Ripley's Believe it or Not

Rating: 7/10 (11 August 2009)

One wouldn't think of pairing Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a half of the directing team responsible (in the 90's) for the very good Delicatessen and visual masterwork City of Lost Children, and Joss Whedon, a comedy writer fresh off an Oscar nomination for Toy Story (yes, there was a time) and just about to start Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But here they are, taking the franchise that started with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) into another direction. It's one that's very promising, and in a very "sci-fi"-like approach: 200 years in the future, the little remains left of Ripley after the end of Alien3 (you know, the one where she, uh, throws herself into the fire), is taken by evil corporation guys who clone her after several tries and extract from her the alien being still inside her to make, what do you think, MORE aliens to, you know, get them to do tricks and cure diseases and things like that. I smile just writing it.
Of course, almost immediately, the aliens break out of their hermetically sealed cages (oddly enough through slaughtering one of their own for the benefit of its acid blood), and wreak havoc, once again, on a vessel carrying Ripley and a motley crew of bandits on a ship called "Betty", who were originally hired to get some extra clones to the military dumb-asses. After this, along with some of those juicy scenes of tough-but-funny dialog, Whedon kicks off a series of action set pieces that leads up to a revelation that is... not entirely satisfying. But it's got characters that, as unsavory (Ron Perlman) and strange (the clone-dude from City of Lost Children) as they are, we care about for the same reason we did in Alien and Aliens; they can take care of themselves pretty well, but only so far as in the midst of a dozen aliens - that have already hatched, of course.
Sure, the tropes of the series are well worn by now, and perhaps Whedon and the producers knew this too. That is some of the fun of it, though its familiarity keeps it from being completely fresh (i.e. another "a-hole" robot on board, you might guess who based on star ranking, traitor on the ship) and there's a couple of things the characters do that seem a little stupid, or rather stupider than one would think to be done by either the director or writer (i.e. bringing along the guy infected by the alien egg), its the re-fresh part that makes it worthwhile. It's visually got the same kind of knock-em-off-your-feet flair that Jeunet made his name on at the time, particularly with an underwater sequence and just the way his camera can VROOM (not zoom) in on a character's face or a moment of action. And the storytelling, however old-hat in parts, tries for some clever things and even tries to lighten it up, ironically, with sarcastic touches and even campiness. Not to mention the actors all having a fun time, even if they don't show it a whole lot (Weaver especially rises up her flat Ripley into something cunning and sarcastic)
At the same time, there's a few glaring things keeping it from real greatness. Aside from the conventions that in previous times Ridley Scott subverted as opposed to just taking along and charging up with adrenaline and ultra-violence, there's the factor of the "human-alien" hybrid. Its design isn't that bad, but what it does is never really made too clear. How much does its human side end up affecting the alien part? Is it cause its a baby, or has it grown super-fast? And before we can have some time with this creation that has some interest even in its silly dimensions (ever seen an alien 'lick' someone with its tongue, don't think so), it's given one of the most needlessly gory death scenes I've seen in recent memory. I find it hard to believe it was originally planned for the first Alien movie, but even as such its presentation here from Jeunet is just mind-bogglingly over the top, and not in a funny way. Up until this point I had been with the movie, more or less (mostly more), as a work of commercial Hollywood art. And then it had to go into pricey-goofy Troma-vision. 7.5/10