You know, I could really just show you one thing to completely sum up my thoughts on
Alien: Resurrection.
Enjoy.
Well, guys, we have come to
Alien: Resurrection, which was directed by the man who later made
Amélie. Who the hell knows what happened with this movie? Probably a lot of studio interference, and a lot of people who were just really not capable of making a film, I guess, and they decided to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what we got.
I hate this movie. I hate
Alien: Resurrection. This is an abomination. This film has barely a single redeeming quality in it. Theres isn't a—there really is nothing. There's—there's nothing, really, to talk about. You could talk about the Xenomorph. uh, "creatures," I guess?
In
Alien: Resurrection, they decide to create a clone of Ripley. This isn't really the real Ripley, because if you haven't seen
Alien 3 (spoilers), she dies. So we have a clone of Ripley, because I guess they want to use her as a host to create more alien creatures, because, of course, man really wants Xenomorphs, because, you know, why not?
Why do they want to clone Ripley anyway? Why is she the host? Why do they have to have this warrant officer, who was magically a lieutenant in
Alien 3, despite having her license revoked in
Aliens? Somehow she got to be, like, a lieutenant during the cryo-sleep period between
Aliens and
Alien 3, I guess, and now she's a clone.
This movie was written by Joss Whedon, by the way. I don't know what happened with this film.
And Whedon himself has expressed extreme dissatisfaction in the film. He stated his script was more fun and lighthearted, but the director made everyone be more serious, and these two tones don't match up. And that's, you know, I guess that's an okay excuse, but to me, an
Alien film shouldn't be fun or lighthearted. It should be suspenseful and terrifying. And so the director had the right idea in trying to make it more serious, but the script wasn't supposed to be that serious, and so the two just never mesh as a whole. It's really two people doing everything wrong for what this film should be. Even the film's score is just so over-the-top and incredibly loud and just overbearing.
Everything about the way the film is constructed just doesn't work. The dialogue that's being spoken, if it was more of a
Firefly/
Serenity/
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/
Avengers-type Whedon-esque experience, that could work, but the film itself just doesn't understand how to accomplish that tone, and the script still has quite a bit of problems. Namely, never really explaining why Ripley has to be cloned, beyond just a franchise that's being milked until it dies by a studio, which is the real answer.
Another massive mistake this movie makes is having the aliens caged from the opening scene. They're pets. They're being experimented on. How terrifying. This perfect organism that was so scary in
Alien and
Aliens is now just behind some glass, and they have a button that can shoot ice mist at it, and, you know, how fucking horrible is that? It takes the fear completely out of the movie.
They also show the creatures far too much. I love the look of Xenomorphs. They're my favorite alien design of all time. But the idea of showing it constantly, constantly, over and over again, is the same reason
Jaws: The Revenge (among many reasons) sucked. They just showed the shark all the time. Like, you have to keep that shit hidden. You can't just always show it on frame. Ridley Scott and James Cameron understood that.
Let's talk about Sigourney Weaver in this movie, who is an actress that I really love. I think she's fantastic in just about all the
Alien movies, even
Alien 3. In this film, she's like this really over-sexualized person that just goes around touching everybody and staring in each other's eyes, looking like she wants to fuck literally every character in this film, including the Xenomorphs.
"So, who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?"
But really, everyone's on this level. Ron Perlman, who I usually adore—one of my favorite character actors of all time—is insanely over-the-top in this movie. Winona Ryder is awful. There's also a character in this movie named Christie, who has a hilarious scene where he bounces bullets off of a ceiling. That's where we're at here, people.
The film also takes about 50 minutes before the plot fully kicks in, and you can forget about all the dumb mad scientist experimentation bullshit, and the characters are finally running through the corridors and the aliens are, you know, taking them out one by one. It's 50 minutes into the movie before anything really happens that's worth a damn. Everything before that is very awkward sexual tension scenes between Winona Ryder and Sigourney Weaver, a hilarious basketball scene that has no purpose in the movie other than to go, "Look, Sigourney Weaver made the shot backwards!"
This entire film, like, I'm telling you, every decision they made was wrong. Every single one.
Just take the characters alone: They're expendable movie characters 101. Everything that you shouldn't do with a movie character here. It's just everyone's a quirk. It's like, oh, there's a guy in a wheelchair, he can't walk and he talks like this, and he's a guy in a wheelchair, so that's his character.
"Who were you expecting? Santa Claus?"
Ron Perlman's a really angry guy who's angry. The one guy can bounce bullets off walls. They're all just a quirk. They have nothing interesting about them. Nothing. Literally nothing.
The movie was really bad before, but the last fifteen minutes are absolute insanity. There is nothing in the entire
Alien universe that holds up to the last fifteen minutes of
Alien: Resurrection. When Ripley gets sucked into this—this—whatever the fuck that was, it's just, I don't know what's happening.
That entire sequence. I actually have no words. I don't know what to say, guys.
Let's just talk about the fucking newborn. Oh my god, the design for the newborn. This thing looks like a deformed penis with eyeballs. I don't—I have no idea what they were thinking. This thing is so fucking stupid-looking, I—it's so fucking dumb. I hate it. I hate the newborn. I hate it, guys. I really do. I fucking hate it. It's so stupid.
But hey, at least it has, like, an amazing death that's really gross and over-the-top like pretty much everything in this movie. I mean, for fuck's sake, every decision—I keep saying this, but it's true—every decision in Alien: Resurrection was wrong. This movie is an abomination. I hate it. It is definitely the worst in the official Alien four films, without a doubt. Oh my god. Ugh.
But hey, at least next, I get to watch and review Alien vs. Predator. My future's looking up. Oh, fuck.
Guys, thank you so much as always for watching this review. I appreciate it. And if you like this, you can click right
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