Alien Resurrection (1997)

By 1997, the Alien franchise had already travelled a considerable distance from Ridley Scott's claustrophobic 1979 original. James Cameron had transformed it into a full-throttle action spectacle with Aliens, and David Fincher's Alien³ had attempted a grimmer, more stripped-back return to horror, to decidedly mixed results. By the time the fourth instalment arrived, 20th Century Fox and Brandywine Productions were working with a franchise that had, by most accounts, already painted itself into a corner, not least because the previous film had seemingly closed the book on its central character entirely. The solution the studio landed on, cloning Ellen Ripley two hundred years after her death and using her DNA to resurrect the Xenomorph threat aboard a military research vessel, is the sort of high-concept swing that sounds audacious in a pitch room and considerably harder to pull off on screen.

The director brought in for that swing was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French filmmaker best known at that point for the visually eccentric, darkly comic work he had made with co-director Marc Caro, including Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995). It was, on the face of it, an unusual choice for a Hollywood studio genre picture, and the pairing of Jeunet's distinctive sensibility with a script by Joss Whedon made for a production that was, at the very least, unlike anything else in the franchise. Running at 109 minutes, the film is no lightweight effort, and the ambition behind it is not really in question. Whether that ambition was well served is another matter altogether, and one this site has a fairly clear view on.

Sigourney Weaver, who had played Ripley across all three previous instalments (you can find thoughts on her earlier work in the series via the Aliens and Alien³ reviews), returns here in what is, on paper, a genuinely different version of the character, one that is part-human, part-alien, and morally ambiguous in ways the earlier films never quite attempted. Alongside her is Winona Ryder, then one of the more recognisable names in American cinema, playing a synthetic crew member travelling with a gang of mercenary smugglers. That ensemble is filled out by reliable character actors including Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, and the French stalwart Dominique Pinon, a Jeunet regular whose presence underlines just how much the director was drawing on his own repertoire. The cast, on paper, is polished but unremarkable for a production of this scale, though whether the material gives them anything worthwhile to work with is the central question.

Honestly? It’s the worst film in the Alien franchise by a mile. It’s tonally bizarre, ugly to look at, and just flat-out boring. The concept of cloning Ripley and giving her alien DNA is Weirdly fascinating on paper, but in practice it’s a mess. The script is laughable, the characters are annoying, and despite a decent cast, everyone feels wasted. I’ve genuinely fallen asleep trying to watch this three separate times. That’s not even hyperbole. It’s like someone tried to make a quirky French art film with Xenomorphs and forgot to make it engaging or remotely scary. And don't even get me started on that grotesque human-alien hybrid at the end, what were they thinking? Same thing that ruined Romulus for me. It’s all just so soulless and odd. A fitting title, because whatever made Alien special has fully resurrected as a shambling corpse here.

I find it hard to argue with any of that, honestly. There's a version of this film that could have worked, a properly strange, auteur-driven science fiction horror with a compromised Ripley at its centre, and you can just about see the outline of it beneath all the mess. But good intentions and an interesting premise only get you so far. For a franchise that built its reputation on genuine dread, there's precious little of it here, and even fans of Jeunet's quirkier instincts, myself included, will struggle to reconcile his style with the material. If this sort of science fiction horror is your thing and you're looking for something that actually delivers on the genre's promise, The Serpent and the Rainbow is a far better use of your time. Alien Resurrection, as a title, turns out to be its own best joke. Whatever it was trying to bring back to life, it didn't quite manage it.

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

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Alien Resurrection (1997) on YouTube

Where to watch

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