Alien Resurrection (1997)

Tagline: Witness the resurrection. It’s like Jesus!

Curiosity: Besides some ill-placed need to write about all of the Alien films? My master Joss Whedon wrote the script. Sigourney Weaver returns, with support from actors Ron Perlman, Winona Ryder, and that guy from The Crow. Plus, AMC was showing this last night, and I really didn’t want to pay to rent this shitfest.

Plot: Set 200 years after Alien³, scientists, as is their amoral way, have successfully cloned Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and an Alien Queen. This has resulted in the two sharing DNA, kina like the frog-dinos in Jurassic Park only not as awesome (VELOCIRAPTORS!!!). Ripley now has super strength, super agility, super b-ball skills, and sort of acidy blood. Also, she’s a lot creepier this time around. A crew of mercenaries arrives with human test subjects for the Queen’s eggs, but they’re actually planning to stop the cloning, too late. The aliens, of course, figure out how to escape their cages and start killin’ and masticatin’ and acting like, well, velociraptors (!!!). The ship they’re on is programmed to head back to home base should anything bad happen. That home base… IS EARTH!

That would be bad, btw.

Thoughts: Each of the Alien sequels starts with a leap of faith, a plot hole that makes you go, “Wait, no, that’s not how it works.” One by one, the rules of Alien get discarded as the series progresses. In this case, the whole cloning procedure seems underwhelming and underexplained, as I fail to see how scientists could recreate an Alien Queen using the original Ripley’s blood. Whatevs. Now, the way the aliens roar like a dinosaur, the way they never did before or ever again, now there’s a bad idea.

Alien Resurrection succeeds in being a black hole, from which some of my favorite actors and filmmakers cannot escape. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films before and after Alien Resurrection were City of Lost Children and Amélie. I’m not saying he didn’t fuck up Resurrection, but this guy has definitely written/directed enough really good movies for me to know he’s not a hack. While his visuals are the weakest of the four Alien films, his cast is solid. I’m inclined to blame the story, as the dialogue and plot are atrocious. But that means condemning Whedon, the man who gave me Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I also just found out he cowrote Toy Story. Freaking Toy Story! How could I blame him?

"It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines... mostly... but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.” – Joss Whedon.

That’s why I can blame him. Dude admits to the film being faithful to the script, albeit in all the wrong ways, and then takes zero responsibility. Dammit, Joss, you still wrote this scene:

Alien Resurrection - Basketball

Alien Resurrection | MySpace Video

I’ll admit Whedon was in a tough bind to write the story – Alien³’s ending was meant to be all-encompassing, and as far as I’m concerned, it still is. But got-damn did he stink it up. Nobody’s perfect, but wow, man. Don’t sell that guy the rights to The Terminator. Still, he did come up with one effective scene. See, Ripley’s clone is called 8. In this scene, we find out why:

Reflection: The only truly essential movie is Alien, although the first two sequels form a decent trilogy.