Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writers: Joss Whedon
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser
Runtime: 116 mins. (theatrical cut 109 mins.)
1997
I am here reviewing the extended edition, which this time around is a bit worse than the theatrical cut. Not enough is added to make a significant difference: two jokes that I absolutely hate and a cool but pointless altered ending, in which Ripley and Call crash land outside of a ruined Paris.
It has taken me until the final movie in the original quadrilogy to realize the Alien series' fundamental guiding principle: Each film must be a direct and biting refutation to the film that came before it. Let's recapitulate.
James Cameron's Aliens took the simple, elegant narrative of Alien and blew it up to epic proportions. We are made to believe (and convincingly so) that the unstoppable antagonist from the previous film could be defeated en masse by the love that Ellen Ripley feels for her companions.
David Fincher's ALIEN CUBED took that love and crumpled it into a dirty little wad before incinerating it and stomping on the ashes. Then it paraded around town with those ashes just to make sure everyone understood how pathetic they were. Having no time for Cameron's sentimentalism, Fincher dumps his audience into a broken world where everyone and everything you love are dead, and there is no longer the slightest reason to remain alive. Killing Hicks and Newt offscreen remains a colossal refutation to Cameron's happy ending (one that a lot of people hated and Cameron himself called a slap in the face), but the film only doubles down from there by corrupting Ripley's body and forcing her to choose death over misery.
Now we are come to Alien: Resurrection, a movie that finds its own bizarre way to exist as the antithesis to ALIEN CUBED. For A:R not only half-assedly undoes the grandiosity of Ripley's sacrificial gesture that culminated the themes of ALIEN CUBED and, in some ways, the entire franchise; it does so flippantly. Had I been tasked with designing the antithesis to Fincher's film I certainly wouldn't have come up with this, but I can't offhand think of any inversion that would be more emblematically discordant.
There are two major forces that pull A:R in contrary directions.* They are both extremely talented artists with distinctive voices, and neither of their voices belong anywhere near the Alien franchise. Which is exactly what makes the film so bizarrely fascinating.
*Three if you count 20th Century Fox, who nixed Whedon's climactic alien battle on earth, and who nixed Jeunet's idea to put both male and female genitals on the alien hybrid. But their primary and most consequential mistake was greenlighting Alien: Resurrection in the first place.
The first is geek icon and sole screenwriter Joss Whedon. It would be easy to lay into Whedon for producing a script so audacious in its insipidity, but one must remember that he was dealt a crap deck of cards to begin with. Then again, one must also remember that Whedon has publicly not disavowed his work on this project, opting instead to blame the production for mangling his script. At any rate, let's take a moment to check in with the nonsense Whedon hath wrought.
It is 200 years later than it was in ALIEN CUBED. Ripley, long dead of her own volition, has been... resurrected... by a team of scientists aboard the vessel USM Auriga. To be more specific, our hero is Ripely 8, the eighth attempt at such a procedure. These scientists, flanked by members of the United Systems Military, couldn't care less about Ripley herself--it is the Alien Queen inside her body that they are after.
-But wait, you ask, presumably they are using Ripley's DNA to clone her? That being the case, why would the alien still be inside her chest?
-You have jumped the gun, sir, for we are still in the synopsis, and the time has not yet come for picking apart the plot!
As it turns out, once the queen is successfully harvested, the scientists find that they have use for Ripley 8 after all. You see, somehow the cloning process has mishmashed Ripley DNA with alien DNA such that Ripley has gained alien qualities. Her blood is acidic, she is super strong and super fast, and like all proper aliens she plays a mean game of basketball.
-But wait, it's not like DNA just gets all mixed together in the test tube. How could you possibly explain the alien powers getting transferred to a human body without any other physiological alterations?
-Allow me to point out, ma'am, that this is basically the same question as last time, and anyway I asked you not to interrupt the synopsis.
A whole mess of aliens are bred from the queen and the scientists start studying them, mostly by spraying them with freezing air and making out with them through the glass. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of antiheroes are milling about the ship for some reason. I think they are planning to rob it? These consist of Elgyin (Michael Wincott), the nominal captain, Hillard (Kim Flowers), his lady friend, Christie (Gary Dourdan), a really cool gun guy, Vriess (Dominique Pinon), an extremely resourceful paraplegic dwarf, Johner (Ron Perlman being nasty), and Call (Winona Ryder), the obligatory secret android. Ripley beats them at basketball but they nonetheless have to team up later when all the aliens escape. To make things worse, the alien queen has another surprise up her reproductive sleeve. It turns out, due to the genetic kerfluffle, the queen is also womb-pregnant with a human/alien hybrid baby. This hyperviolent creature only recognizes Ripley as its mother. And it looks like this:
This creature is defeated by being sucked out of a quarter-sized hole in the hull as if it is being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste.
-But wait-- never mind, I realize now that my critiques are meaningless in the face of such tomfoolery.
-That's right.
Whedon's script is an orgy of dunderheaded sci-fi ideas. It's asinine, but it's not irredeemable. Had he directed it himself as a standalone sci-fi B movie, it could have been schlocky entertainment. Perhaps that doesn't even make sense though, since so many of the weird hitches in the screenplay have to do with the resuscitation of this specific long dead property.
There is one interpretation for what Whedon is doing here that is about as sensible as any interpretation could be--A:R is a meta-commentary on franchise revival in the studio system (along the lines of what Jurassic World was lazily getting at). We've got Ripley coming back bigger and better than ever long after she should have been put to rest--just like this franchise. From there a crew of fun, quirky characters stumble into the film as if they just stepped out of a Firefly episode. That's the studio demanding that Whedon's screwball personality be injected into the franchise. And we have the aliens/the movie getting out of hand and taking over the ship, in response to which the administrators/studio executives collectively bail (or perish in the slaughter). One can cobble together what Whedon was potentially going for here, but none of the meta-commentary is compelling enough to forgive the poor choice of pivoting this franchise into dark comedy.
Which brings us to the contrary pulling force, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. One has to wonder what came over the higher-ups who hired Jeunet, a French fabulist who barely spoke any English. He has a distinctive visual style, sure, but it's the wrong style for this sort of thing. Jeunet's fairy tale sensibility lends an air of grotesque dreamlike imagination to his work. The grounded realism that Alien's horror requires is lost on him, likewise the tongue in cheek wittiness of Whedon's script. What results is a Frankenstein's monster of dark comedy that never feels dark or comedic enough.
Thus the entire enterprise takes on a yellow-tinted hallucinatory quality, where quips plop out of characters' mouths like dead mice, and mass murder plays out like a light farce. Caught in the middle of all this is Sigourney Weaver, who returns nonsense for nonsense. She diligently goes down the rabbit hole of what it means to be a Ripley clone with an alien twist. One could easily argue this is her worst performance in the franchise, but it's kind of impossible to make that judgment call within the context of what she's supposed to be portraying. She even attempts the monumental task of bringing some pathos to the deranged film when Ripley-8 encounters a room full of Ripley-clone experiments. In general, Weaver does her job; Ripley dominates the camera every time she appears. Not to mention that Weaver infamously sinks a basketball shot while walking away with her back turned, proving forevermore that Sigourney's got game.
I don't know what Resurrection did to Weaver's reputation, beyond the fact that she took a rare year off from acting afterwards. It does seem to have been enough to put a nail in the coffin of the franchise, only to be revived when Ridley Scott regained interest a decade and a half later. That's just as it should be. The franchise would have felt far more self-contained and elegant had A:R never been made in the first place, though we would have been deprived an incredibly eclectic Hollywood franchise oddity. It's a fair enough trade-off.
1.5 / 5 BLOBS
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