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"There's a monster in your chest. These guys hijacked your ship, and they sold your Cryo Tube to this... human. And he put an alien inside of you. It's a really nasty one. And in a few hours it's gonna burst through your ribcage, and you're gonna die. Any questions?"
So yeah... they brought Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) back... Somehow. This does not make sense.
Much like Alien³, you have to accept this or there is no movie. Way in the future, in an increasingly unclear timeline, the US military decides to continue Weyland-Yutani's experiments with xenomorphs. (Weyland-Yutani we're told has been "bought out by Walmart".) In order to get the Queen inside Ripley, the military had to clone them both - somehow or another rescuing genetic material out of the vat of 10,000 degrees Farhenheit lava that Ripley swam in at the end of Alien³. So right before the fourth movie even begins, everything Ripley has worked towards has failed, a whole new crew of bozos have xenomorphs and even dumber about their illusions of control than the guys who built Jurassic Park. Also, Ripley herself has become a superhero, with her reborn body is mentally and genetically merged with the xenomorph DNA.
Alien Resurrection is not the most serious movie ever made, you might be able to tell. Every one of these Alien movies have been wild and unique spins on the material: Aliens goes for heroics, Alien³ goes for a kind of desperate hope during intense bleakness. Meanwhile, Alien Resurrection decides to be just goofy as all fuck. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is not Ridley Scott, he is not clinical or subtle, he goes for big-ness. Resurrection is shot in English with an all-American cast but it has all the wacky French stylings of a Citroën 2CV. It even has a similarly color pallet to Jeunet's post-apocalypse slapstick movie, Delicatessen.
At one point the military commander, hilariously played by Dan Hedaya, tosses a grenade into an escape pod that has been taken over by xenomorphs. And when I say tosses: he bowls it like he's trying to beat a 7-10 split. Then he takes a moment to give a somber salute to his lost men, just as another alien gets him from behind. We cut to Hedaya's eyes-crossing as he holds up a bit of his skull. All this sequence needed was some Hanna-Barbara sound effects.
Alien³ is a movie that has won back its place in film history over the years. Alien Resurrection is not. Screenwriter Joss Whedon has disowned the thing, which was a more powerful dismissmal a few years ago. In 2024, Whedon is the epitome of cheese, with his dialog Exhibit A for the cringiest aspects of the MCU. (Probably an over-correction, my called-shot is that his work will rebound eventually, even if Whedon himself is not a good person.) Jeunet fired back in 2022: "I know if Joss Whedon had made the film himself, it probably would have been a big success. He’s very good at making films for American geeks – something for morons. Because he’s very good at making Marvel films. I hate this kind of movie. It’s so silly, so stupid." He also told his negative critics "fuck you", and god bless him. Every director has that right. Jeunet made the movie he wanted to make, and it is silly in a way the Avengers movies are just not. 20th Century Fox never made a true "Alien 5" because nobody could come up with an idea to get Sigourney Weaver interested again. So maybe there is something to Resurrection.
In terms of raw plot and events, Resurrection is the most "safe" Alien sequel. We again have a cast of wonderful character actors trapped in that same future landscape of dark metal corridors and spooky lighting. If Alien is about anything, it is getting some Choice Guys to fill out the body count, be them Bill Paxton or Pete Postlethwaite. Resurrections continues the tradition with Ron Perlman, Brad Dourif, Leland Orser, Michael Wincott, and more. Most of the cast is an expendable band of mercenaries delivering victims to the military to grow twelve xenomorphs within. Call (Winona Ryder) stands alone on the team as the one actually trying to take the military down, but her plan is interrupted when the xenomorphs predictably get out. That leaves the scumbags, a surviving soldier, a surviving mad scientist, a rebel, and Ripley to team up into a dwindling party to get back to the merc ship, The Betty.
