Was it everything you'd hoped for?

Rating: 7/10 (28 July 2001)

**includes spoilers**
I disagree with those of my fellow reviewers who say that this film
was just a gratuitous cash-in with no logical basis in the earlier
films. It may indeed have been just a gratuitous cash-in, just like 2
& 3 were cash-ins on the first one, and the first one was a cash-in
on the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom. But I found the premise not
only believable, but inevitable in the same way as the first three.
That is, if the scientific developments of the last few years (secret
cloning projects, creating embryos for the express purpose of
harvesting stem cells, etc.) have taught us anything, it's that if
science can do something, it will. Given the Company's scientists'
determination to get a specimen of the alien in the first three
movies, you have to know that if there was any way to reconstitute
Ripley and get the queen from inside her, they would. You know
this would happen. You know that somewhere, some scientist
(some government) would do this, no matter the consequences.

That's what the whole series had been about, so in a sense it was
inevitable that at some point the series would have to show the
scientists actually trying to breed the alien. In a sense, the whole
series has been building to this.
You can see it in Ripley's eyes. Sigourney Weaver gives a
stunning performance in this film, showing us not only the effects
of the alien genes she now carries, but an utter disgust and
despair at what humanity has done. Early on, you can tell that
Ripley has just given up on humanity--the coldness she displays
toward the victims of the alien could stem from her alien half, or
simply from this disgust. Certainly the soldiers and scientists
deserved what they got.
It's this odd mixture of feelings, I think, that makes the scene with
Ripleys 1-7 so powerful. Ripley 8, and the viewer, is filled with
horror at the degradations human inquisitiveness is capable of
producing, and pity for the victims of that inquisitiveness. Ripley
herself is perhaps the greatest victim.
That doesn't make it a perfect movie. I agree with the reviewer who
said that it hews closest to the formula of the second movie, which
in this case means lots of action and virtually no character
development. Like Aliens, everybody in this movie except Ripley
basically exists either to kill or get killed; and whereas Aliens at
least had the little girl to inject some real pathos into the
proceedings, in this movie there's nobody to care about except for
Ripley herself. We're supposed to care about Winona Ryder's
character, the robot girl, but somehow the character doesn't quite
work. Ryder just doesn't have the screen presence, the intensity,
to make herself felt over the explosions. (I tend to think she's
overrated as an actress anyway.)
I also agree that in showing so much gore, the movie diminishes
the impact of the creatures. The key to the first one was that you
only saw the aliens for seconds at a time, and you never got a
really good view--they were always hiding behind something, or in
a dim corner. That's why they were so scary. In this movie, you
see absolutely everything, and the result isn't so much scary as
just gross. The newborn is a cool design--a misshapen human/ alien cross--but we just see too much of it. The first one was a
horror movie; this is a splatter movie.
So I give this one high marks for concept and for Weaver (and
maybe for the look), and low marks for just about everything else.