The weakest link

Rating: 2/10 (27 June 2008)

Ugly. Slow. Tacky. Stupid. I have a truckload of negative adjectives that I feel like applying to Alien: Resurrection, and I think they all fit.
I know some people don't share my appreciation for Alien 3, but good grief, I think it's miles better than this installment. Indeed, Alien: Resurrection strikes me as one of those train-wreck movies that leaves the average viewer scratching her head, wondering why a studio would ever give the green light to such a misguided project.
Alien 3, unpopular though it was, brought the Alien saga to a very definite close by killing off the protagonist, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. In this film, Ripley is not-very-convincingly brought back to life as a clone. Indeed, this whole movie focuses on the cloning issue to the exclusion of all else; it's clearly trying to say something about genetic manipulation, or parenthood, or whatever, but the message (if any) is lost in a quagmire of grossness and bad writing.
Speaking of bad writing, the movie's scriptwriter was none other than Joss Whedon, he of "Buffy" fame. I gather that Whedon has sort of disowned Alien: Resurrection because he doesn't like the way his script was realized, but I'd argue that the script was fundamentally unsound to begin with. It's loaded with techno-babble, profanity and pilfered ideas, and populated by a cast of seedy, cardboard and thoroughly unlikable characters. Apart from Ripley, the only character who gets any development is Winona Ryder's cyborg-lady, but Ryder's acting stinks and her motivations aren't that interesting anyway.
Really, this film is the worst possible blend of elements from previous Alien movies. Unlike the first Alien and Alien 3, it lacks the presence of a single, unstoppable, awesome alien creature - and unlike Aliens, it lacks the excitement of a whole hoard of alien creatures. In Alien: Resurrection, there are 12 *somewhat stoppable* aliens - ho, hum. So we haven't got the sheer terror value of the first film here, or the raw energy of the second. We've got 12 aliens milling around yet another boring spaceship setting. What an ill-conceived idea.
There's only one really good scene in this film - the underwater action segment, which is more sophisticated than any of the battles in the other Alien films. But since I don't care about the characters, I don't care about who dies in that scene. And, apart from that one exciting bit, the film has few merits, choosing to get mired again and again in disgusting concepts and disgusting imagery of mutants, clones, and a half-Alien half-human creature with saggy boobs. Gross.
If the tagline for the second film was "this time, it's war," the tagline for this one should have been, "this time, bring a barf bag." Or, better yet, "this time...stay home." Atrocious stuff.