Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.
Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.
Seen before?: A few times in the late '90s - I estimate once from the VHS release and at least two more times via pay cable. I don't think that I've seen it at all in the 21st century, so definitely never from this disc.
What strange beast is Alien: Resurrection, anyway? If you're going to follow up an unrelentingly grim experience like Alien³, I can understand the impulse to course-correct into something a touch lighter. And, on the face of it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems like a good guy for that - Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children both achieve a tricky balance, indulging in fierce grotesquerie whilst maintaining a puckish, joyful spirit. But then, his subsequent career doubles down on the whimsy to rapidly diminishing ends, so maybe Marc Caro was the balancing influence he needed. And here, working with a Joss Whedon script that exhibits all the typical hallmarks of Whedonism, Jeunet gets garish. No, scratch that - he made a full-on goddamn cartoon.
Complementing the smartass personality of the script with a similarly outsized visual and performative lunacy seems interesting in theory. In other situations, it could work wonders. Here, though, the overblown comic-book mania, all tight sweaty bug-eyed closeups and odd canted angles, exists at odds with the studied writerly cool. (Not that I'm letting Whedon off the hook here - as usual, nothing bad in the film is his fault according to him, despite the presence of clumsy, possibly undeliverable, unmistakably Whedon dialogue like, "I am not the man with whom to fuck!") This turns Alien: Resurrection into a distended thing that works only in brief moments and flights of loopy inspiration, bits where the Venn diagrams of the disparate parts find a sliver of overlap.
Take, for instance, the bit with where Dan Hedaya, as hirsute human cartoon General Perez, straight-up eats a damn lemon. It's an interesting bit and instructive for the film. It occurs during an otherwise-dull dialogue exchange; Hedaya and Michael Wincott are dancing around the details of some illegal deal they've arranged, being kept vague for the purposes of silly late-film revelations. Meanwhile, there's the bright yellow of that lemon peel beaming a visual contrast to the silver, orange, khaki-brown and rust-brown that comprise the rest of the scene. The look of the film in general deserves comment - while it presages the orange/teal obsession of modern desaturated blockbusters, this practically blazes with light, with every surface rendered shiny, hot and reflective. All the better to illuminate small details, like that lemon - a sore thumb attached to a broken hand - and most of what is memorable in Alien: Resurrection is similar bits of little business amid the miasma: Dominique Pinon tearing his wheelchair apart to build a gun, Sigourney Weaver casually tossing up a basketball to make a behind-the-back basket, the spectacularly goofy acts of hypergore, a full-body cotton surgical dressing being pierced and shed like an amniotic sac, Brad Dourif pontificating in front of imprisoned Xenomorphs with his chin jutted out in a burlesque of delirious weirdness.
The casting is crucial (aside from poor miscast Winona Ryder) and a key reason why, for all its deficits, Alien: Resurrection is oddly, compulsively watchable. The cast is stacked with memorable, visually distinctive character actors - beyond Wincott, Hedaya and Dourif, there's also Ron Perlman, J.E. Freeman, Leland Orser; as the Easter-Island profile of Perlman, the sunken malicious grin of Freeman or the hyperventilating panic of Orser seem like they should be framed as splash panels anyway, they help the comic-book feel of the direction slide down a bit easier. Then, of course, there's Weaver. As in Alien³, she's the glue that keeps the film from crumbling into its component parts. Her Ripley here, cloned from a sample salvaged off Fiorina 161, is stranger, more ambiguous, a hybrid creature who is unsure of her purpose or capabilities but knows she's dangerous and relishes that. This allows Weaver to play much of this with a delicious sinister bemusement, a note she throws her lean, towering frame into with gusto. While some of the hardass stuff in the script doesn't come off, everything Weaver gets is delivered with aplomb, whether calmly sizing up a knife-wielding Ryder or threatening to rip out Perlman's tongue. Yet, as before, there is left room for other emotional beats, here expressed through the Ripley clone's uncertainty about herself and confusion over foggy memories. This culminates in the film's best scene and maybe only one where the screenplay and direction truly mesh, the discovery of the clone room; the sequence shows off Jeunet's kitsch-as-surrealism ethos at its most productively nasty, with its jarred mystery fetuses, grotesque warped mutations and suicidal quasi-Ripley with approximately a thousand tubes leading in and out of it. It also gets Weaver's best work, a heady mixture of betrayal, heartache and bewilderment. That the scene culminates in a frenzied explosion of violence is no surprise; that it turns out to be a mass act of angry mercy is.
Ripley's hybrid status is ultimately mirrored by the new Alien Queen extracted from her at the beginning and its offspring, a genuine human-Xenomorph crossbreed. But the new live-birth reproductive system granted the Queen neuters all the dangerous aspects of the Xenomorph - about the only good thing to come from that idea is a cocooned Dourif yelling marvelously ripe dialogue about, "HER WOMB." And the offspring is.... well, I'm not sure where the best place to go with this would have been, but a furious dewy-eyed infant with Marfan syndrome seems like not the best option. The object lesson, I think, is: Some hybrids are better than others. I wonder if the divided makers of Alien: Resurrection intended that.
