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Alien: Resurrection
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

After seeing and being impressed by Jeunet's previous movie, The City of Lost Children, I was expecting a lot from this movie. In some ways, I wasn't disappointed. To me, this was the movie that should have been made instead of the very disappointing Alien 3.

The movie picks up two hundred years after the events in Alien 3. Some of Ellen Ripley's blood has been preserved and she has now been cloned; as well as the alien queen inside her. The queen is removed and used to breed more aliens under the (as we all know) false hope that they can be controlled and used by the military (The Company has long since vanished).

But the cloning process isn't perfect (the Ripley in this story is No. 8. You don't want to know what happened to clones 1 to 7 although you will be shown soon enough). Some of the alien's and Ripley's genes have been mixed, resulting in a Ripley that is stronger and faster (among her 'enhancements'). Don't ask me what effect Ripley's genes have had on the queen, though you will find out at the end.

Now, we all know the aliens first come out as 'face huggers' that need hosts for the second stage (adult) aliens. The hosts are provided courtesy of a freighter who brings them to the ship where the alien queen and Ripley are being kept. And as we all (again) know, the aliens break out and began to wreck havoc on the ship. Ripley and the crew of the freighter have to fight to escape from the ship as well as prevent it from heading back to its homebase which happens to be earth, hopefully in that order.

Sigourney Weaver is in her element here, playing a tough alien buster as well as caring mother (so to speak), although her doesn't seem to display as much emotion (effect of the alien genetic material?). The cast is livened up by the inclusion of Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon. Winona Ryder's role is puzzling for half the movie until it is all made clear towards the end.

There appears to be a curious symmetry between this movie and The City of Lost Children. Both Perlman and Pinon also appear in that movie (although on opposite sides) with Pinon playing the cloned assistants to the mad scientist. In this movie, it is Ripley who is cloned instead.

The set design and atmosphere make this movie about halfway between Alien and Aliens, featuring some of the hidden tension of the former and the action of the latter. But it also offers some neat twists on its own.

About the only letdown in the movie is its sameness to the previous Alien movies. You know the aliens will escape and decimate the crew, pick off the survivors one by one, that one alien will escape along with the survivors and there will a showdown involving the vacuum of space. I was half-hoping that the alien could have escaped but perhaps that was hoping for too much.

All in all, a reasonable movie that kept me interested for much the time although sometimes for the wrong reason (why are the aliens always so wet in this movie while the humans are so dry, apart from one underwater scene? Where does all the water and mucus come from?). There are some moments of real tension as well as some disturbing parts. I was satisfied with this movie but I felt that unless something really new can be thought up, perhaps it is time to retire it. Ripley may be stronger than ever, but Weaver is not getting any younger.

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Alien: Resurrection directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Alien: Resurrection
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet