Alien Resurrection

Damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN...

I waited impatiently for almost a year for this. First it was slated for release this summer, then Fox pushed it back when six million other action movies were also slated for last summer (including Fox's own disaster of a movie, Speed 2). So they move it to Thanksgiving, where it would have no competition in its genre. So I wait another four months. And man, am I disappointed.

I read great press about this movie a year ago. Joss Whedon, cowriter of Toy Story and creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series (don't laugh, it's a good show), supposedly wrote a smart script about cloning Ripley, whereby she and the alien queen inside her at the time of her death traded some DNA characteristics (Scientists, it seems, still want to do experiments with the aliens. Will they ever learn?) This could have been something in the hands of a better director. But with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known for the visually stunning, emotionally hollow City of Lost Children, one key aspect of the Alien franchise was lost: characters we can relate to and sympathize with. He cannot direct people as well as he can film scenery.

Sigourney Weaver was fine as a pissed off Ripley, wondering why she can't just rest in peace like she intended. But the crew she's stuck dealing with are a bunch of cardboard cutout characters that, if you were like me watching this, I started rooting for the aliens to kill, slowly. Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon, vets from Lost Children, are here, Perlman trying to be a testosterone loaded he-man and failing, and I don't know how Pinon gets work, because he can't read a single line of dialogue believably. Winona Ryder is Call, who may or may not be trustworthy, and whose part was drastically rewritten while shooting. I probably would have liked her original character better, as her part here was a bit too obligatory.

To give Whedon credit, they could have made a great movie here, really. The right elements were there. Military experiment gone awry, the aliens changing as a result of the DNA mixing, etc. But Juenet seems to have no sense of pacing, and the film winds up having no impact whatsoever. There is nothing in this movie that matches the scene in Aliens where Ripley and Co. are watching the motion trackers, which indicate the aliens are inside the room yet they can't see them, only to find the aliens are crawling above the ceiling. In fact, in this movie, there are good long stretches where the crew is walking around the ship without an ounce of concern for where the aliens are. The underwater sequence, inspired by the Poseidon Adventure, was the neatest part of this movie, because you knew that a couple of these useless characters would bite it.

The person Fox originally offered this job to was Danny Boyle, he of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave fame, a man who has proven he can handle dark subject matter and get good performances out of people (One word: Begbie). Boyle nearly accepted but turned it down because he wanted to keep doing small budget movies. Now that the movie is finished, it is clear that he was the better man for the job, and if he had done Alien Resurrection, it would have prevented him from doing A Life Less Ordinary, another Fox movie, which was supposedly even worse than this. Sadly, this movie sets up a fifth Alien too well, though if the box office stays low enough, perhaps they will just let Ripley remain dead once and for all. I never thought I'd say this, but perhaps it would be better that way than to make sequels like this one.