Next time, dismember the franchise's corpse

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2000)

I dunno. This one...sure, they spent a lot of money on it, okay. Yes, Sigourney Weaver is amazing in that not only does she look phenomenal for a 48-year-old woman, but she actually bothers to act in what could easily have been a where's-my-paycheck performance. Fine, we've got a great supporting cast, like J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Dan Hedaya, Ron Perlman. So where did they go wrong? Why is this a waste of a movie?
I'll give it a shot:
1) Let's start with the small stuff first. H.R. Giger might be a whiz at designing xenomorphic monsters, but must we let him influence spaceship architecture too? Come on! Why on Earth do spaceships always have dark corridors, strange and severe angles and contours...it's a military vessel, sure, so it won't be pretty, but this ship looks like a lot of effort went into making it creepy and scary. It's not as ludicrous as EVENT HORIZON's Notre-Dame cathedral in space, but it's pretty close.
2) They spend all of the film's creative energy justifying a means of bringing Ripley back into the story, and they do a decent job: cloning her centuries later, so that The Man get his grubby hands on the Alien DNA kicking around inside her when she died. Fine, semi-plausible within a sci-fi context, although the odds of one blood sample lasting for 200 years until cloning is perfected is slim, but whatever. However...once the pawns are in place, the film, like the spaceship it's set on, goes on autopilot: kill the lights, let the monsters loose, run for your lives. We've seen this exact same thing three times already. It was old in the third movie.
3) They squander one of the more intriguing premises of the film: having a little bit of Ripley's human DNA, the Aliens are a lot smarter now. But beyond one or two scenes, and a silly "ambush" they set for the humans, this is kind of forgotten about.
4) Winona Ryder is horribly miscast as Call, the gal with a secret (and unlike the morons at Fox, I won't give it away for those who haven't yet seen the movie). She's just too soft and porcelain to play a hardened pirate-type character.
5) Not to give anything away, but the final monster, a human/Alien hybrid, looks like crap. Kind of like Pumpkinhead. So the ending was a bit lacking.
All in all, this movie just didn't do anything for me. It lacked the terror of the first one, the ferocity of the second, and the misguided-but-bold philosophical stance of the third. Instead of trying a new thematic approach, it tries to cover all the bases at once, stretches way too thin, and snaps, leaving you with a movie that doesn't really say or do or instill anything. Sigh. Oh well.