Third best in the Alien series (but a LONNNGGGG way behind Alien/Aliens)

Rating: 8/10 (18 May 2013)

Alien is rightfully considered possibly the finest horror/sci-fi film of all time (The Thing and The Fly its' only real competitors, interestingly both remakes). Aliens is the best sci-fi/action film of all time and for a long period my favourite film ever.
And then we had Alien 3. If they had been deliberately TRYING to make a bad film that would ruin the series I don't think they could have done a better job and really the franchise never recovered. Alien; Resurrection was a valiant attempt to put things right and my boy Joss Whedon does a commendable job. But he had a long way to climb after the debacle of Alien 3.
Really Resurrection isn't a great film overall but it has some terrific things about it. Sigourney is great as always, Wionna does OK in her role, the relationship between Cal and Ripley 8 is brilliant and spawned a thousand slash fanfics. You can see the beginnings of Firefly here, even down to a prototype Jane and River. The scene where Ripley 8 looks longingly at the picture of the little girl who reminds her of Newt is just heartbreaking (come on Joss, why didn't you include a scene during the evacuation where a Michael Biehn lookalike is glimpsed escaping the ship with a little blonde girl, they could always have cloned them too). Love the fact that Walmart have now taken over Weyland-Yutani. The female space pirate has the most AMAZING figure and the director takes pains to show it off. Set pieces like the underwater battle are terrific.
OK, so the newborn looks stupid and it rather spoils the implied parent/child relationship with Ripley (note the newborn actually chooses its' human side over its' Alien heritage). It's a little hard to sympathise with the pirates when they kidnap the poor workers but you have to assume that they didn't know what was going on. The idea that the scientists would be so stupid as not to acid proof the Aliens' cells is ridiculous. A better storyline would be if the space pirates were actually condemned prisoners the military were going to use for alien breeding but when Cal stages a breakout in order to get to Ripley it frees the other prisoners and they inadvertently release the aliens.
Is it just me or is there something a little GOT-fic about the Alien drone carrying Ripley away? Joss sure has his heroines have some deeply weird sex!
Great ending though, the bugs blasted to atoms (along with poor Angola!), Ripley has her ship, her crew and her little girl back and can now become a female version of Mal Reynolds, she has her happy ending at last after all she's been through and finally returned to Earth (which she never did in the previous 3 films). She and Cal gaze at the beauty of their world and Ripley observes that she's a stranger to Earth herself...
Ripley has become the alien. I was actually only going to give this film a 7 but thinking of that final scene I've decided to give it 8.