Alien Resurrection Retrospective

With Alien: Earth taking plaudits and wowing audiences on Netflix, we conclude our retrospective on the original Alien quartet with a look back at the divisive Alien Resurrection. Let’s get freaky!

Alien Resurrection starts very much as it means to go on. We open on a close-up of a drooling, hissing, razor-toothed CGI beast. Wow, no messing around, straight into the Xenomorph action! But no, the camera pulls back to reveal that we’re just looking at a bug which gets splattered on the windshield of a space pirate’s interstellar craft.

It is one of those irreverent cold opens that pretty much everyone hates – see also the CGI gophers at the start of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the CGI bird in Jurassic World. Yet the cheeky switcheroo makes one thing crystal clear from the get-go: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fourth instalment isn’t going to be a grim slog like Alien 3 before it. But does it go too far the other way?

The Alien trilogy had seemingly reached its natural conclusion with the death of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) at the end of David Fincher’s uneven and maligned threequel, but the executives at 20th Century Fox thought there was still life in the franchise yet. After all, Alien 3 made decent money despite the fact that almost nobody liked it. And when it comes to big marquee franchises, that is sadly enough in many cases.

The movie picks up 200 years after the events of Alien 3. Out in deep space, military scientists on the Auriga are up to no good again. They have used DNA to clone Ripley (Weaver) and the Alien Queen that died a fiery death with her at the end of Fincher’s movie. Now able to produce eggs, the sinister doctors need some volunteers to help complete the life cycle and breed xenomorph warriors, which is where the gang of pirates on the Betty come in. They’ve waylaid innocent spacefarers and cut a deal with the Auriga to sell them as test subjects for the nefarious scheme. Meanwhile Ripley is alive again but not quite her old self – her DNA has become mixed with that of the Xeno queen, giving her strange new powers and a psychic connection with the creatures.

The writing process for Alien Resurrection was less painful and protracted than the previous film, which cycled through several concepts and many sets of hands before finally coagulating into a semi-functional screenplay that pleased no-one. For the task, Fox selected Joss Whedon, hot property after creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the acclaimed series based on his 1992 movie of the same name. Whedon’s trademark self-aware humour and quippy dialogue is all over Alien Resurrection, for better or worse. While it lightened the mood after the unremitting grimness of Fincher’s film, certain lines really don’t hold up in the wake of allegations regarding his conduct, especially a few wince-inducing ones of a sexual nature.

Initially, Fox was keen on expanding the Alien universe while Brandywine, the production company behind the first three films, was reluctant to make a fourth in case it ruined the legacy of the series. Nevertheless, Walter Hill and David Giler suggested the idea of cloning to resurrect a familiar face from an earlier instalment. Fox wanted to focus on Newt, the little girl who had been unceremoniously killed off at the beginning of Alien 3. Whedon began working on that basis before the studio changed their minds, reasoning that they shouldn’t deviate from a winning formula of Ellen Ripley as the franchise’s long-suffering hero.

Whedon worked in earnest on the screenplay and his first drafts culminated with a final battle on Earth. The prospect of deadly Xenomorphs reaching our planet was always the omnipresent larger threat hanging in the background of the previous movies, and a mis-leading teaser trailer for Alien 3 even promised a showdown on our planet. But now it was finally going to happen and Whedon went through several scenarios: One in a forest, then in a junkyard, a maternity ward, and finally a desert. None was quite satisfactory – Whedon reasoned that the desert setting might as well be Mars, although that was the best Earthbound ending he came up with.

Ultimately, the final battle on our planet was cut back because the budget had already spiralled to $70 million and the set piece would have driven it up even further. So we got the ending we got, which we’ll come back to later.

With the focus now back on Ripley, the studio needed to convince Sigourney Weaver to return once more to a character she had insisted should die at the end of the previous film. Always intelligent and forthright, Weaver firmly stated didn’t want Ripley turned into a joke, constantly waking up decades down the line to find “monsters running around”. She’d also gotten wind of a potential Alien vs. Predator crossover which she thought sounded dreadful, so used her clout to give Ripley a dignified and heroic sacrificial death in Alien 3.

Despite her reservations, Weaver signed up for a slightly more radical variation on the usual scenario in the fourth film. This time, Ripley is brought back from the dead to find monsters running around yet again – but the twist is that she is in effect their mother as the scientists responsible for her resurrection aren’t doing it for her benefit. 

Nevertheless, Weaver liked Whedon’s script and was intrigued by the idea of Ripley becoming part-human and part-alien. It’s a cool concept and Weaver felt it would give her scope to expand the character in new directions. An $11 million check (compared to $30,000 she was paid for the first film) and a co-producer credit didn’t hurt either.

