wo hundred years ago Lt. Ellen Ripley killed herself in order to prevent the Weyland-Yutani company from getting its hands on the vicious alien that was gestating inside her body. Since Ripley was carrying the last known specimen of the deadly and nearly indestructible alien species, she thought she had destroyed the aliens in the process.
But now, two centuries later, the United Military Service has brought Ripley back to life in the form of a clone, complete with alien inside, to finish the research Weyland-Yutani had begun. But somewhere in the process Ripley's genes and those of the aliens became mixed, and although the USM gets the alien queen it had been hoping for, it also ends up with a human/alien hybrid in Ripley. More disturbing still is that Ripley can somehow sense what her alien cousin is up to, and it's no longer clear which species her sympathies lie with.
Things begin to heat up when a band of modern-day pirates delivers a cargo of human hosts to the USM spaceship Auriga, where all of these alien experiments are taking place. The hosts allow the USM to breed 12 warrior aliens from the queen's parasitic eggs, but the USM soldiers are not prepared to cope with the killing machines they have gone to such great pains to create. Soon the aliens are rampaging aboard the Auriga, and they quickly use up the supply of living USM personnel. Next the deadly aliens turn their attentions to the pirates, who realize that Ripley is their only hope of making it off the Auriga alive. But one of the pirates is not what she seems, and she would be only too happy to kill Ripley in order to rid humanity of the deadly alien menace.
Been there. Killed that.
Alien Resurrection is an ambitious attempt to breathe life into the Alien franchise, which many thought was gone for good after the horrendous box-office performance of the third film in the series. But while there is certainly enough potential in Resurrection to do just that, as written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children), the movie is at best uninspiring and at worst the final nail in the Alien coffin.
One of the biggest disappointments in Resurrection is that, while the introduction of mingled alien/human genes seems to open whole new avenues of fearsome alienness to explore, the bulk of the movie has a been-there, done-that feel. Once again Ripley is improbably trotted out to lead a band of disbelieving humans through a steel-and-metal maze of high-tech caverns, while aliens pop out of holes and shadows. At the very end of the movie the potential for new, genetically altered aliens is explored briefly, but only half-heartedly and through a bizarre sequence that is both disgusting and ridiculous at the same time.
Worse still is that, while the movie timeline takes place 200 years later than the last installment, the sets look the same, the characters act the same, and the military is still using hardware that is practically outdated by today's standards (guns, flame-throwers, grenades, etc.). Another problem is that Jeunet (a French director) has played up the comedic aspects of several characters (General Perez, played by Dan Hedaya, in particular), and the result is a strange mix of European humor and deadly-serious American horror that is hard to reconcile.
In the end Resurrection will probably appeal to the lowest-common-denominator mainstream audience looking for the next special-effects action movie, but SF fans--particularly Alien connoisseurs--will wish Fox had let sleeping aliens (and Ripleys) lie.
