Alien Resurrection is the franchise's most wilfully strange entry, a film that makes no attempt to replicate the tone or approach of its predecessors and succeeds, on its own peculiar terms, more often than its reputation suggests. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's direction and Joss Whedon's screenplay combine to produce something that is simultaneously a horror film, a dark comedy, and a body horror meditation on identity and creation, and the result is a film that is too odd to be entirely satisfying and too inventive to be dismissed. It is not a good Alien film. It is a genuinely interesting one.
At a Glance
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Runtime: 109 minutes
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Brad Dourif
Release: 1997
Critics Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, too strange to succeed, too inventive to dismiss)
Audience Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, a divisive misfire)
Review Breakdown
Plot
Two hundred years after the events of Alien 3, Ripley has been cloned from preserved DNA samples, with the alien queen embryo extracted and used to breed a new generation of aliens aboard a military research vessel. The cloned Ripley retains some alien characteristics and a complex relationship with the creatures she has spent her previous lives fighting. The plot is the franchise's most overtly science fiction in its concerns, moving away from the survival horror of the original and the action spectacle of Aliens toward something closer to a philosophical thriller about identity and the ethics of creation. It does not entirely succeed, but the ambition is real and the execution is frequently more interesting than the film's reputation allows.
Characters
Weaver's cloned Ripley is the franchise's most unusual and most compelling character iteration, a version of the character who is simultaneously familiar and deeply alien, whose relationship with the creatures she carries inside her gives the film its most unsettling dramatic thread. Weaver plays the character with a physical confidence and a detached intelligence that makes her feel genuinely different from the Ripley of the previous films, and the performance is the film's most consistently rewarding element. Winona Ryder's Call is the film's weakest link, a character whose eventual revelation as an android generates more confusion than dramatic impact. Ron Perlman and Michael Wincott bring considerable energy to the mercenary ensemble, and Brad Dourif's Gediman is the franchise's most entertainingly unhinged scientist.
Tone
Jeunet pitches the film at a register of dark, almost playful grotesquerie that is entirely unlike anything else in the franchise. The film is frequently funny in ways that feel deliberate rather than accidental, and the horror sequences have a physical inventiveness that distinguishes them from the more straightforward creature-feature approach of the later entries. The tone is the film's most divisive quality: audiences expecting the dread of the original or the action of Aliens found it alienating, while those willing to engage with its peculiar register found it consistently surprising.
Meaning / Themes
The film's central concern is the ethics of creation and the question of what constitutes identity when the self has been reconstructed from fragments. The cloned Ripley's relationship to her previous selves, and to the alien queen whose embryo was extracted from her body, gives the film a thematic complexity the more purely survival-focused entries do not attempt. The room of failed Ripley clones, each a different and more disturbing approximation of the original, is the franchise's most genuinely horrifying single image and the film's most complete thematic statement: that the attempt to reconstruct life from its components produces something that is neither the original nor entirely new.
Direction
Jeunet's direction is the franchise's most visually distinctive since Scott's original, bringing a European art-house sensibility to the material that gives the film a visual identity entirely its own. The underwater alien sequence is the film's directorial highlight, a demonstration of practical effects work of considerable imagination that remains one of the franchise's most memorable individual passages. The film's production design is the franchise's most baroque, and Jeunet uses it with a confidence that makes the film consistently interesting to look at even when the screenplay is not entirely working. John Frizzell's score is atmospheric and appropriately strange.
Cultural Reception
Alien Resurrection received mixed reviews on its release and was a modest commercial success, though it grossed considerably less than its predecessors. It is now regarded as the weakest entry in the original Ripley quadrilogy, though its standing has improved somewhat as audiences have become more willing to engage with its peculiar register. Whedon has publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the film, arguing that his screenplay was not executed as intended, and the film's tonal inconsistencies support that reading. It remains the franchise's most divisive entry among the original four films.
Final Verdict: Too strange to be a satisfying Alien film and too inventive to be dismissed as a simple failure. Weaver's cloned Ripley is the franchise's most unusual character iteration, Jeunet's direction gives the material a visual identity entirely its own, and the failed clones sequence is the franchise's most genuinely horrifying single image. Alien Resurrection is not the film the franchise needed. It is, on its own terms, a more interesting film than it is usually given credit for being.