With their star onboard, Fox needed a director. Three up-and-coming new talents were initially approached. Bryan Singer was an indie darling after the critical and commercial success of The Usual Suspects, while Peter Jackson had made the leap from low-budget splatter to mainstream respectability with Heavenly Creatures. Both turned it down, as did the producer’s top pick, Danny Boyle, who had brought Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting to the screen with his signature verve. Boyle also declined, going on to make A Life Less Ordinary instead – the less said about that, the better.

Enter Jean-Paul Jeunet, the French visionary who had announced himself as a unique talent with Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children in his home country. Jeunet also had doubts about taking the job as he also thought the Alien franchise was done, but the chance to helm a major Hollywood picture with a $70 million budget was just too good to pass up. This resulted in Jeunet parting ways with his friend and collaborator Marc Caro, who had co-directed both films.

Jean-Paul Jeunet, far right

Jeunet took with him cinematographer Darius Khondji, editor Hervé Schneid, and special effects supervisor Pitof, who all contributed to the distinctive look and pacing of Resurrection. The differences are subtle, but the Gallic team managed to bring a slightly more ghoulish and carnivalesque vibe to the now-familiar dark steel corridors and lived-in futuristic interiors. That sensibility extended to the somewhat off-kilter performances, which also may have been affected by Jeunet needing a translator to relay ideas and instructions.

Strong casting has always been a feature of the Alien franchise, but here Jeunet also veered towards the larger-than-life. Hairy old Dan Hedaya hammed it up as the officious commanding officer of the Auriga, and Brad Dourif went big as usual as a creepy scientist who wants to make out with a Xenomorph. Slightly more subtle is J.E. Freeman as another shady doctor who briefly joins the space pirates as they attempt to survive.

As for the crew of nominal protagonists, it’s a weird mish-mash of backgrounds and styles. Gravelly Michael Wincott is as reliable as ever as the Betty captain without having much to do, while Winona Ryder was strangely mis-cast as the film’s inevitable android. Jeunet also added two terrific character actors who had made a big impression in The City of Lost Children: Ron Perlman, who would go on to play Hellboy, and Dominique Pinon, who portrayed Resurrection’s most likeable character as paraplegic mechanic. They’re portrayed as a rough and amoral band of mercenaries who trade in human lives, but they end up as the de facto good guys compared to a gallery of familiar faces mugging wildly as the staff of the Auriga.

Perhaps trying to learn from the mistakes of Alien 3, the executives at 20th Century Fox took a step back and gave Jeunet significant creative control over Resurrection. The results were mixed. Turning the action into a violent dark comedy was a refreshing new direction for the franchise, and Jeunet’s fanciful tendencies alternately meshed and clashed with Joss Whedon’s self-referential style. The writer has a habit of puncturing a scene with a throwaway joke. Just take the harrowing moment when Ripley discovers the horribly malformed previous attempts at cloning her – it’s an upsetting revelation which culminates in Ron Perlman delivering the line: “Must be a chick thing.”

Ultimately, the change in tone drains the film of any dread. The set-up is strong and Whedon thankfully figures out a way to impregnate a bunch of victims without them dumbly sticking their faces over an egg, which has become a groan-worthy trope of the series. But once things kick off, Whedon and Jeunet’s style makes it all just a bunch of cool stuff happening without much in the way of suspense or scares.

Another element that may have contributed to the different look of Resurrection was the shooting location. Unlike the previous trilogy, which was all shot in the UK, cameras rolled in October 1996 at Fox Studios in Los Angeles. This decision was an example of Weaver’s clout – she believed that travelling all the way to Blighty was exhausting for the cast and crew.

She also put her foot down when it came to one of new-look Ripley’s most famous moments, where she nets a basket by tossing the ball over her shoulder. Jeunet was concerned that the trick shot would eat up multiple takes and suggested using a machine or CGI. Yet Weaver insisted on doing it for real and spent a month practising, averaging one basket for every six attempts. When she finally arrived to shoot the scene, she found that the net was further away on set. Nevertheless, she managed to pull it off in one, much to the shock and surprise of everyone present.

Looking lean and mean as she was pushing 50, Weaver certainly had a lot of fun in the movie. She’s been in other good films throughout her career, but Ellen Ripley is the role she will be remembered for. She seems liberated from the earnestness of the character, reimagined as a laconic revenant with acid blood, increased strength and reflexes, and a nice line in gallows humour. If anything, she is a little under-used with so many other characters jostling for screen time, but she does just enough to cause some doubt about whose side she is on. 