We have a full Poseidon Adventure swimming scene, where the xenomorphs get to be killer sharks. This is the most this franchise feels to be exactly in line with the millions of SciFi Channel creature features it inspired. It's Pythons II with a good budget. Or Deep Rising with a worse script but better effects. Which is fine, you just need to know what kind of genre movie you're watching. Leland Orser screaming his face off adds a lot of production value that say, Lake Placid 3, was never going to have.
Four movies in, the aesthetic surprisingly has not grown stale. That's one of the great things about the first four Alien movies. Yes, dark metal corridors are to this franchise what Crystal Lake is to Friday the 13th, but unlike those movies, you can actually tell them apart. Show me the yellow-green ultra-slick Nineties shine to the dark metal corridors in Resurrection, and I can clearly see how it does not match the colder, slightly dusty texture of the dark metal corridors in Aliens.
Alien Resurrection has two big cards to play. The first is Ripley herself. Sigourney Weaver is playing the role completely differently now, she's become the sexually-dominant mature woman hamming up every scene. She can flirt-fight with Ron Perlman on a basketball court (being six-feet-tall helps Weaver a lot here), and slither around to remind the cast how dead they soon will be. Her relationship with Call might have been written as a replay of Ripley and Newt, but comes off much more like a lesbian dom-sub. Ripley is a wicked witch here to chew on the good little princess. Later we discover that Call is a robot after she survives a bullet wound through her chest - oh boy does Ripley ever jam two fingers down that hole. (That orifice will get fingered again in the movie, btw.)
The other card Resurrection has is just being gross and weird as shit. There are choices made. Brad Dourif tries to make out with a xenomorph, kissing the glass outside its pen when nobody is looking. I'm obsessed with the frozen cube of future whiskey that the commander drinks. We see seven failed Ripley copies all in various stages of fusion with the xenomorphs. The most human one is begging for death, and Resurrection relishes all the gruesome detail of these failed things.
Then there's the other big queer theme of this movie: Ripley and the xenomorph queen have a baby together. It's single-gender procreation, the future truly has everything. Brad Dourif sunken in a cocoon seems to have been kept alive so he could be a creepy pervert as he gives us exposition for us to explain what is happening. The queen has human DNA just as Ripley has alien DNA, and she's built a human womb. And then she painfully births a full alien-hybrid baby for Ripley.
This is where I cannot agree with any of the criticisms of Alien Resurrection. Never dismiss this merely a bad sequel dragging this franchise's corpse into an unnecessary extra outing. (Wait for Romulus for that.) The ending this to movie is unforgettable. The Newborn is a nasty, awful thing, not sleek and beautiful like the xenomorph designs have been until now. It's gloopy, it's sticky, it's unpleasant. It has a very expressive face looks that looks disturbingly like Sigourney Weaver without a nose. It also looks to Ripley as its mother. Jeunet wanted this thing to have male and female genitialia but in the end compromised and so it only has a jagged slit between its legs. Yeah, much more tasteful! This is another masterpiece of puppeteering and practical effects. The end for this creature is heartbreaking, as its face gives so much fear and betrayal once Ripley shoots it out the airlock. All the previous airlock endings have been easy mode, the Newborn gets the worst possible ending for explosive decompression. This is as disturbing as the psycho-sexual imagery ever gets in any Alien movie. You'll never forget the creature's awful painful, much too slow death.
Bravo, filmmakers, you made something really special with this kind of body horror. I'm still freaked out now.
Maybe Alien Resurrection should be the true ending for this franchise. We drop Ripley off on Earth, finally home after four movies, several centuries, and one reincarnation. She's lost yet another daughter-figure but found a partner of sorts in Call. We cut away just as the Betty's doors open and the golden sunlight pours in leaving Ripley finally at home. There probably won't ever be a proper "Alien 5", but let these women relax. Haven't they been through enough?
But the franchise will continue. There's no stopping it now, not even removing its protagonist can stop it. Only a few years later Fox finally gave the xenomorphs a true rival. And this time they did not bring in any Frenchmen to direct.
Next time! We're rewinding back to 1982. Body horror fans, I know you're excited, it's The Thing!
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