Originally published at The Substream.
The dirty little secret at the heart of dirty little Alien Resurrection is that for all its marketing claims to the contrary, and for all of Joss Whedon’s “there’s dead and then there’s dead” reverse-engineering, the fourth and final proper Alien movie does not resurrect the Alien franchise at all (and I’m not referring, even, to the film’s failure to gift us an Alien 5). Alien 4 is a feint, a gag reel; a merchandising ploy wrapped in zombie flesh. Of all the people involved in the project, I think the only person who understood this subtle fact most directly was the person who was, later on, coldly dismissed as ill-equipped to the Alien task: director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Jeunet, as far as I can tell, is blessed with two things above his other gifts. He seems to have a great sense of humour; and an equally great sense of pragmatism. Summoned to Hollywood and separated from his designer, Marc Caro, the director of Delicatessen and City of Lost Children took one look around the Alien 4 development ecosystem and figured something out long before anyone else did: this film was crass, meaningless studio product, and he was a hired gun. If the first two Alien films were certainly driven by the creative intentions of strong directors, and the third one inevitably sunk beneath the same thing, Alien Resurrection – the only picture in the cycle controlled directly by Fox, not Brandywine – did not want a James Cameron or a Ridley Scott in charge. This film wanted someone to mimic the fresh, demo-reel-quality visuals of the startup directors of the earlier films; and further, this film wanted that person to get equally out of the way. Jeunet came in, did his twelve months, flew back to France, and probably chuckles at the thought of Alien Resurrection to this day. Why shouldn’t he? He won.
This explains Alien Resurrection’s prevailing lack of focus in its worldbuilding. The movie has a terrific first act, mysterious and expansive, but the film’s landscape is nevertheless the product of whatever happened to be there at the time. None of its rethink/reboot of the Alien cosmology is directly routed in the story – the events of Alien 4 take place 200 years after Alien3, but could take place 2 years after, or 2000 years after, for all their grounding in time and place – and so, none of it organically matters. Alien Resurrection certainly looks like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film; or more accurately, it looks like Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Darius Khondji’s post-modern repurpose of the aesthetic pillars of the first threeAlien films. They covet Scott’s labyrinthine corridors of the subconscious, Cameron’s guns-n’-ammo military fantasia, and Fincher’s slime-is-sexy fetishization of the big insects themselves. Wrap all this around Joss Whedon’s unmercifully slender script, which is less a story than a charm bracelet of amusement park sideshows, and you come up with a weird, but weirdly satisfying, mishmash of images and ideas which, like Ripley herself, probably shouldn’t be walking around – but is.
A word on Whedon. I am, of course, an enormous fan, but something about his after-the-fact take on Alien Resurrection’s problems doesn’t pass the sniff test. He has claimed at length that Jeunet ruined his scripted intentions through a profound lack of directorial imagination. (Whedon also, it must be reaffirmed, successfully spun the germs of some of his ideas here into what remains the best creative work he’s yet done, Firefly/Serenity.) But I have simply never been convinced that Jeunet took a workable draft that Whedon wrote and somehow turned it into a largely nonfunctional story. The two mens’ styles are certainly, demonstrably, at odds, but if Whedon wrote a kickass resurrection story for Ripley that made emotional sense, there is no lingering evidence of it in the cosmos (ours, or Ripley’s). Let’s just consider it far more likely that the dead-duck premise – bring Ripley back to life – resulted in a dead-duck film, whose final product is only occasionally enlivened by Jeunet’s Grand Guignol sense of gross fun, and Whedon’s legendarily sharp dialogue.
Which brings me back to the feint mentioned above, because again, the dirty secret of Alien Resurrection is of course that it didn’t resurrect Ripley. Ripley died on Fury 161 and remains, as far as I can tell, dead. In Alien Resurrection, Sigourney Weaver does not play Ripley, but rather Not Ripley – who is an entirely different animal (literally). There is some expository falderal about Not Ripley’s hybrid Alien DNA carrying a kind of residual memory, which gives Not Ripley some sense of the events of Ripley’s life… but she is still Not Ripley. And more importantly, Weaver – who by this time must have been having as much sly fun making dumb Alien movies as Jeunet was – is certainly not playing Ripley. The creature posing as Ripley in Alien Resurrection – played by Weaver as a lanky leather queen who is part moviestar, part Alien, part basketball player – would be fascinating, if the script or film were even momentarily interested in digging into what it would be like to be her; but from a franchise perspective, it becomes so much more important to quickly get the pack of characters moving on their Alien-like survival story that we never get the chance.
