Alien: Resurrection Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/05/24 | 8:38 P.M. Mountain Time
Sci-Fi, Horror | Rated R | 1 hr 49 min | Film Release Date: November 26, 1997
The fourth installment in the “Alien” franchise, “Alien: Resurrection,” uses similar ideas originated by Ridley Scott, who directed the first film, followed by James Cameron and David Fincher. The newcomer here is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who later directed “Amélie.” The frightening and exciting elements of the first film make it hard to deviate from. The only one to actually expand and explore the world of “Alien” is director James Cameron. The third film was an unfortunate experience that was fun for no one, and this last film is only a step or two better than that. The script was penned by Joss Whedon, who makes it feel episodic, rather than a cohesive one hour and fifty-minute film. It contains several twists and turns that kept my interest, but this is nothing compared to the first or second film.
The story takes place 200 years after the events of “Alien 3,” in which, Ripley was an unwilling host to alien gestation and died. Interestingly, we see Sigourney Weaver return to play the role of Ellen Ripley. Here, she is company property, but helps a group of black-market smugglers to fight off and escape aliens on a government spaceship, who are still desperately trying to control aliens and use them for humanity’s benefit. We see some Xenomorph evolution through genetic tampering and the birth of a new creature that looks suspiciously like it belongs to another franchise. The special effects department must have been allotted a budget this time around, as the creatures in practical and digital application look much better than the previous installment. We get to see an inventive and exciting but brief chest-bursting scene, but the characters are lackluster and the score to accompany is, at best, forgettable, and at worst, distracting.
Whedon’s television background is at play here. His characters lack progression and are mostly one-note. We see characters we can identify almost immediately because we’ve seen the exact same types in other movies. The biggest descriptor to their characters, so the audience can remember, is their physical features and physicality. One character is in a wheelchair, one is a dumb brute, creepy evil scientist, and so forth. There’s certainly not much to remember them by, and I can’t tell you half of their names.
Our characters are introduced to us in bulk without much detail. So, it may come as a surprise when the group is mourning a character you completely forgot about, because she was only on screen for maybe a couple of minutes. We didn’t get a chance to meet her, and we certainly don’t miss her when she’s gone.
It's always obvious when a movie is built around events and not characters. It is so much more rewarding when a movie is built from a character who is tested by the events. All anybody wants to do here is cash in on the “Alien” movies. There’s no real story to be invested in. What we get is a lot of plot, some worldbuilding, and to guess why is to willingly induce a migraine.
This film just has too many things happening, all of which aren’t developed or explored enough to really matter. It almost seems as if Whedon packed all of a television season’s highlights, centered around the “Alien” franchise, into a sub two-hour long movie. It’s a shame because there are some really interesting ideas here but there’s just not enough time to know them. The script needed to suffer several more rounds of rewrites and a better-matching director to play off Whedon’s specific style and timing.
A daunting task, to be sure though, to find a director that can accurately capture the intent of Whedon’s scripts. Too often, it seems, there is a miscommunication between the page and screen and when that happens, the dialogue comes off as clunky, the jokes don’t land, and character motivation is a complete maze to navigate. I can’t tell you how many times the film lost me when a character makes a decision that completely betrays or ignores what we, the audience, were just told about that character. It’s like playing ping-pong without knowing the rules.
The film is loud and doesn’t make much use of silence. It can be exhausting at times when you’re seeing characters you don’t care about in dire situations, knowing that the next five or ten minutes will be devoted to the suspense of seeing if they can survive. But suspense completely goes out the window when you have nothing to fear. I don’t care if we lose any of these characters; we don’t know them, and even if we do lose them, the writers can chum up some way to see them again, if they make the studio money. I don’t fear for their demise, I don’t hope for their success, which leaves me with no feeling of suspense. The work wasn’t put in to give me reason to root for them or at least care about them. None of them are interesting and are about as useful as paper plates.