If there didn’t exist a venerable franchise based around the word Alien, would anyone have gone to see a movie called Alien: Resurrection? It’s an objectively stupid, terrible title, better suited for something that might air on the SyFy channel. Once a franchise starts entering its colon period, things are about to go off the rails (see Halloween III: Season of the Witch, or A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge). Even among the dubious tradition of horror franchises cranking out increasingly lazy sequels, Alien: Resurrection is at the bottom of the pile.
The subtitle Resurrection is apt. I’m reminded of a lyric from Nick Cave’s “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” wherein Cave empathizes with the revenant: “He never asked to be raised up from the tomb/nobody ever actually asked him to forsake his dreams.” The same seems true of Resurrection. Alien 3 ended on a good note for the franchise, and brought things full circle (even if, yes, the ending is pretty much stolen from Terminator 2). So why resurrect the franchise five years later? Was there some new angle on the material? Some new story to tell? As Prometheus and Alien: Covenant showed up, this franchise is not immune to reboots. So is this a new direction for the story?
Nope. Ripley is brought back as a human-alien hybrid clone. This time the boogeyman is the military (one character makes an offhand reference to Weyland-Yutani being bought out by Walmart). They’ve harvested the alien queen that was incubating inside Ripley in Alien 3, and once again there is little to no justification. Some words are said about using the queen for medicine or whatever, but no one has ever had a good reason for keeping one of these things alive. The queen births twelve new xenomorphs, which get loose pretty rapidly, meaning that Resurrection is trying to be a hybrid itself, of Alien and Aliens, but it doesn’t work because those films are perfect and this one sucks.
Resurrection makes a lame attempt at recreating the band of roughnecks that audiences grew so enamored of in the first two films. It fails in this, too: in aiming for a rakish Captain Dallas type, the film ends up with Elgyn, who objectifies the ship’s android, Cole (Winona Ryder) and is altogether a parody of an action lead, looking and acting like someone put Til Schweiger and Paul Walker in a blender. Johner is notable because he’s played by Ron Perlman, but everyone else on the crew of mercenaries is played at such a high volume that it becomes difficult to watch. When General Perez (Dan Hedaya) somberly salutes an escape pod, it’s hard to tell if director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) is trying to make an American movie or parody one.
There are a few bright spots. Alien 3‘s hacky CGI xenomorphs are (mostly) gone, and we get some good long looks at one of the best creature designs in the history of film. Brad Dourif shines in his few scenes; it’s a nothing character, but Dourif is always fun to watch, and is always committed to discomfiting the audience whenever possible. And there’s a truly horrific scene in which Ripley confronts the earlier, failed versions of her cloned body, including one Cronenbergesque monstrosity that makes a clear case for this franchise sticking to practical effects and makeup.
That’s not enough to excuse the rest of the film, though. The characters are annoying, the plot is nonexistent and predictable, and the alien-human hybrid that’s birthed near the film’s end is laughable. If I said to you “Picture a white xenomorph with human eyes and teeth,” the same thing in Alien: Resurrection looks far stupider than anything you’re picturing. Ironically, the suit is expressive enough that when the hybrid dies, it’s the closest the film comes to a moment of real pathos.
I can’t un-watch this film, but in my mind this franchise will always end with Alien 3. Resurrection is the beginning of the “movies to avoid” phase of Alien, followed as it was by Alien vs. Predator, and AVP: Requiem. Like those two films, Resurrection is a lazy, unnecessary cash grab, notable only as proof that even a film as perfect as Alien can be abused and distorted.
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