It's been 10 years...

Rating: 5/10 (17 December 2007)

... since I first heard about this movie being made, and when the trailers hit the small screen, I was really excited, even though I didn't find Alien 3 a good sequel to the brilliant first two films of the saga. Alien 3 had underdeveloped storyline. It had a few great elements (especially towards the end), but that's it. I never really got into that movie.
The premise of this movie seemed intriguing: scientists capture a bunch of aliens, doing various kinds of experiments on them. Wow! This will be a great movie - I thought.
But I was wrong. A:R failed to deliver on almost all levels of entertainment.
Story-wise it was okay at best. Scientists, yes, but they don't show you too much experiments. Just one scene made it into the final cut, when the main bad guy, the evil scientist tortures an alien then it learns which switch does that and becomes afraid of it. Big deal! We already knew aliens are smarter than a dog, so even if it's memorable, it has no impact whatsoever.
Effects-wise it has nice details and an unique feel for it, but again, nothing special. Aliens look slimier than ever and I didn't like that. Look at the original alien in the 1979 movie: it was smooth and clean, huge and sinister. These new ones are smaller, slimier and don't look that frightening. Sure they're faster, but that's not the aliens' main strength. It is the fear they generate that matters, and it's minimal in this movie. "Aliens" on the other hand also featured smaller, faster and slimier aliens than the original one, but it had great story, great cast and brilliantly directed scenes. Although their charisma was downgraded a bit, the movie was equally good. Cameron created memorable scenes using the aliens, while Jeunet failed to come up anything that catches you off-guard. Even the swimming aliens were somewhat dull. You could see that from a mile and a half away...
And we've now come to the most important aspect of this movie, which could've saved it completely. Characters. Having great characters in a movie is essential to the storytelling. It was Hudson, Hicks, Vasquez, Ripley, Burke, Ash, Lambert, Parker and the others who made the first two movie. In the third movie it was hard to find anyone who matched Ripley, but Clemens came close. Anyhow, that movie at least had decent ones. A:R only has Ron Perlman as Johner, and that's it. And he isn't even playing a character, it's just that he has a certain screen presence which I happen to like. But I couldn't give the slightest damn about anyone in this movie. Not even Ripley.
Well, that's a bit confusing. Ripley is dead, isn't she? Yep. She is. This "Ripley" we see in this movie is completely changed. She's an alien. Thus the Alien series lost their most important character, and it's a disaster when you cannot even like the main protagonist in a movie. Her mood, her tone of voice, her remarks, her view... all has changed to... well, alien. She even has acid blood for crying out loud! And no, the problem is not that she was cloned. The problem is that you can't root for a person like this. And in the end, there's no one else left. You don't care about the characters, the story or about the newborn alien, whose design is beyond ridiculous. Come on! Giger is spinning in his grave! Overall, it turns out to be a movie that you don't care about. It's not good, it's not bad, it's completely neutral. So it's right in the centre of your rating system. One viewing is enough, because you can think about what went wrong, and how it could've been better, but that's it. End of story.
5/10