Alien Resurrection: what could have been
On paper, a visionary French director and a witty young screenwriter should have revived the Alien series; in practice, the 1997 film left both of them, and many fans, unsatisfied.
The fourth Alien film had an unusual starting problem: its heroine was dead. Alien 3 had ended with Ellen Ripley sacrificing herself, so any continuation needed a way to bring Sigourney Weaver back. The answer was cloning. Set some two centuries later, Alien Resurrection opens aboard a military research ship where scientists have grown a new Ripley from preserved samples in order to retrieve the alien queen she was carrying. This Ripley is stronger, stranger and partly alien herself, and she is not entirely sure whose side she is on.
Two very different sensibilities
The screenplay was written by Joss Whedon, then known mainly as a screenwriter and script doctor and on the verge of his breakthrough with Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television. His script leaned on fast, sardonic dialogue and a ragtag crew of smugglers, the Betty, whose banter many viewers now see as an early sketch of the ensemble he would later build in Firefly.
The director was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, making his first Hollywood film after Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, both co-directed with Marc Caro. Jeunet’s style was grotesque, playful and visually dense, with a taste for the absurd. He brought along regular collaborators, including Dominique Pinon, and gave the film a distinctive, slightly sickly look.
Each of those sensibilities might have worked. The trouble, as most accounts of the film suggest, is that they pulled in different directions. Whedon has said publicly over the years that he was unhappy with the result, and his complaint, as widely reported, was less about rewritten scenes than about tone: lines intended as quick, dry humour were played broadly, and moments meant to feel tense came across as odd. Jeunet, for his part, was working in a second language within a studio franchise with fixed expectations.
Ideas that didn’t make it
The clearest gap concerns the ending. Earlier versions of the story reportedly imagined a longer finale that brought the survivors, and the threat, down to Earth. The theatrical cut ends with the ship’s arrival and little more; the later special edition adds a brief coda over a ruined Paris that hints at what a larger climax might have looked like. The film’s most notorious invention, the human-alien hybrid that Ripley confronts in the last act, also divided audiences, with many finding it more pitiful than frightening.
A film worth revisiting
Alien Resurrection is still the least loved of the original four films, but it has its defenders. The underwater sequence is a genuine set piece, Weaver’s performance as a Ripley who is no longer quite human is bold, and Winona Ryder’s Call gives the film a moral centre. It is a fascinating case of a talented writer and a talented director making a film that neither of them quite recognised as theirs.