Jean-Pierre Jeunet, “Alien: Resurrection” (1997)
The idea behind this movie was to give new life to the Alien movie franchise but despite some interesting ideas about breeding alien / human hybrids as bioweapons and space pirate mercenaries working in secret and illegal tandem with a private or public military corporation among others, and replacing the psychological horror and action adventure aspects with black comedy, the movie suffers terribly from poor character development, a formulaic plot and poor writing. Two hundred years after “Alien 3” in which she dies in a vat of fiery molten lead, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wakes up and realises it was all another bad dream … except this dream is very real and she’s not Ellen Ripley but her clone, cultivated and brought to life by military scientists on the spaceship USM Auriga from cells collected from the original woman during her stay on the prison planet. The scientists are actually interested in the DNA of the alien queen found in those cells which is why they have created the clone. By the time the new Ripley is fully conscious, the alien queen has been removed from her surgically and allowed to mature in a special holding bay. Ripley should have been discarded but the scientists remain interested in her as she has inherited various characteristics from the aliens.
A group of space pirates that includes a robot, Call (Winona Ryder), delivers human cargo kidnapped from another spacecraft to the USM Auriga. The cargo is to be used in the scientists’ experiments on the aliens bred from Ripley’s alien queen. The group receives its pay in cash from the USM Auriga captain in a way that demonstrates the transaction is clearly underhanded and corrupt. Call attempts on her own to kill Ripley as part of her mission, kept secret from her fellow pirates, to abort the alien breeding programme but discovers she is too late. She is caught by the Auriga’s soldiers and the entire group of pirates is arrested and held prisoner. In the meantime, the aliens that have already been born and are under study break loose and rampage through the ship. Surprise, surprise, Ripley finds herself following the pirates plus one of the human cargo and a couple of the Auriga’s regular crew as they try to make their way through the ship to the pirate craft Betty and escape before the aliens get them too.
From then on the story falls into the familiar refrain of run, hide, escape, kill if necessary, blow up more ships if necessary and send more aliens into outer space as space junk. A conservationist, environmentalist agenda has never been the Alien movie franchise’s strong point. Though Jeunet introduces elements to spice up the plot such as an underwater chase sequence ending in a cruel twist, aliens possessed of human intelligence and Ripley stumbling across previous aborted results of the cloning experiment that produced her, the plot formula proceeds stronger than ever, perhaps because of the sometimes ingenious deviations from it.
There is hardly any character development in the movie: the actors playing the space pirates, in particular Dominique Pinon and Gary Dourdan, do their best at giving their characters Vriess and Christie some individuality and Ron Perlman as the macho, sex-crazed pirate Johner provides tension relief after some heavy action scenes with lame comic one-liners and an encounter with a spider. Other actors of note include Brad Dourif as a scientist who’s a little too fond of the aliens for his own good. Weaver as the Ripley clone brings sardonic humour and camp to the role but doesn’t have much interaction with the pirates individually, Purvis the cargo or Wren the scientist in charge of the cloning experiment: Ripley’s relations with the Auriga and Betty survivors could have been a good source of tension and conflict and a sub-plot in itself. Ryder as Call is simply not believable as a spy and terrorist among the pirates: she’s too small and delicate in looks, and her role which is significant to the movie’s plot demands more screen presence which waif-like Ryder lacks. The very idea of a robot programmed to be sympathetic and at the same time carrying out a mercenary task is not credible.
Opportunities for exploring the nature of being alien and “alien”, and what being human means, are missed: Purvis, carrying an alien embryo, might at least have been given a chance to beg for death before the alien hatches, putting the pirates in some quandary about killing him in cold blood and forcing them to question how much they value other people’s lives; the Ripley clone might have wondered how much she owes in the way of loyalty at least to the humans who tried to exploit her or to the aliens, some of whom accept her as their own, let alone pondered on her uniqueness and “alienness”. The closest the movie comes to tackling this idea is in the Newborn, a weird alien / human hybrid which recognises Ripley as its “mother” and tries to bond with her. The moment when Ripley disposes of it before the Betty lands on Earth is a poignant one and possibly at the risk of “chick thing” melodrama, as Johner might have put it, director Jeunet could have extended this moment to have Ripley sobbing a bit and Call comforting her before they realise they’ve arrived.
The movie does have some big plot holes: what does mad boffin Wren get up to after trying to kill the pirates and Ripley and before boarding the Betty? why does the Auriga automatically set course for Earth whenever there’s an emergency, no matter how many zillions of miles away it is? how does Purvis manage to escape his prison and why is he the only one to do so? why don’t the characters care much about what happens when one of their number goes missing in the underwater swimming scene or on the Betty? (Doing head counts obviously isn’t important in the Alien movies.) Viewers expecting the movie to follow its own logic will be disappointed here.
Motifs from the previous Alien films – motherhood and the idea of a recurring link between Ripley and the aliens – appear in “Alien: Resurrection” but the movie otherwise doesn’t extend these motifs much (apart from giving the aliens no further excuse to bother humans or any other species) or introduce new ideas and themes that could be taken up in a fifth movie / fourth sequel. Yours truly has known for some years that Joss Whedon, the script-writer for “Alien: Resurrection”, had penned a script for a fifth movie tentatively called “Alien: Revelation” which was rejected; this movie likely would have taken up where the fourth movie leaves off and mostly likely developed the Ripley clone’s character, abilities and destiny further. “Alien: Resurrection” has the appearance of a film treading water in search of a clear direction that could take the franchise into new subject and thematic territory rather than simply rehashing old themes.