Allergy Resurrection

While I’m somewhat incapacitated with some seasonal allergies, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about the movie I just watched for the first time since it was in theatres 10 years ago: “Alien: Resurrection“. I just read a fairly lengthy interview with Joss Whedon on the Onion’s AV Club and thought I’d revisit what I remembered to be the worst of the Alien “Quadrilogy“, if not one of the worst sci-fi films of all time. Also, I found Alien: Resurrection in the cheap bin at the Best Buy for $12 and it completed the set for me, so what the hell? I didn’t break the bank on this.

The first time I saw Alien: Resurrection, I remember thinking a few things: 1. Ripley’s character was destroyed. Not just killed, the character itself was ruined for all-time, forever and ever. She cannot be brought back for any other sequels again, ever. Not even with a different actor. (ok, maybe a long-lost relative bearing her name could stand-in, but it’d still leave a bad taste and you’d want to look away — and the new character would have had their name changed several generations ago and would only be revealed to be a descendant during a particularly awkward and embarrassing scene, so horrid would that revelation be) 2. The science was even more implausible than in any of the previous films. This says quite a bit about how poor the science in this film was. 3. The new alien iteration was unbelievably bad. Comically bad but in a not funny way. Cringeworthy. This was on top of an already queasy feeling I had from watching what I considered to be a butchering of a franchise that I’d really quite liked. I actually enjoyed Alien 3 quite a bit unlike a lot of other fans.

And now I’m going to drop a spoiler alert. I realize this movie’s been around for awhile now, and anyone who’s reading this has probably already seen the Alien movies and knows what I’m talking about here, so I’m just going to go ahead and divulge plot with wreckless abandon.

How did my original impressions hold up ten years later? First, Ripley’s character was definitely altered and given the script it was fairly understandable and made sense within that context. As a clone given some sort of inherited memories through the alien DNA she was carrying, I can allow for that. I have to give Whedon a little credit here for trying to execute something a little different within the confines of the Alien universe. Whedon’s talent is in writing series and comics and generally doing interesting character treatments within those confines. His treatment of Ripley took her up a notch and imbued her with super-powers not unlike a character in, oh, the X-men. She’s a bonafide mutant — a human-alien chimera, so she’s bound to act a tad weird.

As for the science bits, well, I think the above paragraph kind of gives you an inkling of what we’re dealing with here. There were bright points though. The revealing bit in the middle when Ripley finds room I-7 containing the 7 previous attempts at reincarnating her is actually pretty interesting for the first few minutes. It shows the various failed attempts in differing stages of mutation held in human-sized formaldehyde test-tubes. Disfigured humans with alien tails and the like. It’s creepy and it kind of works. Until the still-living horror-show is discovered and Ripley, in an act of compassion, incinerates it and the rest of the room, the scene is pretty effective.

The genetic experiment, while still implausible in the extreme sort of worked within the story. The other science-fiction implausibility is, like in Whedon’s other space stories, “Firefly” and “Serenity” the apparent lack of distance in space. That was the one thing that never really made sense for me in Firefly: the vastness of space seems to be actually, quite small. I sort of assumed that in Firefly and then Serenity that the amount of space that was actually colonized was quite small. I believe they even explained that somewhat in one of River’s flashbacks. They showed the solar system and a bunch of planets that had been terra-formed somehow and was led to believe that the entirety of that universe was actually a single solar system.

In Alien: Resurrection, that sense of diminutive space is again present. While the USM Auriga was undergoing its experiments, they commented that they were in “unregulated space” (implying distance). Then, after the shit broke loose, we’re informed that the ship was set on a return course to Earth and would be there in a mere 2 hours (cut to a shot of the ship passing Jupiter). OK, I guess we can just allow space travel to be nearly instantaneous, but it really doesn’t give a viewer the impression that we’re dealing with any kind of distance. Some explanation is always nice. Or maybe that’s just me and my particular brand of nerdiness requires extra coddling. In any case, I’m the nerd writing this review and I declare Whedon to be deficient at writing space scenes and travel that make sense on any kind of intellectual level. He just leaves it out, unwilling or unable to deal with it. He’s a pussy when it comes to writing space travel. Prove me wrong, Joss!

