From Horror Poem To Corporate Menu

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2002)

"You don't dare kill it" said Yaphet Kotto of the original alien's tendency to use acid for blood. Well, the IMDB User Reviews seem to be using their own acid to kill off Alien Resurrection.
It is, as of this writing, five years after the film's release, and the bile keeps flowing over Alien 4. I'm not going to spew acid. I don't like the movie either, it's true. But adding more bile to the brew would be redundant. Instead, I'd like to put Alien 4 in context by rekindling a little fire underneath Ridley Scott's original movie.
Scott is on record as saying that he took the job because the script was tight, direct, plain and simple. In other words, it was a nice blank canvas for his great visual skills to run free. His one and only aim was to make a frightening film, and because he was Ridley Scott he also made, by default, a very beautiful film. Beauty and fear is one hell of a mix.
Part of Alien 1's success lies in its simplicity. The dialogue is terse and functional - almost Kubrickian in its deliberate banality - and is delivered with documentary conviction by a superb cast of legitimate actors. Not stars. Actors.
The script is not weighed down by back-story. It finds no need to explain anything beyond what we see and, more importantly, feel. That was all it needed to work. There was no baggage with Alien, no anally retentive fans to complain that such and such a piece of trivia was inconsistent with Bishop's this, or Ripley's that from an earlier Alien movie. There was no tedious Lord Of The Rings/Star Wars type lore and mythology to be beholden to. None of that bilge had set in. Not yet. Rather, it is a simple story about seven people facing one big problem. But Scott's and Geiger's vision made it a richer experience than anything in the increasingly complex Alien stories to come. Alien 1 is simple in intention, but baroque in execution. There is imagery here which reaches deep into the subconscious. It lingers there.

The critic Leslie Halliwell called Alien's imagery 'half-assed poetry' (at least Halliwell, a habitual movie reactionary, recognised that it had poetry). I'd take Scott's half-assed poetry over Cameron's simple minded Vietnam revenge allegory any day (aliens as surrogate 'gooks'? A disgusting, NRA wet dream). And I'd take Scott's half-assed poetry over Alien 3's laughable pretentiousness.
And then there was Alien Resurrection. Alien Resurrection - it's a painfully ostentatious title. This hopefully final installment of the series is a typical Hollywood product of the 1990's and remains a good example of what was to come in the following decade. It has speed but no grace. It has surface gloss but no texture. It substitutes escalating dread with repulsive gouts of blood. It replaces crisp dialogue with disconnected strings of would-be hip one-liners (a common practice that works for a trailer but kills the actual film stone dead). Worst of all is the film's smug portentousness - the ultimate fate of all film sagas.
So, what happened to bring this about? Money happened. The need to make it. Scott's poetic vision was long gone, or at least too expensive by then for the producers to re-hire. Yet those producers were haunted by that poetry. Half-assed or not, they needed it. They also needed some 'class' to counter balance the goofy, MTV-style script they had bought from the man who wrote Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And so they imported it, fresh from France. Enter Jeunet.
Jeunet had a reputation as an art-house director, yet by even considering this project, he immediately relinquished any claims to 'art'. He certainly didn't achieve it in the movie. Many reviewers claim that Alien 4 has a strong, distinct visual style. But I agree with the reviewer who pointed out the studio-bound look of the film. In fact it more resembles an expensive TV movie. Both Scott and indeed David Fincher used long lenses and peripheral lighting to give a sense of depth and life to their pictures. Jeunet used shorter lenses and hard, textureless lighting to render a crisper but flatter look - probably so that it would 'look' better on a TV screen. It would seem that Monsieur Jeunet sold his art house and bought a condo in Malibu.
Acidic bile is creeping into this review. Must be time to stop.

I'll finish with what may seem an odd notion. I believe that if another Alien film is made, and I don't think it should by the way, then it should be helmed by a British director. This is not idiotic nationalism. It is an acceptance of the fact that there is something in the British psyche which is uniquely suited to the original concept of Alien: innate morbidity. It's the same quality which Hitchcock brought to the American scripted Psycho, and which pervades even the cheesiest Hammer film.
Horror is in the blood of British film makers. Directors after Scott would spout pseudo sociological waffle about how the alien is an allegory of AIDS, Vietnam, the role of the family, corporate greed, etc. This is an over-conceptualised, self-conscious and quintessentially American set of views. Scott's own publicly stated appraisal was much less Sunday supplement friendly. To him the alien is death incarnate. Full stop. Nothing half-assed about that.