Review of Alien Resurrection (1997) by Allan C — 23 Jun 2015

By far the strongest of the Alien quadrilogy, but you really shouldn't have expected anything less than bizarre when you have the director of "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children," Jean-Pierre Jeunet, helming the picture.

The story tells the story of a group of corporate scientists and military cronies (Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif,) looking to clone the Alien creature from Ellen Ripley's DNA. When group of space pirates (Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Michael Wincott, Raymond Cruz) docks at the station, things get complicated, but things get even worse when some of the cloned aliens escape and begin running loose throughout the space station.

What's most interesting about this film is that it was scripted by the brilliant Joss Whedon, who disowned the end result here, but what makes it interesting is that his complaint isn't that his script was changed, but that they did everything else wrong about the film.

Apparently Whedon had written the script with a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone, which Whedon felt didn't work when director Jean-Pierre Jeunet changed the tone that Whedon intended. Apparently Whedon took his intended idea and tone as the prodigy when he'd later create "Firefly.

" However, despite Whedon's complaints, I think this film did work and was an improvement over the third film. I've always liked that every film in this franchise, minus the AVP films, are all very different in tone, style and focus.

Even when Ridley Scott made his prequel film, that one was quite different form his first film and any of the subsequent Alien films. Overall, this is probably the least accessible of the Alien films and is not for all tastes or for fans of the previous films.

The first was a horror film in space, the second was an action/suspense film in space, the third was a cerebral prison films with fairly significant religious overtones, and this one is pretty hard to pigeonhole.

It has the inventive visual style of director Jeunet other films and also his darkly humorous tone. It's a film that won't be for all tastes and I suspect it's one that will not work for most audiences, but for whatever reason it did work for me.