Review of Alien Resurrection (1997) by Juliane P — 07 Nov 2010

I was very interested in seeing this film upon seeing the three previous and looked forward to how they would explain the resurrection of Sigourney Weaver's character. I came away from this film with a bad taste, however, largely due to the combination of a bad script and bad direction. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's direction would be much better suited for a surreal art flick, NOT an scifi horror film. Now I purposely didn't mention the bad acting because some of these actors clearly had potential, but any promise that was there was run into the ground with the horrible dialogue they were forced to deliver.

Weaver does her best to make it work, and she does have some good moments towards the end, but you can still see the confusion on her face as she tries to portray this odd new Ripley. My apologies to Joss Whedon for having to have this film as a blatant black mark on his writing resume.. Despite having expertly penned Toy Story, Speed and Serenity, it seems that for this film he subscribed to the muse behind Alien 3's writing: If you can't think of anything else to say, just drop an unfunny profanity-laced one-liner.

Now, I must say that Resurrection vastly improved over 3, mainly because the attention was returned to the horror elements that made the first two films great. It partially fails to live up to that legacy (much of this film feels the same as Aliens, so we feel like we've seen it before), but the inclusion of Ripley's alien "offspring" did take us to a new level, ie, it was something we haven't seen before. But what could have been a great ending was drawn out a few minutes too long with more unneeded dialogue and an awkward gay kiss.

And while weâ(TM)re on that note, I couldnâ(TM)t help but notice the lesbian undertones of Weaver's "new" character, especially in her dealings with the robot character played by Winona Ryder. This cloned Ripley has (as described in the film) a âsocial autismâ? where she canâ(TM)t process emotion and express it in a normal fashion. So what could have been a chance for some brilliant psychological acting from Weaver turns into nothing more than lesbian flirtations. It all seemed so out-of-place, like another case of Hollywood trying to force political correctness while in reality merely feeding some sort of celebrity fetish.

Overall, Alien: Resurrection fixed a few of the problems that plagued Alien 3, but still isnâ(TM)t even close to being in par with the first two films of this dying franchise. Two stars out of 5 stars overall, 1 out of 5 for the script, 5 out of 5 for visual effects, and 0 out of 5 for content.