Movie Review: Alien Resurrection

Alien: Resurrection [1997] 

I review an Alien movie every Halloween, although I missed last year since it was Resident Evil month for 2022. Despite everyone telling me that the third and fourth movies in the franchise are terrible, I actually found Alien 3 to be... well, it's not as good as the others, but I would say that it's an 'all right' movie, so long as you're watching the director's cut. 

Then there's this movie. 

I'm honestly not sure where to begin with this one, so I'll just quickly detail the plot of the movie. After the events of Alien 3, two hundred years later a bunch of military scientists clone Ripley a bunch of times (somehow they got her DNA despite her jumping into molten metal) in order to extract the Xenomorph queen within her body. They study and breed the new queen in the USM Auriga, and a bunch of mercenaries arrive to deliver a bunch of kidnapped humans, which the Auriga crew use to breed the Xenomorphs. 

Among the mercenary crew, one of their members, Call (Winona Ryder), start to investigate Ripley and seems to know more than she lets on, eventually getting close enough to kill her. Ripley (or, rather, 'Number Eight') reveals that she has xenomorph DNA and blood, having fused with xenomorph DNA during the cloning process. Of course, this being an Alien movie, the aliens break free, kill a lot of the crew on board the Auriga, and the survivors of both the military crew and the mercenaries have to kill all the Aliens before the ship goes on its automated course back to Earth. 

Call reveals herself to be an "auton", a type of synthetic android with human feelings, who's trying her best to kill all the xenomorphs to protect humankind. Ripley 8 gets caught by xenomorphs just long enough to witness the Queen giving birth into a human-xenomorph hybrid, who ends up being the final villain that stalks our heroes into their escape ship. The Newborn actually thinks Ripley is its mommy, but is utterly murderous to everything else. Most of the characters die, Ripley and Call kill the hybrid, and very brutally kill it by shoving it into space.

There are some pretty decent showings in this movie, I will admit. Ryder's character Call is surprisingly compelling and easily the best part of the movie. And Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley Eight as someone who gives absolutely no fucks is admittedly pretty entertaining as well. There's a vague theme of... being human? Or something? Ripley Eight and Call have a well-acted conversation about it, in any case. Members of the mercenary crew like Vriess and Christie are significantly more memorable than the lackluster side-characters of Alien 3, too. And between the swimming aliens, the back-to-back climbing scene and the little eggs-as-traps scene, they do get a bunch of neat action scenes. I also do like the rather ridiculous 'button' scene with the two Xenomorphs in a room. 

But then the one feeling I had when coming out of this movie is... "ew, it's gross". Not scary, not disturbing, just... gross. And I'm not sure what really turned me off of this movie, because the first half of the movie is all right. A bit odd due to the amount of comedy (the military staff really are chewing the scenery) but it's mostly all right. And there's the room full of utterly wrong Ripley-Alien hybrid mash-ups, including a still-living clone that begs for Eight to kill her. That one was actually disturbing and if it had been toned down a bit, I would actually say that it's effective.

But then we've got the scene of Ripley being embraced by a lot of aliens as she falls down the grates. Or the extended scene of the Alien Queen giving birth from an oversized womb -- which apparently was 'Ripley's gift to her'. It's pretty gross and I honestly don't quite understand the specifics of how the Queen managed to make a bunch of regular Xenomorphs but then decided to... give birth to the Newborn just this one time? Or the general pathetic look of the Newborn human-alien hybrid in general... There are some shots where the Newborn's bizarre skull-face does look pretty sad and pathetic, but for the most part it just looks kind of gross. And let's not get to the overly long scene where it dies, which feels unnecessarily long and goes from 'oh man, it's disturbing, the creature is in terrible pain' to just 'okay, I get it?' I don't know. There's a lot of attempts to show imagery that symbolize birth or whatever, but unlike the original Xenomorph design or even things like the Facehuggers and Chestbursters and that weird octo-thing from Prometheus, the imagery in this movie just feel like they're here to gross you out. And, well, they sure succeeded in that regard. 

There's also the scene where the 'obviously he's going to die at some point' infected man Purvis ends up somehow able to flail around and wrestle the evil Dr. Wren and weaponize the Chestburster coming out of his chest to lance through Wren's skull. It's actually so over-the-top that it ends up being hilarious. 

Anyway, this movie. It's not actually entirely terrible, and there were some decent parts of it -- I did like the mercenary crew and their dynamic, for what it's worth. It's just that the general idea of a human-alien hybrid or a Ripley clone are all just kind of tossed into a blender and the movie just sort of shrugs about it, resulting in a movie that, again, ends up just feeling kind of messy. If I wasn't so grossed out by the Newborn, I might actually have better things to say about this movie. The action scenes are neat, and the actors had a pretty fun time. But the vibe of the main plot with the hybrid aliens and telepathic Ripley really didn't do it for me. 

As it is... eh? I'm not surprised that the movie series basically went into hiatus after this and went on and on to do spinoffs and prequels that, while ending up being more action-oriented, at least isn't full of over-the-top attempts at imagery like this one. I know this movie probably has fans out there, but as it stands, it's not my favourite Alien movie by far.