Decent Idea Killed By Horrible Execution

Rating: 3/10 (18 December 2008)

If ever a franchise needed a new direction, it was the Alien series. With Ellen Ripley gone, there was an opportunity to do something totally new and original. Instead, the studio insisted that Ripley return and thanks to the cloning of the deceased character (cardinal sin #1 when making a movie), she did, with the alien queen in tow. But that was forgivable because of the idea that came with Ripley (ie the failed clones). Then the director decided to crap all over it and make another bad horror/sci-fi movie with bad cgi.
The story is fairly basic. Ripley is somehow cloned 200 years after her death, with the alien queen somehow still in her. The doctors cut it out of her and keep her alive for some reason. Some space pirate types bring the scientists some hyper-sleeping miners and shortly thereafter, we have a bunch of aliens in cages. But these aliens (and Ripley) had some genetic crossover due to the cloning and are much smarter, leading to a fast escape. The rest of the movie is spent with Ripley and the pirates trying to escape the ship, all leading up to a "shocking" revelation after Ripley is taken into the alien nest: the alien queen now has a humanlike reproductive system from the genetic crossover. She then gives birth to a nasty looking hybrid, which quickly kills her and sees Ripley as it's mother. Ripley eventually escapes to the pirate's ship and kills the hybrid by letting it get vacuumed out a broken window.
A lot of the concepts in the movie could have worked very well. The scene with Ripley finding her failed clones is the best scene in the film. The rest is... well, questionable. Most of the cast (save for the pirates) is just poor, reading their lines more like a dark comedy (although that is mainly the fault of the writer). Save for the clone scene, Sigourney Weaver is borderline terrible and the fact that she got paid more for this movie than the entire budget of the original Alien is horrendous. The aliens themselves look like crap, both in color and how they are portrayed. The little bit of cgi used for the aliens is appalling, even by late 90s standards. And the hybrid alien is a f***ing travesty. It's not scary or interesting, just plain ugly. And the fact that it was designed with genitals (which were removed post-production) pretty much says it all.
This movie could have been the start of a new, unique trilogy. Instead, it effectively killed the original Alien franchise and led to us having to endure those horrible alien/predator crossovers. For that reason alone, this movie loses a few points. All in all, this whole story should have never been adapted into a movie.