Attack of the Clones

Rating: 7/10 (2 April 2018)

Alien 3 seemed like and should have been the natural closure of Ripley's arc, and the series as a whole. Ripley sacrificed herself to defeat her extraterrestrial nemesis, and finally found peace after being torn from her home, loved ones and even her own timeline. Alien: Resurrection resets all that by turning to the age-old sci-fi trope of cloning, allowing the deceased character to simply come back. To its credit, the film does try to add something new by returning Ripley as an alien/human hybrid. It is perverse irony that Ripley would end up, albeit partially, becoming the very thing that she fought for so long. Sigourney Weaver, while realizing the material isn't up to par with previous entries in the series (supposedly, she only signed up to stop Fox from making the long-teased Alien/Predator crossover, which they did anyway seven years later), does her best to make this new Ripley interesting by upping the ambiguity of the character - being part Alien, do we even know what side she is on? Still, it's easy to see why this self-aware, sarcastic and superhuman Ripley doesn't appear to core Alien fans - Ripley's appeal wasn't being badass, it was her everyman nature and her brave moral stance against corporate greed, to the point where she gave her own life in order to save humanity from the Company's ill-advised exploitation of a dangerous alien organism. This new Ripley doesn't really seem to care, and condescendingly recounts how she tried to save 'people' once. The film does seem aware of this to some degree, and deliberately casts Winona Ryder's Call in Ripley's old role as the determined anti-Alien crusader who tries to remind Ripley of what she once stood for (and initially distrusting her for being not human, which is somewhat ironic since she herself is revealed to be an android in a potentially interesting moral sub-plot that should have gotten more attention). The rest of the supporting cast do their best, but the script relegates them to stock characters - the evil scientist (Wren), the cool black dude who sacrifices himself (Christy), the amoral seen-it-all smuggler (Elgyn) and the unhinged brawler who just wants to shoot everything (Johner). Leland Orser's Purvis deserves mention for spending the entire film knowing he's going to die a horrible death, and ultimately redeeming his apparent expendability in a final sacrifice (that is, unfortunately, unintentionally funny in execution).
The Aliens themselves have become your average slimy, roaring sci-fi monster, clumsily rendered through 90s era CGI for the first time, although the animatronics look better than ever save for an unneccessary color shift from blue to brown (thankfully corrected in Alien vs Predator) as well as excessive slime. Despite some changes, H.R. Giger's briljant design manages to keep them interesting. It's a shame, then, that the film decides to throw another human-Alien crossbreed into the mix in the form of the Newborn. Arguably one of the most hated elements of the film, the Newborn's main purpose seems to be present a new chief antagonist in the vein of Aliens' introduction of the Queen, and to serve as the punchline to the film's obsession with mingling human and Alien together, as if to say we're not so different from these terrifying monsters as we like to think we are. Given its quasi-innocent nature (it bonds with Ripley as its mother), its death scene seems unnecessarily cruel. But ultimately, the Newborn doesn't belong in the franchise - the Aliens are supposed to be a lethal force of nature, not something we can relate to. That is the human characters' job.
Alien: Resurrection is by no means a terrible film - it's a fun, gory monster ride. It's just that it doesn't entirely seem to understand what it means to be an Alien movie, and would have worked better as a non-Alien film taking cues from the series than an installment of it. It's also sad that the series has opted for Predator crossovers and prequels/reboots rather than continuing the story, as Alien: Resurrection leaves us in a very interesting place: Earth. The series has never set foot on Earth before, and this leaves the story wide open for any direction. Will the Aliens finally reach Earth? Will Ripley 8 come to terms with her Alien DNA? What about Call's struggle with her non-humanity, analogous to Ripley 8? Sadly, we will never know. There were and still are plenty of opportunities for jumpstarting the series from this point, even fixing many of the mistakes that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Joss Whedon made with Alien: Resurrection.