Gist of this is 200 or so years after Ripley died, she and the queen Xenomorph that was inside her in Alien3 are brought back to life to harvest this bioweapon. Yeah, again with the bioweapon stuff. Now Ripley is upgraded to human/alien hybrid clone status. She basically has Matrix powers. She and a group of space pirates are trapped on a spacecraft with 12 aliens. They are trying to kill everyone so the queen can make it to Earth and do her thing down there.
Love a good basketball scene out of nowhere, which this film has. Ripley has some fundamentals, can dunk, and has acid blood. At 5'11, I'd take take her in the first round if I were a WNBA GM. I remember seeing an interview with Sigourney Weaver and she claimed she made that shot she threw behind her head from 30 feet out on the first take. Looked it up and apparently true, which shocked Ron Perlman, causing him to lose it.
From Bloody Disgusting: “I watched her training for this sequence, and they were rehearsing this little thing for a month. She never made it once. The camera’s rolling. I’m in the shot where she’s walking away and it goes in.” It indeed would be shocking, I'm sure. However, they were able to cut his reaction out and the shot was able to stay in the movie without being faked.
Here's the cast... We've got Sigourney Weaver back from the dead as Ripley. Winona Ryder as the smaller, whinier droid version of Ripley (more or less). The always fantastic Ron Perlman. Perlman plays a great pervy creep. This was sort of his modus operandi back then. One-on-one banter during basketball, then, at one point, Ripley asks, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” He replies, “I'll get you off... maybe not the boat.” So naughty!
This movie has a few feels, believe it or not. First we have this horrible bit where the scientists put the eggs in front of these miners to impregnate them with the Xenomorph embryos. Cold blooded.
This flick also features the saddest of the aliens. Again, they aren't asking for any of this. Born into this bullshit like livestock. Smarter than your average Xenomorph because of the human intelligence it has. Plus it feels a little emotion. It doesn't just want to kill. Then it dies horribly and slowly in excruciating pain after being betrayed during a tender moment with it's chosen mother. Fuck, man.
When she sees the failed clones is another one of those shockingly moving bits from this franchise. It's kind of surprising that Sigourney Weaver came back for this and put in such a stellar performance. She is a great actress and all. Criminally underrated even. This is sort of trash, yeah, but without her would have been embarrassing, probably.
In the bad column we've got some “hacking the mainframe” bullshit. They even say it at one point. “I have to hack the mainframe manually. I destroyed my modem.” “I have a neuro-processor that allows me to dream.” Little of that shit. We also get more lazy anti-corporation stuff. The corporate guys, of course, are comically terrible. They are always worse than the aliens, ya know. I think this series did more to hate corporate empires than anything else really, other than what they do in real life, of course.
The film also ends on a weak note with Ripley finally getting back to Earth. This should have been cool after four movies, a Christ-like death with resurrection, and countless dead aliens, but is sort of like, look at that, Earth, cool, I guess. See what this is about, why not. Bill Bryson must have had this scene in mind when he wrote I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes from a Big Country in 1998.
Like Ripley, the queen too is an alien/human mismash and at the end starts giving birth to more hybrids instead of eggs. Cutting out the middleman. An exceptional cool concept that does not deliver in the end.
This is probably something that has potential to explore, the birthed hybrid killing the queen, it's mother, then taking to Ripley, it's grandmother, who ultimately kills it. But this is too crazy to put that much thought into.
Overall, it had good pacing and was pretty entertaining. Larger cast than most of the Alien movies, these extras are mostly there to raise the body count. There are some good moments like the underwater alien chase scene that goes on for like several minutes and nearly resulted in actors actually drowning. Then when they finally get out, the facehuggers are there waiting for them. The Xenomorphs look like they would be great in water. The biggest problem with the movie, IMO, is that the tone is all over the place. You have Nick Tortelli here and Chucky yucking it up, then Ripley damn near makes you cry. Likely more too many people giving too much input, like with Alien3. I feel like it could have been really good, but it tries to do too much and fails.
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