“No. Alien: Resurrection is far worse.”
“You’re kidding me. The third one is worse than the fourth one.”
“I don’t think so.”
This is a somewhat reduced (I did not use the word ‘redacted’ I’ll have you know) version of a conversation I had with Tom after my son and I watched Alien3. His contention was that the fourth movie, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is worse than the third movie, directed by David Fincher. He makes a good point, in that with David Fincher, you can see where he is headed. As crappy as Alien3 is, you can see his filmmaking style starting to develop. Up until that he was doing commercials and music videos. With Jean-Pierre Jeunet you have a director who had already made City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. So he’s not exactly emerging as a filmmaker. Sure, he would go on to make one of my favorite movies a couple of years later, that being Amelie, but he knew what he was doing, presumably. Maybe he didn’t understand the vagaries of Hollywood, but he could shoot coherently.
Man, Alien: Resurrection gives you no hint of that.
Tom is not wrong. I still do think that Alien3 is a worse movie, but only by a hair. The problem here is that I’m evaluating based on watching it with my son, and we had a good time watching that movie. We laughed at the silliness of it. We goofed on it. He came out to the kitchen during my conversation with Tom and talked about these things rather joyfully. There is a certain pleasure in watching a bad movie. Anyone who has listened to a Kellywand-opsis knows this.
But Alien: Resurrection is just a slog. Watching it is utterly joyless. I kind of like what Sigourney Weaver is doing in tweaking her character, but there is little to balance this. She has become harder. More abrasive. Which is justifiable when you realize who she is at this point. The problem is that it doesn’t help the movie. There is almost nobody to root for. My son liked a couple of characters a little bit, but had no real emotional connection with them, and often didn’t see how their actions were justifiable. And Winona Ryder just seems to be doing a wide-eyed, “What’s that again?” performance. She really should have paid attention to the humanity Lance Henriksen brought to Bishop. Even Ian Holm’s icy Ash had layers. She’s just out of her depth.
When we got to the part where the new creature was birthed by the queen, my son was pretty much done with the movie. “I hate this character,” he said. “It’s disgusting and stupid.”
He was right. There is an elegance to the way the aliens are designed. This looks like an alien Stuart Gordon made for one of his movies, and then dumped acid on, and then put in a giant microwave oven. There are moments that could have worked, emotional moments between the creature and Ripley, but they don’t really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
On to Prometheus. God help us.
-xtien
“Don’t push me, little Call. You hang with us for a while, you’ll find out I am not the man with whom to fuck!”