page_title: Alien Resurrection
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: Alien Resurrection / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: Sigourney Weaver on the red carpet at the at the 61st Annual Academy Awards, 1989. Scanned from the original 35MM film negative.
context_page_description: Alien Resurrection is a 1997 American science fiction horror film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Joss Whedon, and starring Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder. It is the fourth installment of the Alien film series, and was filmed at the 20th Century Fox studios in Los Angeles, California.
  Set 200 years after the preceding installment Alien 3, Ellen Ripley is cloned and an Alien Queen is surgically removed from her body. The United Systems Military hopes to breed Aliens to study and research on the spaceship USM Auriga, using human hosts kidnapped and delivered to them by a group of mercenaries. The Aliens escape their enclosures, while Ripley and the mercenaries attempt to escape and destroy the Auriga before it reaches its destination: Earth. Additional roles are played by Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya, J. E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, and Michael Wincott.
  Alien Resurrection was released on November 26, 1997, by 20th Century Fox, and grossed $47.8 million in North America, the least successful of the Alien series on that continent. The film was well received internationally, however, with a gross of $113.6 million, bringing its total gross to $161.4 million.
context_section_description: As of May 2020, 55% of the 80 reviews compiled by Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and have an average rating of 5.79 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Alien Resurrection marks a slight improvement over its predecessor, but still lacks the emotional stakes that helped make the franchise's first two entries sci-fi/horror classics." Metacritic assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 21 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.
  Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gave the film "B+" and stated "By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly [...] to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction." Radio Times' Alan Jones described the film as "tense, mordantly funny, very graphic and bloody", and praised Weaver in a four out of five stars review. Houston Chronicle editor Louis B. Parks said "The film is a marvel, a well-photographed feast of visual imagery", while Richard Schickel of Time wrote that it was "Less frightening, but as much fun as ever." The Washington Post contributor Desson Thomson felt it "satisfactorily recycles the great surprises that made the first movie so powerful. And most significantly, it makes a big hoot of the whole business." Andrew Johnston commented in Time Out New York that "If Ripley, Call and the pirates had been developed further, the film might have been as involving as James Cameron's Aliens, the gold standard of the series. The film's techno-Gothic look is gorgeously immersive, however, and Jeunet turns in a number of original (and grotesque) effects sequences that are worth the price of admission." Salon′s Laura Miller noted "Weaver obviously relishes playing this feral, sarcastic new Ripley, and her pleasure is infectious." Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers' review was mostly positive, writing that the film "is sometimes glib and repetitive, but it stays worthy of its predecessors by staying close to its two battered heroines."
  TV Guide magazine's Maitland McDonagh wrote in her mixed review: "The plot is more of the same old running and screaming, but Weaver is worth the price of admission all by herself, which is just as well in light of the less-than-fleshed out characters by whom she's surrounded." James Berardinelli also gave a mixed review at ReelViews by writing "If you consider Alien and Aliens to be the main course, then Alien Resurrection is leftovers." Jeffery Overstreet of Looking Closer rated the film "C+" and commented "What began as the most menacing movie monster of all has evolved into a whining oaf that looks its been dipped in a vat of Cream of Wheat." Janet Maslin from The New York Times reported "The filmmaker's ghoulishly fecund imagination makes this tale murky that even the screen's toughest woman warrior remains largely stuck in the mud." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a negative review, stating "There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder", later naming it one of the worst films of 1997.
  Screenwriter Joss Whedon was unhappy with the final product. When asked in 2005 how the film differed from the script he had written, Whedon responded:
  It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines ... mostly ... but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they'd changed the script ... but it wasn't so much that they'd changed the script; it's that they just executed it in s
caption: Weaver's performance as Ripley was widely praised by critics.
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