Alien Resurrection

It’s the 25th anniversary of Alien Resurrection next month, meaning now is as good a time as any to revisit the conflicted legacy of what’s arguably become the least-discussed (and, in my experience, least *passionately* discussed) entry in the long-running Alien franchise.

Looking to *ahem* resurrect the series just four years after David Fincher, for better or for worse, steered it to is logical conclusion in Alien 3, Fox made a bold choice in tapping French art house darling Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) to direct. And the setup is clever. Jumping an additional 200 years into the future, the story finds a team of scientists aboard a military vessel cloning Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) back into existence - complete with the alien queen gestating inside of her. In an amusing twist, the procedure results in a form of genetic cross-splicing, meaning this version of Ripley has heightened strength and senses, in addition to moderately acidic blood. But… hubris being what it is in movies such as these… no sooner has the science team starting diligently breeding Xenomorphs than the aliens are on the loose, wreaking all manner of havoc (and spilling all manner of blood).

What’s striking, upon revisiting the film, is how simplistic the actual plot is, once you get past the high-concept premise. Ripley hooks up with a band of mercenary smugglers - including Call (Winona Ryder), who has her own closely-guarded agenda - and they have to figure out a way off the ship. That’s it. That’s the entire narrative engine - “travel from point A to point B without getting killed.” Beyond Weaver and Ryder, Jeunet assembles a pleasingly weird cavalcade of character actors - including his City of Lost Children alums Dominique Pinon and Ron Perlman, 90s favorite Michael Wincott, and reliable faces such as Dan Hedaya, Brad Dourif and J.E. Freeman - all of whom contribute to the film’s slightly grotesque, carnival sideshow slant. The art direction is striking - as it often was in 90s moviemaking, before everything became homogenized by green screen - and the film moves at an impressive clip. And Jeunet delivers one absolute banger of a set piece - an underwater chase through the flooded bowels of the ship that leads directly into a Facehugger ambush and a gripping showdown that unfolds mid-ascendance on a maintenance ladder. In terms of staging and sheer visual spectacle, it’s as good as almost anything else in the series.  

Unfortunately, the lack of narrative depth proves difficult to overlook. Weaver’s spark appears rekindled by this new-and-improved, almost superheroic Ripley (look no further than the basketball scene)… but the script engages only superficially with the implications of the character. Her relationship with Call suggests the surrogate mother/daughter bond she shared with Newt in Aliens, but if this was meant to be the film’s beating heart, it’s a pretty faint one (Ryder, for her part, seems oddly ill-at-ease throughout the picture). But the real misstep is the third-act revelation that the Queen, thanks to Ripley’s genetic material, has developed a human reproductive system… not the worst idea in the world, but the subsequent arrival of the repugnant alien-human hybrid derails the movie each and every time. One gets the sense Jeunet views the creature through the lens of Frankenstein’s monster… but his attempts to engender sympathy are well and truly an act of pissing in the wind. The final 25-minutes suck all the remaining air out of the movie.   ​

The real issue with Alien Resurrection though - which has firmly crystallized over this past quarter-century - is its outlier status. Disconnected from the original trilogy, laying the groundwork for future installments that never materialized, it serves no real purpose beyond the confines of its own runtime… and creatively it simply isn’t vital enough to impress itself upon the conversation (love it or loathe it, Alien 3 stakes a far more forceful claim to the discourse). In the space inhabited by the Alien franchise, its scream definitely registers as the faintest.