Alien: Resurrection

Seeing as I'd watched Alien 3 recently, I thought it was a good opportunity to watch the fourth film in the quadrilogy again (the correct word is actually 'tetralogy', but no one uses that). I've actually always liked this film, although when you compare it to the first two movies, and ask whether it successfully continues the franchise, you have to be disappointed. They are really scraping the barrel here. Ripley (along with the aliens) is quite conveniently resurrected. Her character bears almost no resemblance to the interesting figure of the first two films, though. She is now 'part alien'. There is no longer any attempt to slowly introduce the aliens, to terrify us with them again. Instead, the film gives us a series of fairly gruesome and complicated deaths, but we've pretty much seen it all before. There's only so many ways an alien can sneak up on someone and kill them. This film was written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, however, which must account for the bits of originality that are here, and the sense of humour involved. There is a slightly annoying comic book look to the film, which I can assume comes from Jeunet. Watch out for the underwater scene, which is about as contrived as you can get, trying desperately to show us the aliens in a new light. This film is good fun, despite some bad acting by Winona Ryder, but when you compare it to its predecessors, which inevitably you have to, you can't help but feel that this was an empty exercise.