Decent, it will either please series fans or disgust them.

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2001)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ** 1/2 out of ****
If anything, Alien: Resurrection has the distinction of being the most consistently paced film of the series. Ridley Scott's Alien was fairly slow all the way, James Cameron's Aliens built up slowly and the last 1/3 of that film was a rollercoaster ride of action and terror, and David Fincher's Alien 3 mixed some highly suspenseful parts along with some slow, morose scenes. Resurrection basically tries to get the action started as quickly as possible (which, as is typical of the genre, means halfway through the film) but before that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet tries to hold attention with some icky gore, new developments, and a wicked sense of humor. The result is decent, certainly not bad by a long shot.
The film takes place 200 years after the events of Alien 3, when Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) committed suicide inside a prison to exterminate the last of the xenomorph, a dangerous race of alien monsters. Some of her blood was recovered by from the prison by a scientific and military team and is used to clone her. They extract the queen and plan to create a small nest aboard their ship. As for Ripley, her personality is different now. She's seems less human, but still has all the memories of her former life.
Then a band of space pirates arrive on board the same ship, including a mechanic named Annallee Call (Winona Ryder), bringing along cargo that the military team is in need of (if you haven't figured it out by now, that cargo is humans). But then all hell breaks loose when the aliens cleverly, if not also gruesomely, figure out a way to escape, and now the space pirates, along with Ripley and Dr. Wren, the man in charge of the whole cloning operation, must find a way to get off the ship and prevent the aliens from getting to Earth.
Going over the plot, it seems writer Joss Whedon and director Jeunut were aiming for a mixture of Alien and its sequel. The obvious fact is that you have a bunch of people trapped on a ship as they're being hunted down. It also tries for the high-octane action of Aliens, and is fairly successful at that. Perhaps the film's most intense sequence is an edge-of-the-seat ten-minute setpiece that first involves the survivors swimming through water until they end up in the room where all the eggs are laid and must find a way to get through as the aliens surround them. Though the remainder of the film afterward is still tense, no other scenes maintain as much suspense as that setpiece. But still, Jeunet proves himself a director capable of creating excitement and the film never tested my patience once.
Other good aspects of the film include the special effects, which are actually slightly less than Cameron's film because of the use of CGI, which isn't nearly as convincing when the creatures are animatronic. Jeunet's cinematography is vivid and distinct, and the use of humor is effective at times. The cast (with one signifcant exception) is good, with Sigourney Weaver delivering another fine performance as Weaver, though you can't help but feel at times it might have been better if they'd thought of something else other than cloning to buttress the plot. The other standout is Ron Pearlman, whose wise-cracking character gets the best lines.
Not everything in this movie is good, however. The fact that the storyline is a mixture of the first and second installments makes predictibility a factor, and there's never really a doubt as to who lives and who dies. Then there's also the whole cloning issue, and the fact that it is used in this movie goes to show that the filmmakers trying to take the easy way out. To be fair, they did pull it off in a more convincing (and disturbing) manner than I expected so credit should be given for that.
If nobody noticed, except for those ten-minutes I mentioned, there's not exactly a whole lot of non-stop slam-bang action, it's mostly sporadic throughout. Though, I must say what is present is gory enough to jolt even the most hardened series fan. This is easily the goriest film in the series, surpassing the original by quite a bit.
Then there's that one casting mistake I mentioned previously and that goes to Winona Ryder. It pains me to say this, considering the fact that I admire her very much and is among my favorite actresses. But she's pretty much a miscast as the character Annallee Call. Whether it's that haircut, which is a short one (keep the hair long, Winona, you look extremely beautiful that way!), or the long bouts of shouting she's forced to do, she comes off unconvincing and had me wishing they'd replaced her with someone like up-and-comer Radha Mitchell, whose performance in her own respective sci-fi thriller Pitch Black shows her quite adroit at playing a strong heroine.
The biggest problem series fans have with this film is introduction of the new alien. First of all, give Jeunet and the special effects crew credit once again for trying something different and original. The alien design is not as good as H.R. Giger's but I didn't find it annoying or bothersome, either. Just as a sidenote, the way this creature dies may very well be the most gruesome death I've ever seen so don't be surprised if you actually feel a little sorry for it.
At this point, another addition to the series seems unlikely since Weaver is unwilling for another run at it, which is both a good and bad thing. You can take the fact that the series won't go into overkill, but the final reels of Resurrection hint at the prospect of another installment that could take place on Earth, which is exactly what series fans have been clamoring for. It may never happen, but either way at least Alien: Resurrection wasn't a shameful way to end the series.