Weakest of the series

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2000)

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
I couldn't believe Resurrection the first time I saw it. Isn't the biggest pile of pants you've ever seen? Well, maybe not. Second time around, I didn't find this low-brow edition so bad, though maybe that's because this time I'd won a free ticket. And can you really blame the producers for making it this way? After the failure of the introspective third, the logical progression would be to return to the previously successful format.
Where the first two sequels had used Alien as their template, Resurrection seems to think James Cameron's was the first film. Categorically set 200 years after the third, which was set possibly 200 years after the second, we get an action movie c.2299 with excessive gore and wisecracks. And that's really what dismayed me the first time. For while the movie never gets out of it's mainstream trough, the last twenty minutes scrape the barrel for tacky excess. Worst moment has to be the guy with an alien inside him who gets shot multiple times then bangs a man's face against a steel bar. With the man's head at waist level, he screams, and the camera pans down his throat to endoscopically reveal the alien. Then the alien rips through his ribcage, and in so doing tears through the face of the other man, all in blood-spattered detail. Or maybe you prefer the bit where the General picks his own brain out the back of his head, or the alien's guts getting sucked out of a g-force crack in slow motion. Just have a glance through this entry's "quotes" section. Nearly the entire list contains profanity or crude sexual references, clearly indicating the mentality of the piece.
But away from the juvenile gore, the underwritten characters and the non-literary narrative, there are some good points. The aliens themselves are utilised better here than in the third, probably because the "Rottweiler" alien could never be played by a man in a suit. CGI is used, but sparingly. Still a little primitive, (note to CGI workers on soon-to-be-made Alien 5: the aliens are black, so why design them as silver?), but rarely used, it is passable. The aliens are shown to be intelligent, a throwback to the lift-operators of Aliens. Again, there is no horror, but that is because the creatures are perhaps over-familiar to audiences now. In fact, so docile are these aliens that this is the only film in the series with more than four survivors. The use of clones to bring back Ripley seems more of a logical plot extension than the gimmick it seemed first time around, and this does add an interesting slant to her hybrid character. Though once more, this doesn't really add to the dramatic tension, as the new, sexual Ripley, amazed she's alive again, doesn't care whether or not she lives.
Ultimately, though, it comes down to who's your favourite Spice Girl? Scary? Action? Moody? Or Dumb Spice? They are the products of four very different writers and directors and do not gel together particularly well as a whole. Taken alone, Aliens is great entertainment. Watched concurrently with Alien, it's mindless slop. Yet while they're all entertaining, none of them, not even the first, have got above a "7" rating from me. For whatever you say about these four movies, they are just "bug-eyed monster from outer space" vehicles, the original no-brainers. Maybe that's why the fourth really disappoints. The first three try to disguise this fact, the fourth makes a celebration of it. 4/10.