Alien Resurrection
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ALIEN RESURRECTION - film review
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Joss Whedon talks about Alien Ressurection |
A group of mercenaries, including Winona Ryder as Call and Ron Perlman as Johner, arrive at the Auriga with a group of kidnapped humans who have been placed in stasis in order to be used as hosts to breed the xenomorphs. Events take a turn for the more-than-expected as the quickly-maturing aliens break free of their prison cells by sacrificing one of their own. Anyone left alive on the ship realise that Ripley is their only hope of getting off the Auriga, which has to be destroyed because it has set an automatic return to Earth and will unleash the aliens upon the planet if it’s not.
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Resurrection, quite predictably, ticks the boxes that fans of the series expect, but does so with little energy or originality. The fleeing humans are picked off in a series of set pieces that lack suspense and are deliberately contrived to back them into a corner just for the thrill of the alien kill! Then there’s the ending … Ripley has to, once again, face off against a Queen (who through its gestation in Ripley has miraculously developed a human womb), but, this time, she’s killed by her own offspring. The “child” is a hybrid xenomorph-human that has eyes and a mouth and actually thinks that Ripley is its mother. Whatever was written in the script is completely lost in translation, as a peculiar transference takes place, making Ripley the "Queen", as it were, as her "child" defends her "mother" from the alien Queen.
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There’s a pall of weirdness that rests upon Alien Resurrection starting with the strange story that tries to mine the maternal instinct themes of Aliens in reverse, but comes across as just plain creepy. There’s Brad Dourif’s kooky turn as Gediman, the scientist who “likes” the aliens just a little too much. Dan Hedaya as Perez looks like he’s just got out of bed in every single scene he’s in. Winona Ryder as Call struggles to make any impact acting up against Weaver, who like her character battles on through it all perhaps wondering at some stage why she signed-on for a fourth outing.
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Alien Resurrection has atmosphere, it has xenomorphs, it has abunch of working class grunts and its has a version of Ellen Ripley. All of the elements are up on the screen, but the movie just never comes together in the manner that either those making it or those watching would have hoped for. This lack of cohesion was reflected in the box office performance of the film upon its release and hopes of any further films were dashed, as Alien Resurrection bombed at the US Box Office. It finished its domestic run with a paltry $48 million, but was saved by its international performance, generating a further $113 million. With an estimated budget of $70 million plus its marketing costs, Alien Resurrection didn’t lose money, but its lack of originality and formulaic approach didn’t win the franchise any new fans. Perhaps it’s best left to Joss Whedon, the film’s writer, to have the final word about Alien Resurrection:
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Brad Dourif's always kooky, but he ramps it up for Alien Resurrection.
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"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."
Alien Resurrection - Spanish Lobby Cards
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