Some Things Should Just Stay Dead

Oh the Alien Franchise. You've come so far since the ultra atmospheric Ridley Scott opus that defined the way I, and many other film viewers, look at horror and sci-fi in general. Unfortunately all that forward momentum has been steadily clawed back by the third and fourth movies in the series with Alien Resurrection failing to even keep pace with the overtly action oriented Aliens by inundating the viewer with a middling plot, ridiculous, motivationless characters (or caricatures) and an entirely unfrightening depiction of the Aliens.

To this day I still get a charge out of the way Alien blended sci-fi and horror while keeping the story relatively grounded. Sure there was a freaky alien and they were flying around in space but all the characters were basically space truckers. The alien itself was the first other species that mankind had come across which meant that there was a minimum of jargon and sci-fi tropes that the audience is supposed to put together through exposition or contextually. The space setting, however, provides the perfect location for a monster thriller. There really is nowhere to run. Alien Resurrection has ostensibly the same setting but there's nothing left to the tense atmosphere of the first movie. The sets and hallways are all so huge there always seems like there's a place to go. The plot itself is fairly wrote as well. Evil military scientists try to clone Ripley in order to get a clone of the Alien Queen so the can use it as a weapon. It's a lot of the same plot other Alien films have had but this one feels a lot like they tried to make Aliens again only with even more gratuitous action and less interesting characters.

All the main characters are apparently battle hardened bandit badasses and Ripley herself has be reborn as an ultra-strong, part-alien, one-liner spouting killing machine. She just roams around the movie being a deux-ex machina which is always great for maintaining suspense. All the other main characters seem to be one note shells as well. There's the dude in a wheelchair, the crazy black guy with all kinds of gun gadgets, the secret robot, the backstabbing scientist. Nothing even remotely surprising happens and all the characters seem to do well is shoot at the Aliens and be gritty. Ron Perlman and Winona Rhyder stand out, though Ryder comes off as a little whiny and fragile for reasons that I either missed or were never articulated. Perlman's presence in this movie is more indicative of the overall quality. It's campy and feels much more like a B-movie with standout one liners like "Who do I have to Fuck to get off this boat" and "Since when are you in Charge? - Since YOU were born without BALLS!" I would have expected a movie with Joss Whedon's name in the writing credits to have a lot better dialog but I guess the need for punchy, action movie dialog won out over witty exchanges.

All in all, the movie is more disappointing as a continuation of the Alien Franchise than it is as a mediocre action/sci-fi/horror flick. The relative quality of the other movies in the series makes the expectations for Alien Resurrection much higher than it could have really hoped to achieve. I probably would have been much more accepting of what this movie has to offer if it didn't purport to be part of a franchise I have a deep fondness for but with the whole package presented as it is I couldn't help but find it severely lacking.