Review by Dan Wiencek
You
know the story already. A group of scientists,
greedy or just impervious to common sense,
want to tame a deadly alien species and
exploit it for military gain; the aliens'
chief nemesis, Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley,
utters dire warnings; things go wrong and
people start dying in a frenzy of thrashing
limbs and spraying blood. Ripley's suicide
in the previous film complicates things,
but not much, and before the first reel
is out a cloned Ripley is back on her feet
and the alien fetus she was harboring in
her chest is maturing nicely. A gang of
shady characters then arrives bearing a
mysterious cargo, and the stage seems set
for a cozy, predictable bloodbath. Except
this time there's something odd about Ripley,
like the way she can tear open steel bulkheads
with her bare hands, and the way her blood
sizzles when it hits the floor.
The reborn Ripley is easily
the best thing about ALIEN: RESURRECTION.
Now an unsettled mix of human and alien,
she sees the human world with a mixture
of pity and contempt, and the primal power
of her alien side represents a seductive
lure: the urge, I think, to fully surrender
to your own desires, to divest yourself
of conscience. Sigourney Weaver makes the
most of this struggle, giving a riveting
performance that blows everyone else off
the map, including the creatures themselves,
whose scariness, after three previous movies'
worth of exposure, has largely evaporated.
Indeed, in a well-executed underwater chase
scene, they're almost beautiful, sweeping
like porpoises through the water with powerful
thrusts of their tails. It is Ripley who's
frightening, as she stops to impassively
watch an alien catch and consume one of
her fellow humans: she's too far away to
help, but does she even want to?
Weaver's strong performance
comes in virtual defiance of Joss Whedon's
script, which lurches between second-rate
action-movie wisecracks and laborious catch-up
sessions in which the plot is clunkily advanced
another step. Some of the dialogue is actually
embarrassing, as when Ripley escapes from
her cell and asks the smugglers now trapped
with her on the ship, "Who do I have
to fuck to get off this boat?" The
smugglers have no more idea why this is
supposed to be funny than the audience does.
The other characters fare no better, and
most of them fare worse. Scarcely anyone
has any defining traits and you quickly
find yourself keeping track of the characters
through mental shorthand: Lead Bad Guy,
Black Guy With Cool Guns, Wheelchair Guy,
Freaked-Out Guy, etc. The characters are
just real enough to be missed, barely, after
they are killed; if you can remember their
names, you're doing better than I did.
The only other character who
stands out, and the one we're obviously
supposed to like, is Winona Ryder's Call,
the junior member of the smuggling crew.
Ryder is an avowed fan of the ALIEN movies,
and getting the part of Call must have felt
like a dream come true. If only. The real
truth is that Ryder doesn't belong here:
she has none of the edge needed to make
the character believable, and Call ends
up reminding you less of a hardened smuggler
than of a college sophomore who signs up
for a summer of shoveling fish guts in Alaska
to gather material for poems. A heart-to-heart
with Ripley near the end plays stiffly,
as though cribbed from the much more effective
scenes in the first sequel between Ripley
and pseudo-daughter Newt ... which, come
to think of it, it probably was.
That second film seriously
explored the bonds between mothers and their
offspring, and in fact, RESURRECTION covers
much the same territory -- but not among
the human characters. Ripley's customary
rage is tempered not just by her newfound
empathy for the aliens but by her being
responsible for their very existence; as
she points out, "I'm the monster's
mother." In that sense, ALIEN: RESURRECTION
promises a bright future for the franchise.
A woman torn between two species, but belonging
to neither: the new Ripley is shaping up
to be one of the most tormented and fascinating
women in all of recent film. With luck,
someone more interesting than Call and her
friends will join her for the next voyage.
