After the ending of Alien3, you'd have been forgiven for thinking that the Alien franchise had come to a logical end - or at the very least, that Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley's role in the franchise was over. But if you've been here a while, you'll also most likely remember some of the ways the studios had kept other franchises going despite the death/consecrated burial/destruction of the hell dimension that its antagonists resided in, and so it should really be no surprise to see that Alien: Resurrection manages to both continue the Alien series and bring back Ripley for another movie.
The year is 2379 - 200 years since the events on Fury 161. On the spaceship USS Auriga, a team of military scientists have succeeded in cloning Ellen Ripley from blood samples taken when she was alive. The reason they've done this is to extract the Xenomorph Queen inside her so that they can use it to grow their own set of Xenomorphs for use in military operations. The cloning process has also left Ripley with her DNA blended slightly with that of the Xenomorph DNA - she is now stronger and faster than your average human and has slightly acidic blood. Her fingernails are also Xenomorph Green. A crew of space pirates deliver a cargo of hijacked humans in cryosleep to be hosts for the Xenomorphs, but inevitably something goes wrong and the Xenomorphs effect an escape from their cells, running amok through the Auriga and killing anyone they come across. Ripley and the survivors of the pirate crew find themselves working together to try to escape the ship and prevent it from landing on Earth. Along the way, Ripley and the others discover the extent of the cloning experiments and that the DNA blending didn't just affect Ripley...
Stop me if you've heard this one. A crew of space pirates, led by a handsome rogue with flexible morals, whose first mate is a very capable African-American. Other crew members include a big guy who's not too smart but good at violence, and a female engineer. They come across a woman who has been experimented on by the government and as a result, has superhuman abilities but is also somewhat schizophrenic/autistic in behaviour. If you squinted hard and blurred some lines separating a couple of fictional universes, you could see Alien: Resurrection as a rather violent pilot episode of Firefly - which isn't all that surprising considering Joss Whedon wrote both of them. Whedon says that he didn't actually notice the similarities between the two until someone pointed out to him, but I have to say that it's glaringly obvious to anyone who's seen both, to the point that if there had been a beautiful and exotic escort onboard the ship as well, I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised.
This time around we have in the cast: Guy of Gisborne (or Top Dollar if you didn't spend a large portion of 1992 watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), Hellboy and Spock's mother. Oh, and the lead scientist on the Ripley/Xenomorph Queen experiments is Charles Lee Ray. Dourif does chew on the scenery somewhat, particularly in one scene where he croons at a newborn hybrid Xenomorph that it's a "beautiful, beautiful butterfly", but frankly that's a pretty average performance from 1990s Dourif and only slightly awkward to watch. Of the rest of the cast, only Ron Perlman as not-Jayne really stands out though - even Ripley feels less like the complex and, yes, human, protagonist of the previous films, as though she'd been stripped down to the barest essentials to make her a Generic Badass Female Action Hero.
There's considerably less CGI in Alien: Resurrection - or to be more exact, what there is of the CGI is a lot less obvious than the Amiga-level modelling that we saw in Alien3. The Xenomorphs are back to being portrayed mostly with practical effects, with the exception being mainly whenever their legs were in shot, as director Jean-Pierre Jeunet felt that it would be too easy for the audience to discern that they were actually watching men in suits. There was also a certain amount of digital "airbrushing" done to the Human-Xenomorph hybrid to remove its hermaphroditic genitalia after Fox and Jeunet eventually decided that would be a bit too much for the film.
Vastly improved effects aside though, Alien: Resurrection is something of a disappointment as a film that's part of the Alien franchise. Even Alien3, with all its faults, still had the basic idea at its core that the Alien movies are meant to be about running and hiding from the Xenomorphs, and only fighting them as a last resort. We've seen how lethally efficient they are at taking humans apart, even well-trained and armed squads of Space Marines, but in Resurrection they seem to be reduced to occasionally reaching up through the floor and grabbing someone every now and then. There's one good underwater scene, but for the rest of the film, they feel woefully underused. Instead, we have the hybrid Xenomorph taking centre-stage, and while it's an effectively unnerving image, with a more-human skull and actual eyes to push it into the outskirts of the Uncanny Valley, it still doesn't make as terrifying a threat as the traditional Xenomorphs. There's also the fact, that despite what the film is telling us, I don't think you ever really feel that our protagonists are really in any danger. Incidental characters, sure, but from about the halfway point you can pretty much tell exactly who's going to survive till the end of the film and that takes a lot of the tension out of it.
There were originally plans for there to be a fifth chapter of the series after this one, taking place on Earth, which might or might not have involved Ripley returning to battle the Xenomorphs once more, but those plans were eventually shelved in favour of going back in time a little and taking an idea born from that one brief shot of a trophy case in a certain film from 1990...
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