It's very easy to determine when a movie franchise has gone on long enough. You know what I mean - that key moment when the series just nasty turn and practically "jumps the shark" or something along those lines. It is never, ever pretty, and yet many of us still make the trek to the theaters to go see it at least once. It's like a train wreck that you can't help staring at even though you know in your brain that you probably shouldn't be so into it.
And yet you keep watching.
It's a shame when a movie sequel feels this way. Despite how much geeks like myself have learned to fear the Hollywood sequel, one can't help but hope against hope that the new movie will still add something of value to the story (instead of the franchise alone) and so we go out and see it.
I saw this one and still had high hopes even though there were clearly some major things against the movie in terms of casting and potential plot. Still, it's never a crime to hope, right?
Alien Resurrection is the fourth (and perhaps last?) movie in the Alien franchise of movies. It takes place more than 2 centuries after the events of Alien 3 and somehow it still features Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) - at least a clone of her. Somehow scientists were not only able to clone her but the alien embryo that had been implanted in her original body. Of course this was a bad idea somehow since Ellen's DNA became mixed up with the alien DNA and both creatures were significantly altered by this development.
This all happens on a slaving ship of sorts that kidnaps people and uses them as host bodies for aliens embryos. Of course trying to control these near-perfect killing machines is a pretty bad idea and eventually their captive aliens escape and wreck havoc on the ship. Again it falls to Ripley to turn the tide, even though she's no longer quite human.
It's interesting to note that this movie was actually based on a screenplay by Joss Whedon, a fairly big name now in terms of science fiction and fantasy writing. And yet things just turned out so weird, it all didn't quite make sense to me.
The biggest issue I had was the fact that they found a way to bring Ripley back after she had jumped into a vat of molten metal. She was dead already and had more than served her duty for the franchise so why were the producers so afraid of making another Alien movie without her? Hollywood really needs to grow up and stop antics like this which over abuse what was initially a great character. I think Ripley's time really ended after Aliens - anything beyond that was a bit too much for me personally. She was near perfect there and everything beyond that was just...extra crunchy bits.
Then we get the Alien trope in the form of the artificial human. In the past it was Ash, then Bishop and now we got...Winona Ryder? This was definitely not a movie that did anything to help her revive her career. She just ended up being this weird, rather mousy Call android whose true value I never really got.
As much as I did appreciate how the concept of hybridization for the aliens was really explored in this movie, it also generated some of the ugliest Aliens that I had ever seen. One of the coolest things about these impossible xenomorphs was their eerie, eyeless smooth head structure. Instead we get this odd alien hybrid that had some form of human features that so didn't work.
Overall, I felt this movie didn't do much for the overall franchise and the story at its heart given how most of the concepts here were just blatant rehashes of what the studio folks thought were the strongest elements of the franchise to date. It was a truly disappointing attempt at extending the life of a dying series but then I guess there were still some fans who found this movie rather interesting. A very select few of them anyway.
Alien Resurrection gets 1.5 drops of acidic human hybrid blood out of a possible 5.
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