Witness the series running out of steam

Rating: 5/10 (19 May 2017)

Well, at least there were no more favored characters to be killed off.
"Alien Resurrection" is a movie I paid to see in the theater, and I was even disappointed when it fell to "Flubber" at the box office. This is just to give you some perspective. Twenty years hence, it plays as something very French, very weird, and way too sluggish (and I'm not all that sure what I saw as a 17 year-old). It's certainly lost any of the spark of its predecessors, and the motley group of smugglers assembled here feels more like systematic xenomorph fodder. Even Ron Perlman(!) is wasted.
What I will say is that Sigourney Weaver embraces the off-kilter vibe of her lab-reproduced Ripley. The character's lost somewhere between human and alien, and she plays it with a mix of cynicism and wicked curiosity. She also has the best scene in the movie when she discovers one of the lab failures that came before here and puts it out of its misery; it's a hard scene.
We can probably all agree that cloning Ripley was a desperate attempt at keeping the series going, and it really shows.
5/10