Seems ironic now that a film with the word 'resurrection' in the title would ultimately kill off a series, but this Alien film does not deserve the reputation it carries.

Rating: 5/10 (22 October 2008)

I don't think it's that Alien: Resurrection is a bad film, just a film that pales in comparison when it comes to the mainstream's opinion of films that preceded it. But what films to have precede it; Ridley Scott's brilliant Alien, a film that helped pioneer that formula of the human, non-human and the anti-human archetype within a certain space together as events played out, more often than not the anti-human element 'jumping' out at you and picking off the hapless character. What happened in Aliens made everybody gush, some even more than Scott's effort and what happened in Alien³ largely has everybody point fingers at the studio simply because it's a David Fincher film and he directed Fight Club and that's 'brilliant' thus; he cannot make a bad film which means it was the studio's fault.
But biased opinions on directors, films and studios aside; Alien: Resurrection is a sort of hybrid of all three of the films, more so the first two than the third alone. As a film of the genre, it's relatively well paced with a host of characters that threaten to break into the anti-hero vein but all of whom are given their fair share of screen time and all of whom have their traits and quirks. This is a far cry from Cameron's Aliens, which is the worst of the quadrilogy in my opinion, which had a series of soldiers or space Marines or whatever all wear the same uniform, speak and act in the same manner and generally shoot and scream and panic their way out of obligatory action set pieces that would come along every so often.
If Alien was a science fiction that fell into the horror subgenre, Aliens was a science fiction that fell into the war subgenre. Alien: Resurrection is a science fiction film that just teeters over into horror meaning its core is taken from Scott's film although it has the elements of war from the second instalment although we never feel the group of protagonists are fit or equipped enough to take on the group of Aliens because of lack of firepower. The film isn't as good as the first one but then again, given the set up Alien had let loose to filmmakers after its release, no film that had been made in the genre by this time was as good.
Alien: Resurrection sees a band of space travellers land at the ship hosting events in this edition. Their timing of arrival co-insides with Alien series veteran Ripley (Weaver) getting cloned for the purpose of extracting the Alien queen inside of her by the nasty, greed driven guys in surgical suits. Little does everyone know, the ship is an experimentation lab of horror and soon their own fates will be rendered ambiguous when some of the Aliens break out. The set up sounds similar to the following year's Deep Rising, itself a film about a group of 'bad' people who hijack a large mode of transportation, that time it was a cruise liner on the open sea, just as the anti-human element of the piece decides to strike. Rest assured, it's a lot better than Deep Rising.
So the set up is one thing but the real meat of the film sees these rouge space travellers, of whom include Ron Perlman's Johner and Winona Ryder's Annalee Call as well as heroine of the hour Ripley fight and fend their way off the ship to safety. This is where it could be argued the film slips into "Aliens" territory in the sense it's a bunch of characters on a ship, with guns, trying to get the hell out of there. So the question is, what's wrong with that? It's not as if the films descends into out and out chaos complete with choppy editing and dodgy one-liners, more so a more calm and drawn out exercise in travelling to a certain location and weathering the storm. The group must deal with underwater travel, the problem in dealing with a character in a wheelchair and how all these elements might affect them.
But it's the character of Annalee Call that garners most of the attention, not least for the twist that arises to do with her. As a character, she is the voice of reason; she is the audience within the film, stating things and saying things aloud we might say or questions we might ask. At one point she stops Ripley from killing one of the ship's lab technicians after the grizzly hybrid findings in the laboratory; instead, she beat the official following Annalee's interruption and the audience perhaps feels relieved there is no blood shed between humans within the human prism of the human-nonhuman-antihuman triangle. Similarly, when it arises the ship automatically negates itself back to planet Earth following a revelation Annalee is there to once again announce, out loud that "we should blow the ship up." There's a beat between her (and us) hearing this information before her reacting during which time some audiences members might have already come to the conclusion she announces out loud.
So while the film isn't brilliant, it is far from the disaster its reputation embeds it with. The film is a little bit of the previous three moulded into one but with a European director at the helm stamping his own mark on proceedings and allowing new ideas such as the hybrid monster at the end to step up. With hindsight, it's a far cry better than the path the producers took the franchise down most recently; that being Alien vs. Predator and more-so its respective sequel.