The Alien series comes full circle.

Rating: 9/10 (25 June 2010)

I won't write a start-to-finish review, as there are already plenty on here. What I *will* write, is about the experience this fan of the franchise had watching this movie for the second time in many years (shortly after the first three).
For me, this is just the perfect little ending to the Alien quadrilogy. Aside from being a perfectly badass sci-fi action movie on its own, with a ridiculous amount of referenced subplots like the relationships between the pirate crew members and their individual stories, the crazed scientist who is ultimately killed by the absolute peak of his life's work and the timid general forced by his corrupt superiors to deal with criminals, it takes every classic theme from the series and does something cool with it.
First, obviously, the aliens. Ripley, who died trying to exterminate them, is mercilessly resurrected, once again pregnant with a queen. The cloning process that in a way "revived" her, however, has fundamentally fused her physiology with that of the aliens. She has become that which has dominated her life for as long as she can remember. Ultimately, we learn that this has happened to her "child" as well, enabling it to give birth to a perfect cross between Ripley and the queen. In a truly moving homage to the end of the first Alien movie, Ripley ends the quadrilogy by once again blasting the final surviving alien into space, except this time the action is infinitely more profound, the alien being a confused child and Ripley being one of the mothers. Out of the blue, I literally wailed during that final moment. Never before have I seen the main antagonist in a series become so intertwined with the object of her struggle, literally *becoming* it, actually having given birth to it and personally destroying it. Weaver plays the role no less than perfectly.
The synthetic. We went from the malevolent, corporate, heel android working against Ripley in the first film to the empathic "good guy" android saving Ripley twice in the next two films to the oddly completely and utterly logical successor to these, a "second generation" (ie produced *by* androids) synthetic human initially intending to kill Ripley (in a really neat reversal of the Ripley/android story from Alien) but ultimately working with her and saving her life (by noticing her on Betty's monitor). Call is a tormented synthetic, much more so than Bishop, and Jeunet pays a great deal of attention to this all through the film, from Joner's incessant stigmatizing comments to Call's reluctance to go to the "dark place" that is the cyberspace part of her belongs to.
Finally, of course, the company. While Weyland-Yutani apparently doesn't exist anymore by the time this story takes place, everything the army and their scientists do is perfectly in line with the spirit of this evil corporation. More than in any previous film, human dignity is spat on completely, from the dozens of failed Ripley clones (including the one featured in one of the most haunting visuals of the film, the killing of which, incidentally, is also a neat precursor to Ripley's ultimate act of destruction) to the kidnapped "hosts" consciously being impregnated. In the most perfect ending I can imagine for "the company" (at least for the purposes of this quadrilogy-closer; I am excluding the AvP films from the story arc), the last host first beats Wren, the only surviving "company man" half to death in a fit of blind, superhuman rage, then holds him in front of his chest, just in time for the baby alien to burst through his brain (before the baby and its host are blasted to pieces).
How people defecate on this so vehemently, I fail to see. Continuity errors? Every movie has some. Unexplainable plot elements? It is sci-fi. You've already accepted that a spider crab can make love to someone's face, have a small creature grow in their chest, burst out of it and within hours transform into a huge slimy predator. I would think a clone with memories isn't such a gigantic leap.