Alien: Resurrection (1997)

The laboratory has a new Ripley. She has some reasonable complaints.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet · Written by Joss Whedon · Approximately 109 minutes
Starring: Sigourney Weaver · Winona Ryder · Ron Perlman · Dominique Pinon

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA ratings remain unscored. Explore the Alien collection.

After three films built around different kinds of pressure, Alien: Resurrection introduces a different kind of appetite. Faces loom, bodies misbehave and the camera seems interested in how unpleasant a human expression can become at close range. Jean-Pierre Jeunet brings a grotesque comic sensibility to a series whose monsters already have an unusually intimate relationship with anatomy.

Two centuries after Ripley's death, a military project clones her to recover an alien queen. The resulting woman has inherited more than the researchers intended. The official synopsis makes that starting point explicit: this is a newly created Ripley, rather than the original simply restored intact. The distinction is the film's best opportunity.

Before you watch

Severe gore, invasive reproductive horror, medical exploitation and grotesquely altered bodies. People are abducted and used as hosts without consent. There is also sexualised menace, crude dialogue and brief nudity. Specific deaths involving mercy and parent-like attachment are disclosed separately. The BBFC record supports the strong bloody violence and horror assessment; the scene account corroborates the forced experiments and laboratory sequence.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

A surviving, severely deformed Ripley clone asks to die; Ripley kills her and destroys the laboratory.
The human–alien Newborn is sucked through a small breach into space while reaching towards Ripley, who has caused the breach.

Weaver gets to become unfamiliar

Weaver's performance makes a useful break with the earlier films. Her guardedness has a different texture: less the exhausted professionalism of somebody who has survived too much, more the amused distance of somebody uncertain how human she feels. The researchers want a specimen. She makes their confidence in ownership look increasingly ridiculous.

That change allows the film to explore identity through physical behaviour. Ripley's body can be impressive and alienating at the same time. The pleasure of seeing her unsettle the men around her is complicated by the fact that the institution made her for a purpose she never agreed to serve.

Winona Ryder's Call supplies a more anxious presence. The contrast gives the film a relationship to build around while everyone else projects bravado, cruelty or eccentricity. It is more promising than treating every returning franchise element as an automatic source of emotional continuity.

When the grotesque has a purpose

Jeunet's style suits a world in which the distinction between clean science and dirty commerce has collapsed. Military personnel and mercenaries appear to belong to the same grubby economy. The laboratory is an industrial workplace whose raw materials happen to be people. That makes the visual ugliness more than decoration.

The film's most effective horror takes the researchers' indifference seriously. Bodies carry the evidence of decisions made elsewhere, by people who can describe cruelty as a procedure. Its strongest emotional passage asks what a successful experiment owes to the failures that made it possible. The precise scene belongs behind the spoiler boundary, but the question is central to the recommendation.

There is also a strong physical idea in the submerged pursuit. Water changes movement, visibility and the availability of air; a familiar creature becomes a different practical problem. The sequence has a sense of sustained effort that some of the louder confrontations lack. It earns attention through staging rather than through the novelty of another organism alone.

When the joke gets in the way

The difficulty is tonal consistency. Whedon's screenplay and Jeunet's direction give the film plenty of broad personalities, but abrasive banter does not always make those personalities interesting. The mercenary ensemble is visually memorable before it becomes emotionally substantial. Some exchanges seem to want the viewer enjoying a rude joke while the surrounding material asks for disgust or dread.

Black comedy can sharpen horror by exposing indifference. It can also drain a scene of its consequences. Resurrection moves between those effects without always controlling the transition. Sexualised hostility is particularly awkward when a woman appears mainly to give a man something coarse to say. The larger interest in bodily autonomy does not automatically repair the framing of every exchange.

The theatrical version runs approximately 109 minutes. A later Special Edition changes the opening and ending, among other material; its additional footage is not assumed throughout this draft. The version history records that distinction.

Corny DNA

This entry has deliberate camp: extravagant faces, oily textures, swaggering grotesques and humour willing to be extremely silly. That can be enjoyable on its own terms. The film also wants its bodily suffering taken seriously, and the friction between those ambitions is a real weakness rather than an automatic cult virtue. Scores remain unassigned.

Verdict

For the curious — proposed. Weaver's altered Ripley, the disturbing laboratory material and the underwater sequence provide substantial reasons to investigate. The uneven humour and thin ensemble keep the recommendation narrower than “another good Alien film.” Best approached by viewers interested in an abrasive stylistic experiment and able to tolerate severe body horror. Its oddness makes it worth discussing; it does not make every choice work.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

The failures and the offspring

Ripley finds the earlier clones, including a living one who begs for death; she kills her and burns the laboratory. The queen later gives birth to the Newborn, which treats Ripley as its mother. Ripley defeats it by creating a breach through which it is painfully drawn into space. Call has set the Auriga to crash on Earth, and the remaining survivors escape aboard the Betty. These events are corroborated in the scene account.

The laboratory gives the new Ripley an ethical relationship to her own existence. The previous bodies are people to whom something was done, rather than a display of entertaining design failures. Her response briefly lets the film's cruelty acquire emotional weight.

The Newborn extends that problem. Its apparent attachment makes the final killing distressing even though it is dangerous. Ripley survives by refusing a relationship that the experiment has imposed on her. The sequence can be read as a grotesque continuation of the film's interest in manufactured family, though the creature's presentation may also strike a viewer as ungainly spectacle.

The draft follows the theatrical ending; the alternate Earth material in the Special Edition should not be described as part of every release. Likewise, the returning Ripley is a clone with altered biology and traces of memory. The film's identity problem becomes less interesting if the review quietly treats her as an unchanged person who happened to come back.

Sources

Critical judgments are provisional editorial readings. This newly requested entry does not establish the owner's viewing history or approval.