Take a director who didn't speak English, a studio desperate to resuscitate one of its most profitable franchises, a writer who later disowned the finished movie (and wasn't afraid to be vocal about it) and what do you get? The weird, gloopy, tonally incongruous Alien: Resurrection, aka the ugly duckling of the Alien franchise, and the one that killed off Ellen Ripley and the xenomorphs for good. Instead of resurrecting the Alien franchise, the fourth Alien film buried it.

"They said the lines... wrong," opined writer Joss Whedon in 2006, years after the film's 1997 release. "And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do." Whedon was biased. Of course he was. He wrote the thing imagining a quip-y, taut little horror movie that mashed Ridley Scott with James Cameron. In short, he imagined Firefly with xenomorphs. ("If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta plague look like a f**king square dance!" exclaims one character in A:R, a line that could easily have come from Firefly.)



What we got was something far more unique. Set 200 years after the events of Alien 3, A:R sees Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) cloned by scientists aboard the USM Auriga using blood samples from Fiorina 161. The reason? They want the Alien Queen she was carrying when she died. With the monster surgically removed from her chest cavity, Ripley 8 (according to the brand on her arm) is considered little more than a "meat by-product" by General Perez (Dan Hedaya, who seems to think he's in Spaceballs 2).

But what a fascinating by-product she is. Tough and unpredictable, she's Ripley, but demonstrably not the Ripley we knew before. She's also the best thing in Alien: Resurrection. Sewn into a brown jumpsuit that's more like a second skin, she's Nietzsche in motion ("Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," the philosopher once wrote) and everything you'd want in a Whedon heroine. One-liners are hocked and butts are kicked, but Ripley 8 is also psychologically complex. Like some kind of comic-book anti-hero, her DNA has been spliced with the xenomorph's, lending her greater strength and agility, but also conflicting loyalties that means for the first time, we're not entirely sure we can trust her.

As with previous entries, Ripley's central to every one of A:R's greatest moments. "I loved the evolution of the character," Weaver has said, and it's not hard to see why she signed on despite the infamously onerous Alien 3 production. She plays an intoxicating range, from snarky quips ("I'm the monster's mother") and slam dunks (she put that basketball in the net for real), to the gut-punching moment she discovers Ripleys 1-7. That last encounter spectacularly drags the franchise into freak show territory - you thought Ripley's life was a circus of horrors before? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Of course, some things never change. Ripley still wakes up in a patriarchal world of power-hungry morons. And though she's surrounded by no fewer than nine male characters, none of them feel fully fleshed out - which is also nothing new. Alien's Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) had a few snappy exchanges, but they were as undeveloped as the crew of the Betty in A:R. The film's far more interested in the relationship between Ripley 8 and Call (Winona Ryder), which develops a romantic subtext over the course of 100 minutes. Amid all the butchery and double-crossing, it's something of an after-thought, but it adds texture nonetheless.

And what of the monsters? "It's not scary," Ryder acquiesced of A:R in 2013, and that's true. This is the least scary of the standalone Alien films. The only exception is a nail-biting underwater sequence, in which our band of characters swim through a submerged level of the USM Auriga, pursued by xenomorphs (as the film's soundtrack announces, 'They Swim'). It's A:R's most impressive addition, shot on a Fox soundstage and worth the admission price (or Blu-ray tag) alone. Alongside the concept of a mutated Ripley, it's proof enough that, despite being four films in, the franchise has fresh ideas aplenty.



What really separates A:R from its predecessors is its morbid sense of humour. Positioning itself as a carnival of weirdness rather than an all-out scare-flick, it amps the gore up to Shakespearean levels and, most shockingly, a number of deaths are played entirely for laughs (see cross-eyed General Perez plucking out the contents of his skull). It's a brave move by French director Jean-Paul Jeunet. In stark contrast to David Fincher's experiences on Alien 3, Jeunet was given free rein to do whatever he wanted (within the $70m budget; the biggest of any of the Alien films), and while he kept most of Whedon's script intact, Jeunet's weird humour is all over Alien: Resurrection.

The franchise had already done restrained horror and all-out action, and A:R's twisted humour is a natural progression that keeps it feeling fresh (if initially dissonant with what went before). Here, the aesthetic is pure fantasy (cinematographer Darius Khondji added silver to the print to give it a metallic edge), and this is the ickiest Alien movie by far - the xenomorphs appear to be constantly leaking, which was perhaps not quite the desired effect.

It all comes to a head with the newborn, A:R's most contentious addition. Just as Ripley inherited alien qualities from the cloning, the Alien Queen inherited certain human qualities - namely a womb, from which erupts a towering, bone-white abomination with dark, soulful eyes and a pixie snout. It's both laughable and horrifying, but it works as an extension of the franchise's slow-unravelling of the xeno's biology and as a final tragic mirror to Ripley 8. They're both crossbred monsters, it's just that one of them is far prettier and less inclined to wantonly murder. And in destroying the newborn, Ripley 8 finally confirms whose side she's really on.



If Alien was sinewy like a xenomorph and Aliens was pumped-up like the Alien Queen, Alien: Resurrection is as grotesque and mesmerising as the newborn. Whedon may have hated it, but he's hardly the first writer to disown his work. (Besides, he went on to make Firefly, which features just about the exact same set of characters - Johner is now Jayne, with Reavers standing in for xenos and so forth).

"It's kind of like a really cool art film," Winona Ryder recently surmised of Alien: Resurrection, and she's right. Like art, it's unapologetic and singular in its vision, and it's a shame that the enticing open ending never developed into an immediate sequel. It's also odd that Marvel man Whedon isn't a fan - while the previous Alien films were all sci-fi horrors, there's something distinctly comic-book-y about Alien: Resurrection. Perhaps it was just a little ahead of its time.

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