Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Resurrection

Artistic depiction of the event by an eyewitness 

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Alien 

Aliens

Alien 3

Alien: Resurrection

Prometheus

Covenant  

 

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Alien: Resurrection 

(1997, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Not unique to this movie, but it does always feel intrinsically wrong for the 20th Century Fox fanfare to not immediately transition into the Star Wars theme.

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Still an orange opening, except it’s closeups of grotty/distorted organic material. No nebula when we get to space, just an ugly-ass ship. The overbearing theme music is here to stay, it seems.

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Oh boy, written by Joss Whedon.

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Things feel off from go: it looks like a low-mid Sci-Fi Channel movie outing and yep, we’re stuck leering at nude Ripley. It’s not like this series hasn’t ogled her before, but this feels worse. Probably because it immediately follows "Written by JOSS WHEDON".

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Wait, why are they cloning Ripley if they want the Burster? Can’t they just clone it and implant it in livestock, since there's apparently enough of its DNA in Ripley's blood to clone a full copy? And wouldn’t the burster pop in the tank anyway because of how much faster it grows? Do they not know what cloning is? Does Joss Whedon not know what cloning is?

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I can assure you, Joss, autism does not grant genetic memories. Shut the fuck up.

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The vibes are somehow even more rancid when Ripley-8’s out of the tank, considering that she seems to have some kind of brain damage.

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Ripley-8 was cloned from the blood samples taken by Clemens in Alien 3: a tortured way of dragging her back into the series, but I’d almost be willing to buy it if the movie hadn’t already burnt its good will by the time they explain it.

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Weyland-Yutani is no longer in power by this point (2381); the Auriga is a United States military ship. They at least have a stated plan for what they’re going to do with the xenos (“urban pacification”), so that's something.

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The space pirates feel like a first-draft run at Firefly, or at least an intrusion of more generic post-Aliens sci-fi back into the source series. I’m not entirely against that conceptually. Just not here. Or written by Whedon. “I am not the man with whom to fuck” is ridiculous but could be charming in other circumstances.

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Still got smoking in space, still got a whole lot of Gender in this movie, just now with significantly more sexual harassment of anyone unfortunate enough to not be a man in a Joss Whedon script.

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So we’re just ignoring that you could get a xenomorph from a dog in the last movie, eh? Gotta use human test subjects. Can’t use a sheep, or a cow, or a vat-grown slab of muscle tissue. 

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Ridley-8 and Ron Perlman flirting would be fun in a different movie. Sigourney Weaver making the basket on the first shot (after practicing it for two weeks) is a fun story.

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Why are the xenos always so wet in this movie? Where does it come from? For what purpose? (I know it’s because Sex Reasons, but come on do better world building for your weird sex symbolism. You can't just have a guy make out with the containment cube, you gotta put the work in!)

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The gun shopping channel has massive Cowboy Bebop vibes, though likely because they were drawing from the same late 90s TV shopping.

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Dear Winona Rider: how do you drink coffee with boxing gloves on?

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Glad to see that enormous purposeless rooms are still standard on interstellar spacecraft in this setting.

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Every single time Ripley is on screen makes me desperately want to see anything else. It just feels bad.  People who harp on Whedon’s quips are just ignoring his “a strong woman is an action figure you can sexually harass and through the power of the male gaze I WILL drag the audience into this” thing, and how he somehow managed to fool a large segment of the populace into believing that this shit was progressive.

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Spare me this “ooooh I’m going to imply ladies kissing for the pleasure of the male viewer” bullshit. Leave it for the more ethical perverts, Joss.

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So now the xenos are spontaneously acting sapient - they’re clearly coming up with a plan while communicating with each other in a back-and-forth, and one of them clearly has a fear of death!

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Of course, if the Auriga’s science team used a highly basic solution instead of a freezing one (or just submerged the xeno containment unit in a tank of the stuff) they wouldn’t be having the escaped xenomorph problem, but no one ever remembers chemical bases.

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Well, at least the Auriga’s crew is smart enough to immediately evac after a containment breach.

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I can really see how this movie basically killed the series for 20 years. It would be basically impossible to take it seriously after this, your options would be camp comedy or farce.

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“Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” how about you shut the fuck up, Joss.

