Like resurrecting a man who died peacefully, only to then stab him to death with a serrated knife

Rating: 4/10 (25 May 2009)

Resurrection? Why, what's the point?, what's the logic? what's the reason?, what's the meaning? Why? These are questions that should have been asked before Fox greenlighted Joss Whedon's piece of work, "Alien Resurrection". This film is a failure on so many levels it's almost unbelievable.
After the troubled production (and obnoxious, studio-meddling) of Alien 3, you would think that someone would just have enough brains to leave it be. Just let it end on a relatively good film (who's only flaw was the studio's editing after Fincher's walkout). But no, they just couldn't leave it alone, the resurrection of this franchise has absolutely no logic behind it. How could this film possibly succeed? Someone should have said.
Let me begin my walkthrough of this horrible injustice. The beginning problem was Joss Whedon's script. Who on earth said "Hey! let's have the buffy the vampire guy write our new Alien movie!", And then the next big question is: Who agreed to it? The funny thing about it is that Joss has apparently escaped all retribution for this movie by stating that they filmed his perfectly good script wrong. But this argument doesn't hold up when you know the contents of the actual script, in fact, the resulting film did the original script justice (maybe even improvement).
The film starts off with no setting, and no background. Where are we now? Why is this ship here? Who are these people? What is the universe's current condition? Are questions that are never fully or satisfactorily answered. In fact the film is so restricted by it's limited scope that it doesn't even seem to know the answers to these questions. It just makes a large amount of excuses to get both weapons and aliens into the picture, and let me tell you their excuses involve, cloning, evil governments and pirates or "mercenaries" or whatever they called them (they seemed like pirates to me). Where these people came from, and why are they pirates are questions that no attempt was ever made to answer.
The biggest of the script's issues are the mind-numbingly wide plot holes that cause the entire film's premise to crumble. The excuses used to drag our battle-weary Ripley out from the grave is so clearly ridiculous they really can't fool even the most unscrutinizing audience.
The foolishly ignorant use of science is used repeatedly throughout the film, most evident in the arrival of the "Newborn" (highly original name, ain't it). Apparently.
(SPOILERS) Since a group of scientists removed an Alien queen out of a cloned Ripley (not like that even makes sense to begin with), the queen apparently takes on human traits, such as a human reproductive system, resulting in the birth of an alien-human hybrid. The hybrid kills the queen and then identifies with Ripley as her mother (which also, doesn't make any sense). The original Whedon-design of the newborn was so ridiculous that it had to be redesigned into a better (but still awful) combination which is somewhere between the hunchback of Notre-dame and Casper the friendly ghost. (NOTE: All this info is thrown at you within a 4 to 5 minute period towards the end of the movie). (SPOILERS END)
So at about this point I was asking, why? what kind of plot device is this. Randomly thrown in, it doesn't help or move the story along just simply makes it more inconceivable than it was to begin with.
So aside from Whedon's completely non-plausible script, the entire air of the story itself was a major problem. It successfully rips all terror and dark intensity from itself, only to replace it with what can best be described as swashbuckling campiness. Scenes with humorous intent were thrown here and there with no particular meaning, although the ending result was not humorous at all. There is no substance, not even one original piece worth noting, the entire film reeks of the staleness of it's own concept.
None of the acting was really worth mentioning, almost all of the performances felt weak and contrived, none of the characters had any depth or soul to them. Even Ripley has been leached of all her relatability, replaced with weird alien-hybrid version of herself that really leaves no character relatabilty in the film at all especially after a disturbing "sex" scene between her and an alien (oh yes, that was in there), they all just seem like disconnected people that we just don't know or care about.
As I wrap up here, I will say this, if you are dying for some alien action, this will not satisfy you no matter HOW desperate you are. In fact you would be better off watching AVP, which, regardless of how weak a film it was, was WAY better than this crap.
3/10 stars