It is here that I will make a quick diversion to mention the part of the movie that I did think worked. There was about 10 minutes of film when Ripley rejoins the rogues from the small pirate ship in the hall after their captain had been gutted by one of the aliens. At this point, you’ve got a group of characters that start to interact like characters in a Joss Whedon script. They’re cohesive. They’re kind of interesting. They’re quippy. They’ve got an established tension between them. For 10 minutes, they work together to try to make it to the dock and their ship, The Betty. Then Ripley finds room I-7 and the whole cohesiveness kind of falls apart.

I have to wonder if the director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet was responsible for butchering Whedon’s script or if the script itself was just bad. Some of the action sequences were pretty well done. The underwater sequence with the swimming aliens was pretty neat, if over-long on screen. The characters themselves were not bad and followed the typical Whedonesque team of archetypes. We had the muscle played by a scar-faced Ron Perlman, we had a crack-shot weaponer with an uncanny skill at ricochets played by Gary Dourdan (of CSI fame). We had a crazy scientist portrayed by the always entertaining Brad Dourif. We had a cute and spunky young woman who was more than she appeared in the form of Winona Ryder. To their credit, they did what they could. What the director (or writer) couldn’t seem to do was effectively kill them all properly. C’mon, it’s an Alien movie! The conventions demand that each and every one of them should die in a horrible frightening way. I think Whedon, early in his career made the mistake of liking his characters too much. Or, in the case of Dourdan’s character, not liking them enough to give them a decent death. Some acid on the face? That’s no reason to kill yourself, man.

Anyway, this has gone on long enough, so I’ll get to the final bit. The latest alien iteration. I had forgotten just how bad this part of the movie was. I had literally blocked it out as I do so often with things that aren’t worth being remembered. Ripley’s abducted by a convenient hole in the floor and taken to the alien queen (who’s in pain, Ripley tells us before being swallowed up by the floor panelling). Her chamber is strewn with typically alien biogoop encasing a couple of the ship’s scientists including a crazy Brad Dourif. Dourif’s character, in crazy-person fashion informs Ripley that she’s given the queen a great gift, the ability to birth like a human. Then we’re given a shot of the alien apparently in the throes of labor with a distended belly pouch which is moving about threateningly. This is bad. What comes next is just, frankly, unbelievable. The alien queen gives birth in what is probably the most revolting bit of film I can think of. Think Rosie Perez giving birth during an episode of Will and Grace kind of revolting. With the screaming and the pushing and the sweating and the cursing. I’m surprised there wasn’t a laugh-track as the alien “baby” rips itself out of the queen’s (mommy’s) … womb-pouch and begins making cooing noises. It looks kind of like a cross between Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider and the Elephant Man with some extra long fingers and reverse-jointed “chicken” legs. There’s a brief, tender moment where the new alien coos at momma while Brad Dourif yells crazy stuff from his cocoon on the wall until the new baby gets pissed off and rips a chunk of the alien queen’s head off.

This is bad stuff. Nobody should have to watch this. It’s not bad science-fiction horror. It’s not bad horror. It’s just bad. But wait, it gets worse!

The new alien sees Ripley on the floor and starts making googoo faces at her. It recognizes it’s real momma! This is a tough thing to convey with a skull-headed, bat-nosed, alien face, but the special effects team spared no expense on articulating the most human of expressions on this unwieldy construction of theirs. They must have felt very proud at that moment, watching it mewling and drooling there on screen. Then it notices Brad Dourif still talking and saying crazy stuff and eats his brain affording Ripley a chance to get away.

There’s more. Ripley gets onto the escaping ship as the Auriga approaches earth’s atmosphere. Eventually, the Auriga crashes into a continent and explodes in a huge mushroom cloud visible from space, surely annihilating most of the population on whatever hemisphere that was. Meanwhile. the newborn alien gets onto the escaping ship as well and there’s another sickening scene with it and Ripley as robot-Ryder watches on from the corner, cowering. Then they kill it by breaking a window and we have to watch Nicolas Cage get sucked out of the ship like an egg blown out through a pinhole in its shell for, oh, several minutes, at least. Ripley cries a little because, yes, she feels a bit of motherly sadness at having to kill baby Ghost Rider.

So, after 10 years, I wanted to like this movie more than I did the first time. For those brief 10 minutes or so, I think I did. But really, in the end, I think I just like Joss Whedon a little less.

boolean is listening to: Lightning from the album “Everybody” by The Sea And Cake