And on the basic level of giving the people what they want, Alien Resurrection feels like so fundamental a missing of the point that it’s nearly funny. If the people want Ripley, and if Fox, indeed, was afraid to make an Alien movie without Ripley… how did nobody, at any point in the production of this film, notice that they hadn’t brought back Ripley? Ripley, as a character, as an icon, and as a propulsive element of the first three Alien films, is hell and gone from the shenanigans that unfold in Alien Resurrection. Not Ripley is so passive and anti-heroic that she can’t properly be described as the protagonist of Alien 4; but if she ain’t, nobody else is stepping in to fill the void. Whose story is this? Fox’s?
And yet for all its epic fails, Alien Resurrection’s goofy charm is not lost on me. I’m of course entertained mightily by Johner, played by Ron Perlman, who is one of my favourite actors (and Jeunet’s, too). Likewise, wheelchair-bound Dominique Pinon is a capable addition to the universe; and if Dan Hedaya is the exact wrong kind of hilarious in pretty much every moment in the film, his pow-wow with Elgyn – with the freeze-dried cubes of Scotch – is the only scene in the film that actually makes me feel like I am encountering a chewy, textural world. Leland Orser, too, remains one of my Secret Weapons of character acting – I’d watch him in anything – and his truly bizarre contribution to the Alien Resurrection traveling squad, as a miner with an alien inside him, pops nicely (pun intended). Brad Dourif is great, Michael Wincott is great, J.E. Freeman is great… Resurrection boasts a sensational supporting cast. All except You Know Who – although, to be fair, the script has so little a sense of what to do with Call, or what Call even wants, needs, or must become, that blaming Winona Ryder doesn’t feel entirely fair.
If Alien Resurrection has a success, it is in laying out a twisted anti-fairy tale within the Alien frame, with Not Ripley at its centre. It’s a naughty, mischievous movie, with a dark and dirty heart; Alien Resurrection feels like Grimm. “My mommy always said there were no monsters; no real ones,” Not Ripley intones over the opening of the film; it is noteworthy that it is Weaver speaking the lines, not Carrie Henn, whose Newt originally delivered the dialogue in Aliens, and whose Newt was last seen in roughly the same state as we are introduced to Not Ripley now – the naked body of a child, entombed in a lab. The child morphs into the adult, and Not Ripley could be the Ripley we see sleeping in her cryotube at the end of Alien or Aliens – except for that squarish 8 tattooed on her wrist, which Not Ripley herself is wondering about only a few scenes later. (I have often wondered, and still do, if the Alien Queen that was cloned out of the same batch as Not Ripley has a similar tattoo – and what that tattoo artist’s day at the office would have been like.) The science is ludicrous of course – why would cloning Ripley result in a cloned Alien embryo, gestating within her, just because she was carrying one when she committed suicide at the end of Alien3? Why are these movies so devoutly interested in undoing the sacrifices of the conclusions of their previous chapters? Well, at this late stage, what difference does it make anyway.
The strongest throughline in Alien Resurrection is the slow contortion of Not Ripley’s sense of self under the pressure of the theatre of horrors that she wanders through in her attempts to escape the Auriga. Her blood is part acid, a delicious reveal; a lab bears Not Ripley Versions 1 through 7, the film’s most vertigo-inducing squirm-fest; the Aliens call Not Ripley into a weird, underexplained sexual coupling, a true what-will-they-think-of-next moment; and then, the Newborn. I must be the only fan of the Newborn on record; that thing scares the shit out of me. In their creature design, Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis manage to take the biomechanical otherness of Giger and marry it to a rather sensational perversion of human anatomy, and the disgusting, fleshy, razor-toothed result – with eyes – provokes such a strong sense of wrongnessthat it very quickly sells me on one critical notion at the climax of Alien Resurrection: whether it’s Not Ripley’s baby or not, someone’s gotta blow that fucker out into space.
But on something like five alternate endings for Alien 4, neither Whedon nor Jeunet ever landed on one that meant anything worth a damn; perhaps if theBetty crew in general or Call in particular had been developed into anything like a character, there would have been some dynamics to push and pull against when the Newborn inevitably escapes the destruction of the Big Ship only turn up again on the Small Ship as creatures in Alien movies inevitably do. Or ifResurrection had anything to say about human nature along the lines of Firefly– or, y’know, Alien – there might be something waiting on Earth worth arriving at. But no. For a film partially concerned with cloning, Alien Resurrection clones too much of its plot structure and presumed franchise requirements to come away feeling like anything other than a dank, twisted mishmash. For a film that bats so desperately to set up a sequel, Alien Resurrection ends up making the most convincing case for its own reboot. What happens to Not Ripley when she arrives on Earth at the end of Alien 4? Who cares? Not me.
The search for our beginning will be our end (of this series of articles). Check back bright and early tomorrow for my review of the long-awaited Prometheus!
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