Fittingly for a movie helmed by a Frenchman, Alien Resurrection premiered in Paris and performed better globally than at the U.S. box office, where it became the lowest-grossing Alien movie in the North American market. Perhaps it was because international audiences tend to be more accepting of change and experimentation than the average multiplex-goer in the States. Overall, it was a modest success worldwide, making back $160 million from a sizable $70 million budget.

Critic reviews were mixed and I can fully understand why many people don’t like Resurrection. The film’s flippancy and peculiar sense of humour sit at odds with the overall serious tone of the previous three, which remained largely consistent despite coming from directors with very different approaches. It is more interesting in the first act as we establish the characters and learn of the shady plan to breed more Xenomorphs from Ripley’s Alien Queen, but it turns into a standard scramble for the spaceship after most of the baddies are prematurely killed off. There are still some good set pieces, like the underwater kitchen sequence and the ladder shootout, but Jeunet has a habit of deflating the tension with his oddball flourishes. Then you have the human-alien hybrid Newborn… and fans really, really hated that thing.

For once, H.R. Giger wasn’t involved in the design of this new iteration of the Xenomorph life cycle. Special effects duty was handed to Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated, who tweaked the look of the Xenomorphs and the Alien Queen and were tasked with emphasising the human elements of the Newborn hybrid by Jeunet. He wanted the creature to have mixed-sex genitalia, which freaked out the suits at Fox. Once the design was complete Jeunet also felt it was too much “even for a Frenchman,” and the goolies were removed digitally in post-production.

What can you say about the hybrid? Anticipation was high when news broke that Resurrection would feature a new creature which was partly human and partly xenomorph, and I remember sitting there in the cinema eagerly awaiting its birth. But then…

Fleshy, gloopy, and mewling like an extremely dangerous baby, it is a radical departure from the sleek and ferocious Xenomorphs we knew so well. One thing that makes the regular Xenos and the Alien Queen so scary is that their phallic heads have no eyes, but this beast has a skull-like face with beady little peepers set in deep sockets. It looks uncanny rather than terrifying, although it does have a few moments when it seems genuinely threatening in its scenes with Ripley. That could be down to the fact that it is an impressive feat of physical effects, brought to life by nine puppeteers manipulating the huge animatronic figure. Maybe we would have gotten away with the strange design if it wasn’t for two factors that really turned fans against it: It kills the nerd-favourite Alien Queen and its death is unintentionally funny, which leaves the showdown feeling a little flat as we finally get to see Earth in the Alien Universe.

In some ways, the Newborn sums up Alien Resurrection as a whole. Whedon and Jeunet have taken a big heart-pounder of a franchise and grafted new features onto it, making it seem comical and grotesque rather than thrilling or scary. Yet it does have one big thing going for it: Resurrection is a movie that knows it’s a movie and has few ambitions beyond showing the audience a good time. If it wasn’t saddled by the legacy of the first two films, it might have even succeeded.

This is the problem I have with the Alien franchise and Ridley Scott’s original movie in particular. Fans have a habit of taking anything that becomes popular and elevating it to an unreasonably lofty status. Alien has gained this elevated reputation in the sci-fi genre, but let’s not pretend it is anything more profound than a superior slasher set in space. While it is artfully designed, shot, scored, acted, and directed, its characters still make dumb decisions that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Friday the 13th movie.

James Cameron had the right idea, successfully expanding the lore and the universe while giving us a white-knuckle horror thriller. After the joyless Alien 3, Resurrection arguably took it too far in the other direction for many. Jeunet’s film is pure popcorn, but that’s okay. It dares to be fun. Indeed, it looks far better now after the dual debacle of Alien vs Predator mash-ups and Scott’s prequels over-explaining the whole mythos. If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another go. If you start getting angry at any point, just remind yourself: Resurrection is only a movie, and all the better for it.

So there you have it, that concludes our retrospective of the original Alien Quadrilogy! In case you were wondering, this is how we rank the four movies:

Adam 

1. Alien

2. Aliens

3. Alien 3

4. Alien Resurrection

“It’s tight between the first two. Perhaps Aliens is the better all-round action film, but there is something about the original that felt so different. Still love watching it today. A masterpiece.”

Lee

1. Aliens

2. Alien

3. Alien Resurrection

4. Alien 3

“I wrestled with myself over the top two spots here. Ultimately, I had to pick Cameron’s sequel over the original because I’m unable to find any significant faults with it. Scott’s film is iconic but there are problems that I am simply unable to overlook. Resurrection is such a weird film but it gets the nod over Alien 3 because no matter which version you watch, Fincher’s threequel is such an unrelenting bummer.”

You can find all four parts of our Alien retrospective here.

What is your favourite, and how do you rank them? Let us know!