level CGI. The original opening just had creepy close-ups of the clones we’re about to see. You’ll notice that the quality jumps a few full steps once the credits are over. Anyway, some company has gotten some DNA out of the remnants of Ripley at the end of Alien Three and cloned her, complete with alien queen inside. They operate and pull the queen out of her, then decide to keep her around, keeping her in a cell where first she has to tear through a fiber cocoon [shades of The Fly II]. She later reveals herself to be very strong and violent, and lo and behold, remembers her identity and life before, saving us from having to meet a whole new character that just LOOKS like Ripley. And she’s fully back and ready by 13 minutes into the film! By the way, Weaver looks good, but apparently Jeunet didn’t think so, as you’ll notice that every time the camera turns to her it finds her under markedly over-bright lighting and about 17 layers of hazy filter.

So the deal is that the military is going to breed aliens and train then so they can be used as—what else?—the perfect weapon. Christ, does the military do ANYTHING else but search for the perfect weapon? Nevertheless, we have some kind of interesting ideas here as we see the queen held captive in a big chamber, then later a bunch of people strapped in, their faces just above alien eggs. I think these people were brought by this crew of renegades who arrived of this ship The Betty, although none of it is very clear. The Betty contains the usual Whedon-esque crew of characters designed by well-worn screenwriter’s decree, and they include Winona Ryder as Call and Ron Perlman as Johner, as well as various other future victims. Also on hand, as part of the military, is Dan Hedeya. You gotta love Hedeya’s simple professional acting skill as you see him acting even with his CHEWING at around 23:36. In here we also have a sequence of Johner trying to mess with Ripley and her toying with him before kicking his ass. You see, apparently she is apparently now a Ripley/Alien hybrid, and has special advanced reflexes, and the military is training her for violence. Soon after Call breaks into her cell and tries to kill her, because she’s a secret agent sent to bring down the alien, but hesitates once she sees that they’ve already removed it from Ripley. She tells Ripley that she’s a clone, that’s it’s 200 years since she last existed, and the two of them begin their weird mother-daughter relationship that will continue throughout the film. As usual, Ryder looks good but just isn’t that great an actress, and her attempts to be tough are just a little bit silly.

Also in here is a scene of one of the technicians taunting an alien prisoner through the glass, with the alien making all sorts of teeth-opening faces—like they just LOOOOVE to do, apparently—and the guy making faces right back, from behind the glass. When the alien attacks he has a button to press that punishes them. You’ll also notice that these aliens drip a LOT of slime. The slime budget on this movie must have been in the millions. Anyway, eventually two aliens get an idea, and attack a third alien, whose blood eats through the floor, allowing them to escape. This was the best moment of the film the first time I saw it, and remains the best. By the way, let me get out of the way up front that the acid blood here alternates between being acid and not, all as befits the needs of the script.

Before I saw this movie the first time, someone who had seen it at the theater before me said at one point Dan Hedeya got up out of bed and you could see his big tufts of back hair, and she said the whole theater went “Ewwww!” as one. There’s that moment below. Anyway, the aliens rampage, killing various people, including Hedeya, who reaches around a pulls out a piece of his own brain and looks at it before collapsing. There’s also a moment where the alien presses the punishment button—with its tongue—and freezes this guy, who then gets his arm ripped off. These scenes are kind of trying to be “cool,” but are a little more violent and gory, jar with the established tone of the previous movies, and just start to seem crass. Anyway, before you can say boo, all the military folks have been evacuated and it’s just Ripley and the renegades left.

At this point anything interesting about this film is officially over and now we’re back to old and familiar “avoiding aliens while trying to get off the ship” territory. The renegades [this is what I’m calling the crew of the Betty] try to get back to their ship. Ripley shows up, indiscriminately blowing the head off an alien, spewing blood everywhere, but apparently this time it’s not acid, and causes no problems! Selective acid! She joins up with the renegades [“Who do I have to fuck to get off this ship?”] and they start heading out. Soon enough Ripley finds a room full of previous clone attempts, which is supposed to be all emotionally affecting, but I just found tedious and fast-forwarded through. They find a guy who is carrying an unborn alien, and decide to bring him along. They have to swim through the flooded kitchen. Please don’t think about where all that water might have come from on a spaceship like that—or what it might be filled with, and please, DO NOT think about how all these people can swim for ten minutes with only taking one breath. Blah, blah, alien attack, alien eggs, narrow escape, blah, blah. Then some guy shoots Call, but she is soon revealed to be a robot—i.e. she, too, is resurrected—and the story goes on. Blah, blah, more escape.

So Call patches into the ship’s computer and sees it’s headed for Earth, which is supposed to be disastrous, as it will release the aliens there. Ripley tells her to crash the ship. Then they’re escaping when Ripley starts getting down on the ground and sniffing, because she scents an alien nest. Uh, that’s nice, but we’re escaping here, right? Although I suppose this new Ripley would be helpful to have along on hunting trips. Oops, but before you know it, Ripley is abducted by the aliens. The other guys make it to the ship, whereupon the guy with the alien inside start to birth it [what timing, eh?] and pulls a newly-reappeared bad guy to him so the alien can burst out through his forehead. Uh guys, this is just GROSS. Stop it. But now, in its final moments, the movie is going to crash and burn HUGE time.

