Subject: Review: Alien: Resurrection (1997)

From: "Luke Buckmaster" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Apr 1998 04:26:40 GMT

REVIEW: Alien Resurrection (1998)

by Luke Buckmaster

1 star out of 5

I wont even pretend that I have seen the other 3 alien films.  I saw glimpses
of Alien and Aliens and fragments of Alien 3, but I have by no means actually
sat down and watched any of them.  So take my opinion from an unbiased and
impartial perspective: Alien Resurrection is not worth the large bag of lollies
I was munching into after a hard days work.

I didnt just dislike it so much because the plot was awful; most of the acting
was very average or the special effects got tiresome after 5 minutes of painful
viewing  but also the fact that every tedious ingredient thrown in attempts to
give this pointless dribble some meaning.

Sigourney Weaver, whos role in Alien earned her an Academy Award nomination,
plays the character of Ripley, who died fighting against extraterrestrial scum
in Alien 3.  200 years later, scientists use a sample of blood found at the
site of her death to recreate Ripley - including the alien that was stuck inside
her.  In no time they remove the alien from her body and separate the two; yet
Ripley is now not completely human, possessing strange amounts of strength and
being able to withhold greater pain than a normal being.  Im sure someone can
explain exactly why this is so, but for now well just ignore it and move on.

Why, you ask, would Ripley and the alien inside her be recreated?  Well, the
smart little lab researchers believed that they would be able to discover many
advancements in science from studying the alien creature.  These were the same
people who said they could control the alien and that their was no danger in
their research.  They (yawn) were wrong.

It doesnt take a genius to figure out that the rest of the film is a continuous
cat and mouse chase between the humans who die off one by one and the aliens who
open their mouths on every possible occasion to show off their frightfully scary
un-flossed teeth.

Theres a little saying that goes something like this: If youre going to make
a bad film, do it well.  I have seen plenty of disappointing and underachieving
movies, but they are not the ones that really bother me.  Alien Resurrection, a
good example of a film that really gets up my nose, is not so much a
discouraging experience but an off putting one.

There is no way to describe why the Australian MA rating was given to this film
other than unnecessary and repulsive gore, which attempts to distract us from
the wandering-but-not-going-anywhere plot.  In one scene my stomach churned as I
witnessed a mawkish looking alien put its hand on a characters head and
literally ripped most of his face off.  Another one featured Ripley sticking a
knife through her hand just to impress someone she was talking to.  Fair enough
if it were in a horror film or even if it bared any significance to the story,
but this is unfortunately not the case, and this sort of bizarre gore is
inexcusable.

If you think Im struggling to find one good aspect about the film, then you
thought right.  One exciting scene is a credit (and the only part remotely worth
seeing) to the film, in which an alien chases two men (one a cripple) up a tall
ladder with interesting results.  But of course after that thrilling scene Alien
Resurrection had no problem in returning to its pathetically low standard, and
ends up crashing into the shores of movie dullness more often than Japanese
kamikaze jet fighters fall off their skis.

So in a film where the one liners come as bad as Earth man, what a shit hole
and the primary means for one mans strategic attack is to bounce bullets off
walls to hit an opponent, its no wonder why Alien: Resurrection turned out to be
as off putting and clumsy as it is.

Oh, and in case youre wondering about my bag of lollies  the less I enjoy a
film, the more I eat.  So all the lollies were gone in 15 minutes; but however
empty the bag turned out to be, it was still a long way ahead of the movie

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