The fourth movie - does she get home now?

Rating: 9/10 (23 September 2011)

After a very disappointing Alien III, the forth offering to the Alien saga, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, promised to bring redemption. Could an alien movie supersede Cameron's Aliens? Well, in my opinion, no. Resurrection began having a lot of promise, and held on to this all the way through the movie with excellent characters, but it was at the end that it all fell apart. This was to do with a problem with the storyline, but I will explain a little before going into how the plot falls apart. The movie is set two hundred years after Ripley (Sigorney Weaver) died aboard a military medical research ship. The movie does follow along the alien tradition with having a small group of people aboard an enclosed space so the aliens cannot escape a wreck havok across the universe. The aliens are supposedly all destroyed, but they have managed to get hold of some of Ripley's blood and from this they managed to clone her. Later in the movie it is revealed that this is not the only clone of her made but this is the first functional one. They remove the queen from Ripley and then help it grow. We slowly come to find that the cloning process has not worked entirely, Ripley has inherited the alien's aggressive nature, and also seems to be able to sense them. The scientists then get the alien eggs (which we assume the queen laid) and cause them to open in front of some human captives, originally prisoners but captured by space pirates employed by the military. This is not the only place where the eggs have been laid, for we discover later that the eggs were laid as an ambush on the route back to the ship, the Betty. Now, as Ripley had inherited things from the alien, the alien inherited something from Ripley; the movie says that it was the womb and we watch the queen give birth to a half-human/half-alien hybrid. This causes problems with the plot because I do not know where the eggs came from. This research facility was conducting highly illegal experiments, that is trying to create the aliens to use for humanity. What we see is that what used to be a natural monster has now blurred with what humanity created. The monster is no longer from outside, it has now become us. The original alien movie put the monster inside of us so that we would feel defenceless against it, now Resurrection has made us the monster because what we are watching is what we have created. The final alien reacts in a very interesting way. It hates humans and kills all in sight, but it does not harm the synthetic nor does it harm Ripley. Ripley feels compassion when she watches it die, and the creature calls out to Ripley to save it. We can almost feel the regret in Ripley's heart when it speaks her name. No longer is this alien horrible, but what it has shown us is that beyond all the horror there is a human heart inside (or liver or stomach, depending on the culture you are from). This makes us realise that even the most horrid person we know is capable of love. The plot discrepancy destroyed the movie for me, but compared to Alien III, this was far better.