Alien Resurrection - is it really so bad?

I needed to tidy, I needed to cook soup. I needed distraction that enabled me to lie under my duvet on the sofa and not do anything.

Not fancying another dose of Hawk the Slayer, I put Alien Resurrection on, which was sitting neglected next to it on a particularly dusty part of the shelf. I thought I might try and watch it with fresh eyes, and see if it is truly as bad as I remembered.


Alien is a classic piece of atmospheric, and let us not forget, sexual, horror. Aliens is a crash bang action fest where the extended cut should be avoided. And Fincher's Alien 3 gets slated by many, but I rather like it thanks to its strong cast and oily, greasy vibe. Where does Alien 4 fit in?

Needless to say, even taking a charitable view, it is comfortably the worst of the 4. Again, it's a strong cast with it's cultish crew of Ron Perlman, Dominic Pinon, and Michael Wincott, and Winona Ryder is not so really out of place. But it's script writer, a certain Josh Whedon, is. "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!" is symptomatic of the "yoof interest" awful dialogue that finds its way into the script. Add to this the endlessly clanged desire to explore Ripley's historic desire for motherhood results in a clearly not giving a toss Sigourney Weaver creeping around like a genetically engineered incestuous abuser, muttering in am dram fashion when she isn't cosying up to xenomorphs for some borderline interspecies nookie.

"I'm the monster's mother..." "You mean....my baby?..." Weaver breathes, and the audience giggles, turning into outright cackles when Brad Dourif's signature oddball introduces "The Newborn", the human-alien iceberg that sinks the movie in many more pieces that the Titanic went down in. Looking like a heavily KY'd Scooby Doo villain, the brain eating space pug dog roars, whimpers and coos through 'emotional' scenes with Weaver that plunge the depths of emetic bathos.

And then we have Jeunet's direction. It seems to me that he feels pretty early on in the piece that his chances of making a visceral masterpiece have been fatally compromised, and so decides to lather the gore on and seemingly stick cameras down people's throats on several occasions, while trying to fit in a bit of humour such as spaceship General chap Dan Hedaya giving a cornball salute before picking his cerebellum out of an alienised hole in the back of his skull. But the nadir is the scene where clone number 8 Ripley meets the previous failure versions of herself, seemingly including Captain Caveman in a jar; and Joey Deacon clone strapped to a bed dribbling "kill me" before meeting a humane and painless death at the end of a..er...flamethrower.

"Kill Me?" "Kill Us" chanted the audience.