Hammerman Ikon

Hammerman Ikon Film Guide

Alien Resurrection
1997
*
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Brad Dourif, Leland Orser, Dan Hedaya, J. E. Freeman, Kim Flowers, Raymond Cruz

The fourth instalment in the Alien franchise doesn't even bother to set up a proper story before it unleashes mayhem. 200 years after Alien³, a group of spaceborne scientists clone Ripley into a superhuman, take out the baby alien inside her and let it breed. Why? Nevermind, none of it matters 30 minutes in when it's business as usual; the aliens are loose and they kill everyone on their way, including a ragged group of mercenaries who arrive on the spaceship at the wrong moment. Jean-Pierre Jeunet made his name with eccentric fantasy films (Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children), but his Hollywood debut offers committee filmmaking at its worst. Joss Whedon's mechanical script assembles a cast of characters, none of whom deserve to survive. Jeunet, in turn, takes each cliché and each line of cheesy dialogue at face value, without the slightest sense of humour or irony. Predictably there's plenty of gore but, thanks to inept direction and John Frizzell's unsubtle score, no sense of terror or dread.