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3 hours to Earth? How fast is this ship? (I answer this later: it’s fucking fast.)

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This movie came out a mere 4 months after End of Evangelion, so no giant tank of Ripley clones. In a better movie this would be a really powerful scene, but as usual we’re stuck with giving the one surviving clone a death wish instead of actually having to change anything.

Also: formaldehyde is flammable as fuck do not use the flammenwerfer in here you are on a spaceship!

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Could you imagine a xenomorph whale? I can. Let me make an Alien movie, Disney, I’ll put a xenomorph whale in it. Hell I'll do a twofer and put a xenomorph whale on Pandora.

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Dodging bullets on a ladder by swaying side to side, huh. This scene is both terrible from a baseline film perspective (people standing around doing nothing but watching events unfold) and an epilepsy warning. What does this series have against photosensitive viewers?

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Call’s alive! Yay! And also an “auton”, according to Helpful/Taunting Exposition Pirate. An android built by other androids, which is an interesting idea that will never be mentioned again despite being directly related to the reproductive & gender obsession of these movies. 

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I think the chapel on the Auriga is legitimately the most interesting thing in the movie entirely by accident:

• It’s basically a closet with a cross, a two-person bench, and an ethernet cable.
• It’s specifically a cross and not a crucifix (Protestant), but Call crosses herself left > right on entering (Catholic)
• There’s no other decoration at all, it’s all claustrophobia and hard edges.

How the hell did the setting get to this point?

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Knock it off with that Pinocchio shit, Call. Fuck Pinocchio stories, all my homies hate Pinocchio stories. How did we get here from Ash idealizing the total loss of consciousness? Why are we wasting the "android built by other androids" premise on "oh but she wants to be human".

I miss Legion. Why don't more things rip off Legion? I know this movie can't but what about modern stuff? Everyone loves Legion.

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Ah yes, the Pulsating Mass™, the new and improved form of the Quivering Mass™.

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Glasses-guy’s zombie walk is too goofy to be scary but it is very memorable. 

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Shut the fuck up, Joss. Never use the word “womb” again.

What are we even fucking doing. This shit isn't even worth picking apart for analysis.

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A crash landing? Where? Where would it possibly be besides the sun? 

Wait you’re crashing it on Earth? On fucking Earth?

Motherfucker a Jovian slingshot orbit to Earth in FORTY FIVE MINUTES, (crunching the numbers on the back of a post-it and rounding up everything for convenience) would put the Auriga at ~92% lightspeed. At a conservative estimate of the ship mass as equivalent to two USS Gerald Fords stuck together (100,000,000 kilograms displacement each) that is not a crash landing, that’s “I want this planet to stop existing”. Normal kinetic energy calculations have broken down under relativistic effects.

Sir Isaac Newton is, and always will be, the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

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The Newborn, like many elements of this movie, could have been interesting in a film that cared to explore its ideas and wasn't written by sex pest hack Joss Whedon. What happens when successive xeno generations hybridize with humans? How does that compared to androids building androids without human interference? What are the ramifications of sapient xenomorphs? Why does it immediately kill the queen? Is there any reason besides Joss that it’s immediately creepy towards Call? Why does it get such a grody death compared to the less-human, more-animal xenos? How the hell is the human reproductive system an improvement when it’s about as bad as you can get in a species without going extinct?

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That’s awfully triumphant music you’re playing for obliterating half of Africa and spreading a burning radioactive dust cloud across the southern hemisphere, movie. 

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Alien 3 was bad in interesting ways: this one is bad in extremely boring, predictable ways. The shlock could have been fun if it didn't feel so gross and greasy at every single moment. A lot of good acting talent is wasted. There are glimmers of things that could have been cool. Aquatic xenos, auton society, the monsterfied Ripley clones, the Newborn. I'd go as far as to say it's a good pick to watch with friends for a beer & bad movie night, but if you're not throwing it on to laugh at its many failings it's not got much of a point at all.

I think that this is kind of the long-running horror franchise end-state: setting, plot, cohesion, none of that matters anymore. The tropes have solidified and you can just shuffle them around in new circumstances with no thought for how things connect or any of that. The xenomorph has achieved blorbofication.