MUBI

After re-watching all four Alien flicks practically back-to-back I feel like I need to reassess my opinion of Resurrection. When I first saw this (1998-99) I was a budding cinephile and was more than a little pretentious with my opinions.

Is it weird? Yes, absolutely. It feels like City of Lost Children in space. Is A:R Ripley completely different from the previous three versions of the character? Again, yes but (a) it’s not really the same character, is it? and (b) it feels like a natural evolution for the character. After years of being pitted against the xenomorphs against her will she’s become this battle-hardened misanthrope. The way they chocked it up to her being a strange amalgam of the xenomorph and Ripley, however, was ingenious.

Jeunet’s weird visual sensibilities and Whedon’s unique storytelling show through in almost every scene. Plus, there are so many subtle (and not-so subtle) similarities between Jeunet’s previous work (City of Lost Children & Delicatessen) as well as Whedon’s future work (the crew of the Betty feels like a precursor to that of the Serenity and the United Systems Military feels an awful lot like the Alliance Military). I feel like this flick has gotten better with age. At the very least it has aged much better than Alien 3. Plus, to me, Resurrection’s vision of the xenomorphs (the nest scene in particular) is much more Giger-esque than the poorly animated dog-beast in Alien 3.

Alien: Resurrection has all the hallmarks one would expect from a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet: the peculiar brand of humor that is entirely his own, the familiar actors from previous films, even the color pallete of the cinematography—the greens, browns, etc. Why someone handed him the keys to direct Alien: Resurrection in the first place was beyond me. He’s not the one of the usual suspects. Based on the movies in his ouevre, I would say he was a terrible choice by the studio. All the same, it could have been fun, right? The absurd, whimsical, macabre of Jeunet doing a spin on the Alien franchise? More than anything, this film suffers from being too much like a Jeunet film with all its idiosyncrasies. It is tragically torn between fulfilling what people think it should be as an Alien film and the type of film Jeunet likes to create. I knew this going into it, but still held onto dear hope that it would be a fun mess at the very least. Well… thus ends Jeunet’s brief flirtation with Hollywood, and not only that, manages to carve out an arguably permanent spot in the Alien canon as the biggest stinker too.

/****star