Alien Resurrection Review

Posted by Darkness on November 24, 2006 (Updated: 06-Oct-2023)

Alien Resurrection is considered by many to be the worst film in the Alien series. I have to agree. I often rated this film above Alien 3 but in recent years, I just can’t stand the film for obvious reasons.

The United Systems Military has assumed the task of breeding and harnessing the deadly aliens. With blood samples taken from Ripley’s previous life, scientists clone a new Ripley in order to extract the queen alien inside of her. The new Ripley, known as number 8, acquires physical and emotional traits from both humanity and the aliens, making her question where her allegiances lie. Shortly after, the aliens break free and commence killing those onboard. Ripley, along with a crew of smugglers must now escape the perilous ship. Along the way, Ripley encounters a shocking revelation that truly sets herself against both humanity and the alien species. She must now decide what she truly is, in order to save humanity once more.

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The film is directed by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet who has directed such films as “The City of Lost Children” and “Delicatessen”. After Alien Resurrection, he went on to write and direct “Amelie”, arguably is most well-known feature. He brings his unique style to Alien Resurrection although I’m not sure I like it. Anyway, Sigourney Weaver returns to play Ripley 8, a clone. Other actors include Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan and many others. Ripley 8 is more or less an entirely new character. She has some of the memories from Ripley but you’re never sure which side she’s on – the aliens or the humans.

Let me just to talk about the premise. The story is just ridiculous. I mean after Alien 3, Ripley was killed off and never expected to re-appear and now she was cloned by scientists so they could get aliens to use as weapons. It’s really quite extraordinary how this script was even green-lighted in the first place. A lot of scenes and dialogue in the film just seem out of place and essentially strange. I think it’s quite easy to place blame for Alien Resurrection. It’s a combination of writer Joss Whedon, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and actress Sigourney Weaver. They all had a hand in its downfall.

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The film isn’t all bad of course. There’s one scene I always seem to like watching and that’s the underwater sequence. I just thought it had been done excellently. The CGI is great when the aliens are underwater. I couldn’t say the same when they were out of the water, however. The computer graphics seemed very poorly done in those scenes. The general alien designs aren’t great either as any fan will tell you.

Let’s not forget the ending with the dreaded Newborn creature. I think to a casual movie viewer watching this movie, it doesn’t seem that bad until the last 20 minutes when this creature appears. Really, I haven’t got the faintest idea what they were thinking when they thought that was acceptable. It was just poorly designed let alone the technicalities at how it appeared in the first place. The special edition of the movie was released with the Quadrilogy which adds 7 minutes of extra footage. It doesn’t feature any interesting scenes though.

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Alien Resurrection is a very bad film and is definitely the worst one in the Alien series. Well, this and AvP are more or less joint at the bottom. I think Alien Resurrection would work well as stand-alone film but as an Alien sequel, it has little in common with the previous films. I’m not sure what they could have done for Alien 4 but they shouldn’t have had Sigourney Weaver in it. Alien Resurrection also ruins any potential Alien 5 film. I just don’t believe you can do a good sequel to this unless it was a prequel to the original Alien.

Rating:
(1/5)
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Comments: 8
  1. Well, I don’t understand the rate. The movie as nothing to see with the first but it try to create something. After 3 movies the Alien can’t scare us at all. And Hollywood and JP Jeunet try to tell us something else with that monster and it worked with me. I understand that it don’t word with everyone, but when you see Alien Covenant .. Well 20 years ago we still have ideas, today if you really want to see something strong with the Alien universe, you play Alien Covenant. Forget my englis but i’m french, and not bilingual


  2. I wrote this review 15 years ago and the Covenant one was written by another person. They’re bound to be different. I would have rated Covenant much higher than 6.5 as I really enjoyed it.


  3. Yeah this would definitely work as a standalone, but isn’t of ‘Alien’ quality.
    Always gets me how Joss Whedon tries to pin the blame on direction and performances, but the fact is it’s poorly written and he was the wrong choice for it


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