Resurrection is the death of the "Alien" franchise

Rating: 4/10 (14 August 2013)

While I found "Alien 3" to not be that great and be extremely mediocre, "Alien: Resurrection" proves to be the worst of the "Alien" films in my opinion and does many things that I find infuriating in film. The third film had a great ending to it with the intense game of cat and mouse through the prison and Ripley's sacrifice so that the Weyland Corporation could not get its hands on the alien. Everything is tied up nicely and there are no lose ends.
Then, along comes "Alien: Resurrection", which is the true road to ruin for the "Alien" movies. We open up at least a thousand years later after the events of "Alien 3". Ripley has been cloned and the Weyland Corporation is also trying to recreate the alien species, succeeding in making several clones using kidnapped humans collected by mercenaries as hosts. The aliens soon mature and escape, damaging the ship.
The first things that really infuriated me with this movie was with Ripley being alive because she was cloned. I do not like characters who die to come back to life in movies unless they are like ghosts or the method for their resurrection is set up ahead of time. So, Ripley is alive because she was the star of the first three films so they need her to be in it or it will not be a true "Alien" film. That is what it felt like to me.
My next biggest issue was with the new creature introduced in the movie. The three movies before it had clever ideas, even if they were mild. "Alien" introduced us to the species and the face-huggers, "Aliens" gave us the idea of a queen alien, and the third one had an alien but since it came out of a dog and not a human, it behaved a little like a dog would. What this film did was not even remotely clever. They had a half- human half-alien hybrid. This just screams to me that they wanted something new but could not think of something remotely clever so they did one of the most cliché things imaginable, mixing a human with the creature.
Another problem I had was with the movie all together. It had nothing for the audience besides aliens hunting down and killing the humans. The characters were uninteresting--not that the characters from the first three films were works of art but they at least made you care--so we did not care if they succeeded or not as the only person we might be able to relate to is Ripley, but she's a clone and not the real Ripley so there is nothing from that. The film is played off more as aliens in "Poseidon" as the characters are escaping from a ship, going through different obstacles while aliens instead of rising water are following them. There is little tension as they could easily defeat the aliens. They have firepower and there is less than ten aliens. In "Alien" and "Alien 3", they had little to no weapons and in "Aliens" they had weapons but not enough to fight them all. There was tension with that. In this, the characters are all armed and there are few enough aliens that they could just fight them off, ergo, no tension. To try and compensate for this, they have one mercenary in a wheelchair and a guy with an embryo in him that is about to erupt from his chest, but both of these fail to bring tension to the audience.
While I would watch "Alien: Resurrection" over other films I have seen, the film fails on multiple levels and takes the "Alien" franchise from having an ending that was pretty good to a lousy ending where we are left with our surviving characters sitting around with a "what happens now?" thought running through the audience's brains.