Alien Resurrection (1997)

I have fallen asleep watching Alien Resurrection three separate times. Three. That is not hyperbole, and it is not a humble brag about a busy schedule. It is a genuine indictment of a film so inert, so joyless, so bafflingly misjudged that my brain has simply decided, on three separate occasions, that unconsciousness was the better option. I finally forced myself through it in full, and I wish I hadn't bothered.

Here is the maddening thing: the premise is genuinely interesting. Cloning Ripley, splicing her DNA with the Xenomorphs, exploring what that does to her identity and her relationship with the creatures she has spent three films trying to destroy. On paper, that is a fascinating place to take the franchise. In practice, it is an absolute shambles. The script is laughable in all the wrong ways, the characters are irritating rather than compelling, and a cast that should be more than capable of carrying a sci-fi horror film is left flailing with nothing worth doing. Everyone feels wasted. Every single one of them.

The tone is where it really falls apart for me. There is this strange, arch, almost campy quality to the whole thing, like someone genuinely tried to make a quirky French art film that happened to feature Xenomorphs. I can see what they were going for, and I can even respect the ambition in a vague, abstract sort of way. But ambition without execution is just a mess, and this is a mess. It is not scary. It is not funny enough to work as dark comedy. It is not weird enough to work as surrealism. It occupies this no man's land where nothing lands, and the whole film just sits there, ugly to look at and dull to experience.

And then there is that hybrid creature at the end. I do not want to dwell on it because frankly it upsets me, not in the way good horror upsets you, but in the way a truly baffling creative decision upsets you. What were they thinking? It is grotesque without being frightening, pitiful without being moving. It just sits there as a monument to how badly this film misunderstands what made the original creature so terrifying. I had a similar problem with Alien: Romulus, actually, that same instinct to push things further in ways that strip the Xenomorph of everything that made it work. At least Romulus managed to be engaging for stretches of its runtime.

Going back and watching Alien (1979) after sitting through this is a genuinely humbling experience. That film is so controlled, so patient, so confident in what it is doing. Every decision serves the dread. Here, the decisions seem to serve nothing. And while Aliens took the franchise somewhere completely different in terms of tone and genre, it did so with absolute conviction. Resurrection has no such conviction. It dithers. It smirks. It mistakes weirdness for depth.

I have made my peace with Alien³, which I know is a controversial position. That film has real problems, but it has atmosphere and a genuine point of view. This has neither. Whatever made Alien special, whatever quality of sustained menace and claustrophobic dread, it does not survive here. The title is almost cruelly ironic: resurrection implies something coming back to life. What we actually get is a shambling corpse, going through the motions.

One and a half stars. Avoid it, or, apparently, let it put you to sleep. Either way, you will not miss much.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1997  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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