What Were They Thinking?
Alien Franchise Should Have Stayed Dead

I remember a scene from the horror movie Misery in which Kathy Bates explains to James Caan that he must resurrect her favorite heroine whom he killed off in his last book. The catch is, he can't cheat. Even Annie (Bates' character) understands that writers cheat. Seemingly dead characters are brought back to life, either by rewriting endings so the hero gets away or by coming up with ridiculous scenarios to explain their rebirth.

If you saw Alien3, you will remember that our beloved alien exterminator Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) killed herself by jumping into a vat of molten ore to kill the brood queen living inside her. With such an ending (and an unspectacular one which seemed to be the death knell for the Alien franchise), it seemed that Ripley's days of hunting aliens were over. Until now...

Enter Alien: Resurrection. With genetic cloning all the rage in today's headlines, it only seems natural that someone in Ripley's future (200 years after her death) would attempt to get a sample of her DNA and clone her. Oddly enough, the reasons for this seem perfectly logical in the context of the story and I never felt that the writers had cheated. They did, however, cover some very familiar ground.

While Ripley fought for her survival in the face of a greedy defense contract corporation in Aliens (the second of the series), she now faces the unrestrained hunger for power in the face of the military itself. A special military research program has been attempting to clone Ripley in hopes that they can retrieve the alien queen which had been inside her. The military hopes to use the queen to breed a series of alien warriors which they can tame and use as weapons.

And here's an interesting question. You've just pulled a queen larva out of Ripley. It is the only alien we have. How does one impregnate it so it will start producing eggs? Call me crazy, but even a queen bee has drones with which she mates. If, in fact, the alien queens are capable of fertilizing themselves this little tidbit should have been brought out in the story. Instead, it looks like bad writing with a total disregard for the science of genetics.

Ripley the clone, who operates on an adult level with memories of her former life, seems wholly detached from this news. Her dirty, gaunt appearance makes Ripley seem as alien as the queen which had been removed from her. It isn't long before the audience understand that this clone is not "exactly" the same Ripley we knew before. In a cold, dead, analytical way she predicts -- quite accurately -- that the queen will breed and everyone will die.

Of course they will! We've seen this three times already! The storyline seems almost incidental. With very little in the way of new ideas, we follow the characters as they plod through the motions of being picked off one-by-one. If nothing else, Alien: Resurrection attempts to revive the franchise by returning to the horror of earlier series. Unfortunately, for an audience who has been through this three times already, nothing seems frightening. Instead, we wonder who in this universe is stupid enough to believe that these aliens aren't as nasty as their own history suggests?

On the plus side, there is a strong collection of secondary characters. Some of them are little more than cardboard stereotypes, but others have a certain depth to them. Most impressive of the performances are Gary Dourdan as a mercenary named Christie; Michael Wincott as Elgyn, the captain of the mercenary ship; and Winona Ryder as the ship's mechanic, Call. Although Ryder seems out of place among this motley crew, her small size and vulnerability play a role in allowing her to pass unseen while she works toward a hidden agenda.

Also worth seeing are the special effects, some of which make the aliens seem more lifelike than their human counterparts. The underwater scenes in which the aliens swim with the help of their prehensile tails are truly breathtaking. The aliens seem born to swimming underwater, possibly giving us a glimpse of their natural environment? Maybe, but no one bothers to take time out for scientific analysis during the course of the movie.

The ending of the movie, however, becomes so horribly farcical that one wonders if the writer had any notion how stupid it would look on screen. Like the first two movies, an alien (this time a cross-breed) makes it onto the getaway ship where the final death struggle ensues. Unfortunately, the stupidity and lack of physics behind it makes it laughable (not unlike the last scene in Total Recall).

In my opinion, Alien: Resurrection was not the best movie in the series, but it beats the last one hands down. If the powers that be at 20th Century Fox want to make another sequel, they would be wise to listen to the SF fans and drop Ripley from the script. We don't need another remake of Alien. It's been done to death (and resurrected). Next time, give us what we want: Aliens vs. Predator.

MY RATING: 5 out of 10.

RATED: R
RUN TIME: 109 min.