“Hey guys, Ripley’s back.”

In 1997, Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Script-Writer Joss Whedon put what many consider to be the final nail in the Alien Saga coffin. In Alien Ressurection, we learn that the death of Ellen Ripley didn’t spell the end of the story, although it probably should have. This film does little other than shove the Alien Saga further into the sewer. Its sole benefit is to make Alien 3 look better by comparison.

The film is set two hundred years after Ripley’s death, on a remote space station called the Auriga. There, a Company team cloned Ripley from blood samples found on Fiorina 161 during her initial medical examination. After cloning her, they removed the infant alien and have since been breeding many more.

Even in success, the cloning procedure was not entirely successful. It created several versions of Ripley mutants, the best of which is half-human and half-alien. It is a twisted duplicate of Ripley that the test team keeps confined. Like the xenomorphs, she is considered a test animal in a lab cage. Some scientists find her fascinating as she learns very quickly, has heightened senses, and displays some form of precognition. Others just want her destroyed.

The scientific team has revived the xenomorph breeding process by contracting the crew of a smuggling ship, the Betty. They have hired the smugglers to turn into pirates, offering them legal protections in exchange for their kidnapping crews in space and bringing their hybernation chambers to the space station. When the smugglers learn the true intent of the experiments being conducted they are angered but are no match for the 42 guards supporting the seven scientists on the station.

Yet, a confrontation in inevitable. When AnnaLee Call (Winona Ryder) attempts to kill the Ripley clone, she is charged as a terrorist.  The station manager opts to simply execute the entire crew of the Betty.  The smugglers resist and the two sides break out in a firefight.  This armed exchange quickly becomes a secondary problem when the xenomorphs escape from their lab. The surviving guards, scientists, and smugglers are all forced to band together to escape the alien infested station. The Ripley clone steps forward and leads the haphazard group.

After battling their way through the aliens, they manage to escape in a ship and head back towards Earth, but not before an alien is discovered in the bay of the ship. This creature is a further mutant, possessing far more human genetic material than alien material. It has spun a nesting web of organic material, trapping a crazed scientist with it. In this mass is a half-human, half-alien baby born from a new genetically altered alien queen whose egg sack has been replaced with a womb.

The Ripley clone kills the queen and smashes a small viewport just as the ship enters Earth’s atmosphere. The change in pressure sucks the newborn against the breech and vacuums out the interior of its body. The film’s ending is foggy enough to allow for a new film in which a mutated alien being could have actually reached Earth and begun feeding on mankind there or some classic xenomorph might have stowed away on the ship.

COMMENTS:  Alien Resurrection is a lifeless film. This is partly the result of its unimaginative script and partly because the story is the result of going back to the well too many times. Having the xenomorphs pretty upon humans trapped in a space station isn’t any different than their being trapped on the Nostromo, a colony planet, or a prison planet. There’s nothing new in this story.

The only interesting aspect of this entire movie is the xemomorph’s escape, in which two xenomorphs kill a third in order to get its acid blood to eat through their confines. Beyond that, it is a very boring space film. The movie reverts to the Traveller Role-Playing Game origins, especially for the crew and design of the Betty. Unfortunately, it hits the mechanics without bringing life to any of the characters.

In fact, the characters are probably the worst aspect of this film. The Ripley clone is just disturbing. You can’t tell if she’s supposed to be a biker lesbian or a psychic freak. After a few minutes of film, you don’t really care. You can tell that the new Ripley is supposed to be cool but she’s just disturbing.

The best character is AnnaLee Call who proves to be an android on some personal mission. She’s a renegade robot seeking to right some wrongs. Its not well explained and has not practical impact on the storyline.

The smugglers themselves are just petty criminals. You never quite accept their outrage at learning that the humans are being used for medical experiments after knowing that the only reason they are at the station is that they kidnapped these very same people and sold them to the station manager. There are a few attempts where the film tries very hard to show that the smugglers are very cool but each attempt fails miserably.

In the end, the film falls apart completely. It shifts from the tired escape story to something that’s just bizarre. The end sequence in the ship’s bay, where the mutated alien lays with her baby (who subsequently kills her), while the human scientist shouts a running commentary of freakish philosophy is disturbing. It seems like a wild rock video without any music.

The aliens at the end don’t seem to match any conventions laid out in the other films. By this point, you really don’t care. Alien Resurrection begins with some very loose connections to the original Alien and the James Cameron Aliens. It rapidly abandons them and seems to mix and match ideas that are neither well thought out nor well composed. Where Alien 3 at least has some value, this film has none.

– written by Russell Sanders