We now see Ripley laying atop a big bed of slimy alien appendages in this nest or whatever. She is pulled down within it, where she has a little love scene with the queen alien. This is supposed to be meaningful to someone, apparently, what with Ripley communing with her sworn enemy, but that person ain’t me. Apparently the big advance of this queen is that she can give birth to live offspring—please DO NOT then ask where all those eggs we’re seen throughout the movie came from, thank you—and whaddya know, she’s got one ready to pop out right now! Pop it does, with a soupcon more slime and goo, and it’s a sort of alien/human hybrid that, again, apparently SOMEONE thinks would be interesting to alien fans. Me, I couldn’t give a fuck—or rather I could, because I think it’s an idiotic idea and I have no interest in seeing it. But no, it’s the climax. So it’s born, and first thing it does is knock his mother’s face off! Little alien brat! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Then it turns to Ripley and starts LICKING her face—okay, fucking STOP IT with the slimy grossness!—then she turns and bolts for the escaping Betty. Ok, whatever! I’ve stopped hoping this movie is going to make any sense. So Ripley makes it onto the escaping Betty and shuts the door, but as they’re about to go, it seems the door is open. Alien baby on board!

So Ripley and Call go out back where Ripley has some alien baby bonding time, then throws a little alien blood—suddenly acidic again—on the little window, which eats a little hold through it, and the climax is when the big alien is gradually sucked through the tiny hole. They then crash the huge ship onto the Earth, which looks like it must take out half a continent, but I guess that’s no big deal, while they land safely. Why they couldn’t have just crashed it on the moon is anyone’s guess. Anyway, the original version ends with them seeing sunlight outside—Earth again!—as we hear a heavenly choir sing, but this special edition adds a tiny coda that implies that Ripley and Call are going to go on traveling together, probably muching a taco or two along the way, and then we see the ruins of Paris in the distance, leading us to believe that all of Earth is now a barren wasteland. Woah.
< < < SPOILERS END

There’s a lot of blame to be passed out here, and I believe a lot of it has to fall on Joss Whedon. When asked what went wrong here, Whedon says the problem isn’t that they changed his script, but simply delivered every single line wrong and made every single idea fall flat, which I can kind of see—knowing Whedon’s work elsewhere one can see how maybe his spin could have made it work—but at the same time, many elements here are very recognizably his, and don’t work on their own terms. For one, the group of renegades is very much a classic Whedon group, with everyone in their screenwriter’s handbook-approved roles, all ready to play off one another, and in retrospect [having seen Whedon churn these out for other shows] it all just looks a little tired. Next, Whedon tends to like “cool” one liners and “cool” moments, and here they just tend to distract, and make this feel like something other than an alien film. Also, some of the moments designed to be cool—like the guy freezing then his arm breaking off, or Hedeya looking at his own brain, or the alien coming through a guy’s forehead—are just distasteful. Note how little actual gore was in the first two films, and what was there [the chest bursting] was used to great effect. Useless gore wasn’t just littering the place in order to generate cheap effects, as it is here, and eventually it comes off as just crass.

Two further Whedon items get their own paragraph. The first is that Whedon seems to like big ideas and concepts, which is good here in the first half, where he has found a reasonably compelling way to bring Ripley back and find a new angle to attack the series through. The problem is that sometimes his ideas are more compelling in concept than execution [the Season Seven Slayerettes, anyone?], and something along the way blinded him to the fact that NO ONE gives a shit if the alien queen can now give birth to live kids, and NO ONE gives a shit about this hybrid alien/human baby. It’s a disaster, especially as it occurs right at the very end, ending the film with a fart noise where a bang should have been. The next thing is that Whedon is not so much an original screenwriter as one who processes previous entertainments and combines them in new ways to give the audience what it wants, and he is VERY INTERESTED in giving the audience what it wants. So after the original and interesting first 45 minutes, all of a sudden we’re back in the middle of the same old thing about a small band trying to evade aliens while making it to an escape ship. Having them go through water is just some arbitrary element—why not have them go through a giant sno-cone machine? Same difference. Another extension of Whedon’s “give the people what they want” ethos is that we get showcase scenes for the eggs, the face-huggers, the acid blood and the obligatory robot. All the elements you LOVE are there! Only they’re placed so deliberately and with an obvious nod to including them all that the thrill is gone.

I blame director Jeunet, too, but more for not seeing how this script wasn’t working, or what he would have to do to jazz the proceedings up—not to mention that when you spatter alien blood everywhere, it has to ALWAYS be acidic, not just sometimes. Another thing is that this is supposedly 200 years in the future from the last time we saw Ripley, but we see absolutely no changes or advancements. And those hoping Jeunet would bring some interesting visual ideas to this film can just keep on hoping. Ugh, it’s just a nightmare. A nightmare made worse by the fact that the first 45 minutes actually had a lot of good ideas and potential. It wouldn’t seem quite so bad if the whole thing had been uniformly terrible. Anyway yeah, the stage was set for Alien vs Predator after this—there’s nothing left to the alien franchise.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Only if you’re the biggest fan ever, or you bought the four-movie set and you have this movie sitting around anyway.