*Computer Died In It's Sleep - Phone Post*
'Ripley was dead to begin with. As dead as a tired franchise...' For many years now the much maligned Alien: Resurrection has been a whipping post for Alien fans since its release in 1998. Often seen as a needless, soulless, studio cash cow sequel to a flawed but inspired horror trilogy - a clumsy Ringo in the John-Paul-George sequence of the first three films (respectively).
With the franchise now not only dead, but violated repeatedly in its grave (the dull and stupid AVP and AVP: Requiem.) I thought it would be fair, in blissful retrospect, to look back at a film that in all honesty I enjoyed without prejudice when I was 16, over cups of tea, the morning after a late-night Alien-a-thon.
Like the other three films, each of which was directed by a fastidious auteur, Alien: Resurrection was helmed by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a director with, too, his very own strikingly original visual style. Many shots from Resurrection would not be out of place in his dark, retro-futuristic fairy tales the City of Lost Children or Delicatessen, but as a whole, Jeunet reigns in his idiosyncratic style, favoring a more mainstream approach - which honestly can only be a blessing. The times his Gallic quirkiness take over - as in the woefully miscalculated opening sequence, in which the title is practically spat at us through a straw - prove that what this franchise doesn't need is to be the next Amelie.
Resurrection sports some pretty geektastic names. Sigourney Weaver agreed to come back as Ripley (or at least a bestial simulacra of the character) and you can tell immediately that she's having the time of her life. Probably one of the most important elements of the film is realising that Ripley is not Ripley - merely an approximate copy with some distinctly unwholesome additions. It gives Weaver a chance to camp it up in a performance literally hundreds of years away from the original tortured psyche of Ellen Ripley. Is it over the top? Yes. A bit of a slap in the face for fans? To a degree. But the series would have been nothing without the hard work Weaver had put into it over the decades.
Other performances are patchy to say the least. Dan Hedaya as the ship's captain and a pre-hellboy Ron Pearlman as a hard-case space pirate are inconsistent at best and uninteresting at worst. The rest of the space pirates are tediously faceless and mercifully culled.
A shout-out though to my two favorite non-insectile villains: the good mad scientist/bad mad scientist team Gediman and Wren, played respectively by b-movie legend Brad Dourif (Dune, Deadwood, Child's Play, Exorcist 3) and the ever-threatening JE Freeman best known (to me at least) as the misogynistic tower of psychotic violence The Dane, from the labyrinthine gangster epic Miller's Crossing. Both Gediman and Wren, albeit really only side-characters, are entertaining, intense, occasionally weirdly funny and both have colourful melodramatic demises. ("Always put one in the brain!")
The screenplay was written by scruffy nerf herder Joss Wheadon, who would later hone his skills on the witty, grubby space opera with the much lamented - but probably beneficially finite - Firefly/Serenity tv show and film. Whether you're a fan or not, it's clear that he was not on top form for this script. You can take in account that he had no creative control and the commercial demands of a high profile project, but this is just not a well written story. Interesting characters are sidelined (the potentially fascinating character of Purviss, knowing he will eventually die in the worst way imaginable) and unaccountably awful characters are given full reign (Winona Ryder’s tedious Annalee) Gags are plentiful and dull and the relentless action becomes a monotonous whizz-bang-whatever in comparison to the slow build-up to the other films, even James Cameron’s blockbusting Aliens.
From a horror perspective, this film falls down flat. The idea that the titular alien species would have some sort of reverence for even a partially-alien Ripley is hard to swallow - even given that it’s exact biological life-cycle is vague to say the least - (an egg laid by a Queen alien that spawns a facehugger that impregnates a host with another egg etc. etc.) and it kills the central horror of the beast. This insectile thing - this rape-made-flesh - uses us as an incubator before tearing us apart like the pointless bag of flesh we are. That is where horror lies - not in the idea that these creatures, although undeniably intelligent, could communicate in an overtly human way, form a consciousness of a kind, destroys any last vestige of horror. It turns a primal, cosmic fear into just ugly, penis-headed versions of ourselves - nature’s unfortunate consciousness-cursed mutants. Epic fail.
I suppose the largest fault with the film is that while other successful horror and science fiction films are given dreadful sequels, the Alien franchise is still held in high regard by critics and fans alike. The traditionally low-budget but increasingly high-financed sequels are almost expected, and either ignored outright by critics or have their in-built idiocy ironically enjoyed by shlock fans. So spoilt are we by the previous offerings that this outing could be nothing but disappointing, but in any other series, maybe we could have forgiven its faults and enjoy a daft, gory action film. However, as an Alien film, we deserve more.
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