Frankenstein Created Aliens - and almost got away with it

Rating: 7/10 (8 August 2001)

Joss Whedon, who has sole writer's credit for Alien: Resurrection, is famously unhappy with the end result ("a crappy-ass movie") and it's certainly a bit of a mess in narrative terms: after a thoroughly effective first half hour, the film doesn't manage to graft on to its very basic escape-from-alien-infested-ship storyline the more meditative and fantastical elements that are its real raison d'être. Pacing goes haywire, and some sequences so strain credibility as to turn the film towards campy self-parody. When you look both at Whedon's best writing (for Buffy on TV) and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's earlier French fantasy films, control of plotting isn't really either's strong suit, and there's a nagging feeling of imperfect coherence here, a film that never quite came together. All the same, the actual ingredients are astonishingly inventive (perhaps unprecedentedly so for a third sequel to what was a very straightforward, if brilliantly executed, original).
The story follows on from Alien 3, but its themes dovetail mainly with Cameron's first sequel, Aliens, especially the obsession with motherhood and family. Cameron's script for Aliens centered on the bizarre pairing of Ripley and the Alien queen as maternal figures, and that idea becomes the theme for a set of grand guignol variations here, as Whedon, Jeunet and the effects designers probe at the definition of what makes one human, what makes one a monster, and the strange fluidity between those categories. In many ways the end product less resembles the earlier Alien films than it does a classic Universal horror film, which (like all good monster movies) gives most of its sympathy to the monsters.
I hardly need to add that Sigourney Weaver's dazzling and unsettling reinvention of Ripley as something that both is and is not human is what holds everything together - if only barely (some of the supporting players are less well cast, notably Dominique Pinon who's so great in Jeunet's earlier films, though I confess I do like Winona Ryder in a role that's awkwardly written at times). This is one of those films that gets more interesting and more annoying on repeated viewing - its weaknesses become ever more glaring, its complexities and innovations ever more intriguing.