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Alien Resurrection (1997) It is clear from the get-go that 20th Century-Fox have learned their lesson from Alien3 and that the resurrection promised by the title refers not simply to Ripley and her Queen but to a profitable franchise. Though the services of another visionary director have been retained, it is notable that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is not partnered with his usual co-director / designer Marc Caro and is well away from the screenplay, which is entrusted to Joss Whedon, who remains best known for his Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and TV series. It is, of course, a challenge to make Anything, Part Four fresh and imaginative, and straying too far from the series template tends to put off longtime fans without attracting new audiences, as David Fincher discovered. However, it's a shame that this effort - though far more coherent, entertaining and exciting than Alien3 - should be the first film in the series to be almost anonymous. There are calculated references to earlier episodes: the control computer of the Auriga is called Father (in Alien, it was Mother) - though the scene establishing this seems to have been snipped; when told of the security procedures which will keep the aliens safely penned, Ripley replies with a paraphrase of the little girl's 'that won't matter' line from Aliens; Brad Dourif, apparently killed off early, turns up in a cocoon to explain some biology and have his head chewed off, and an inelegant failed Ripley clone begs her more successful successor to flame-thrower her out of existence - two elements drawn from an excised Tom Skerritt scene from Alien. Whedon also employs such series staples as the illogical race-against-time (a stupid return-to-Earth safety device revealed as a pointless non-threat when the Auriga burns up on re-entry without infesting the Earth), the macho face-off as Ripley shows up grunting male slobs (Sigourney Weaver does some one-on-one basketball with a scarred Ron Perlman) and a stubborn belief that 20th Century culture (jokes about Gilligan's Island and Popeye) will still play five hundred years from now. The Company is out of business, replaced by a nefarious but muddled military conspiracy, and the androids of earlier entries make way for a surprise revelation that Winona Ryder, tagged as 'highly fuckable' by her captain, is an artificial person one generation on from the earlier models. The term Whedon coins for the new-model Call, an android (gynoid?) built by other androids, is 'Auton', which happens to be the name of a race of plastic monsters that lumbered around Doctor Who in the early 1970s. Alien Resurrection, like Alien itself, is something of a mutation of the cramped style of the fondly-remembered BBC science fiction show, with endless running around corridors (there's even a Poseidon Adventure swim-through kitchen) and surprise appearances by fanged nasties who pick off anyone humourlessly militarist or unsympathetic but leave the obvious survivors, predestined by billing or eccentricity, illogically safe. There are a few nice character touches, with Perlman and Pinon - stalwarts of Jeunet's earlier films - grouching and gurning amusingly as the sexless stooges (in four films, there have been precisely no potent male characters). The best new invention in the mild-mannered and bespectacled Purvis (Leland Orser), who wakes up from cryo-sleep to find he has been space-jacked, sold, impregnated and doomed but spends the rest of the film kidding himself along that he has a chance of survival (and gets to dispose of the chief human villain in a rare bit of implied gore). The monsters, CGI augmented in this go-around, drool more than usual - especially in a neat training game with Dourif - and remain fearsome beasties, though the last-reel mutant can't match the escalation of ghastliness provided by the original Queen in Aliens. While the Alien series has taken a leisurely eighteen
years to get to its number four, there has been an interim proliferation
of novel spin-offs and comic books (including cross-over encounters
with Predator, Superman and Batman), not to mention a line of successful
action figures. This is the first film to take back all the merchandising
and incorporate it into the plot - the damp squib human-alien monster
of the finale (whose undignified exit is a straight-faced reprise of
the joke death of George Wendt in Space Truckers) makes
little sense except that the continual mutation of the alien species
allows for more variant toys. There are a few fascinating ramifications
to the dodgy science: the suggestion that Ripley has only been cloned
with her personality intact because she has the alien ability to inherit
memories from one generation to another; the parallels between the unnatural
births of Ripley 8, the Queen, Call and the last-reel monster, which
give them strengths unattainable by men of woman born. However, none
of that material is really explored in the mad scramble to fire off
more guns or splat off more heads. First published in Sight and Sound December 1997 pp.36-37 (UK) Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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