Alien 4: Resurrection
Again with the sci-fi movie series, eh? So (now) having seen all four of them (not talking about Alien vs. Predator, which I have also unfortunately seen) I can truly say that only the first two are worth watching. Alien (from way back in 1979 – Black Hole vintage) was a great horror story in space, and has lots of (now) famous actors in it, including Tom Skerrit, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt and of course Sigourney Weaver (ultimately the star of all the movies). The somewhat obscure (at the time) bio-mechanoid H.R. Giger art and set design really made Alien a unique movie – and with Dan O’Bannon as a key writer plus Ridley Scott as director (this was several years before Blade Runner) were a great combination.
Aliens, the next movie, was directed by James Cameron and took a different tack to turn the saga into an action movie, this time including Michael Biehn (Terminator alum and regular Cameron movie actor). Here, Ripley gets to be a badass and save the day again, despite a squadron of Marines sent to ‘protect’ her and Paul Reiser (who plays a great corporate douchebag, and thankfully ‘gets his’ from the aliens themselves – ha!). And who can forget the classic “game OVER, man!” from Bill Paxton? One of his classic goofy movie roles.
Alien3 was pretty bad. interesting premise (Ripley, Hicks and Newt’s ship is diverted somehow to a prison colony but only Ripley survives the crash – Lance Henrikson shows up again now as the scientist trying to continue the research on the aliens but Ripley ends up as the ‘Christ figure’ and kills herself to thwart him). Interestingly enough, Wired has an article on David Fincher (the director) this month, where he’s still fairly pained about the whole experience – it’s safe to say that the low quality of the movie upon release is probably not his fault based on this article.
Which brings us to Alien (4): Resurrection. Pretty simple plot – yet *again* the ‘Company’ is trying to do experimental research on the aliens (they just can’t learn that lesson, can they?) but this time they are also using clones of Ripley to incubate the alien babies as their hosts. They also seem to be trying to ‘meld’ Ripley WITH the aliens along the way, as she finds out later. A ship of baddies arrives at the military research ship where all this ‘research’ is being conducted – but then when Ron Perlman gets his face popped by Ripley after being a smartass – someone gets trigger happy and the baddies effectively kill most of the guards. However, only Winona Ryder knows about the aliens onboard and what’s really going on – and that Ripley is a clone (200 years have apparently passed since the original Ripley died on that prison planet, after all). So then we go into lengthy chase/confrontation scenes where we find out WR is a robot (remember Ash from the first movie and Bishop from the second? Same deal). We also find out that one of the objectives of the alien research was to allow the alien to have live babies(?) instead of laying all those eggs with face-huggers in them – wtf? After all this useless/?? plot tedium that kills about 45 minutes, the survivors almost get away in the smaller ship only to have an alien on board (again) but manage to kick it out the airlock (again) and then see a sunrise on earth, where the movie ends.
So, while the movie wasn’t near as cheesy as ST:Insurrection – it lacked nearly any original plot and many moments of WTF all over the place – I like many of Joss Whedon‘s writing creations, most notably Firefly/Serenity, but he’s really grasping at straws here (and drowns in the process). He doesn’t include enough plot to make it more a straight horror movie like the first one (and really, now having had 3 previous movies, how could you build onscreen terror in that sense anyway?) nor any real interesting action sequences that even come close to matching the second one. We’ll just politely ignore the third movie altogether. 🙂 And most of the dialog is pretty throwaway too – save the new ‘malevolent’ Ripley, who as a clone with alien blood had a much darker tone and personality than her original – but they never really explore it to any degree, the most she ever says at once is maybe a sentence?
Oh well….
candybowl
Tags: 90's, aliens, fantasy, malevolence, military, movies, sci-fi