Eagerly anticipating this week ... (16-24)

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (16-24)
Ridley Scott's Gladiator II (2024)

7/26/2013

Alien: Resurrection (1997) or, Queen of the Goo Massacre!



The unusual combination of two female stars in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection have gigantic faces that are suspended in icky green color in space on this poster for the film

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver (The Ice Storm (1997))) has slept for 200 years and now wakes up a half-alien.  

The very idea to revive the Alien franchise once again with this (...) invention, - following Ridley Scott's watershed great space horror Alien (1979), James Cameron's explosive Aliens (1986) actioner and David Fincher's so-so prison-set Alien 3 (1992), - was a bad one.
The all-around overkill of Alien: Resurrection extends to its effects, which are competently done but so pervasive and disgusting (in an uncool way) that it feels like the original spirit of the Alien universe is by this chapter firmly buried somewhere in a mountain of snot, slime and blood.
The characters here, good and evil alike, are uninteresting, flat, and many of them sort of amateur-philosophers, (which doesn't make them more interesting), and the dialog is almost completely reduced to one-liners. Resurrection is directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie/Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)) and written by Hollywood's later mega-mogul, Joss Whedon (The Avengers/Avengers Assemble (2012)), who has since denounced the final film, calling it "almost unwatchable."
He was right. But Ressurection's cool underwater scenes with aliens do, however, pull it up a bit. - If you do decide to give the film a chance, I say; do it strictly for the monsters!

Related posts:

The Alien franchise: Alien (1979) or, Space Eggs Are Bad News!
Aliens (1986) or, Alien War
Alien 3 (1992) or, The Monsters Go to Jail!
AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) or, Everyone Loses
Prometheus (2012) or, Even Then, Space Eggs Were Bad News
Jean-Pierre JeunetAmélie/Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) - Pretentious French fluffy-puff poop
Delicatessen (1991) or, The Brown Quirk

Watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection feels a lot like what Sigourney Weaver appears to be doing in this photo: Immersing oneself in gooey crap

Here is a trailer for the film, captured off of a VHS tape

Cost: Estimated 75 mil. $
Box office: 161.3 mil. $
= Flop (returned likely 2.15 times its cost)
[Alien: Resurrection premiered 6 November (Paris, France) and runs 109 minutes. Whedon and Jeunet both took the job of making the film mostly as a career opportunity too great to turn down, it seems. Jeunet for a long time fought to have the aliens equipped with a mix of male and female genitals, which he did not succeed with in getting into the film. Weaver was reportedly paid 11 mil. $ for her performance, along with a co-producer credit on the film. Shooting took place from November 1996 - April 1997 in California and Manitoba and Ontario, Canada as the first Alien film shoot done entirely outside of England. The film opened #2, behind Flubber, to a 16.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another week at #2 before leaving the top 5, only running a total of 4 weeks domestically, grossing 47.7 mil. $ (29.6 % of the total gross). Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Jeunet's native France with 16.3 mil. $ (10.1 %) and Japan with 16.1 mil. $ (10%). Alien: Resurrection was only the 47th highest-grossing film in North America of 1997, quite bad for an Alien movie. It is the first and only film in the franchise so far to be highly financially unsuccessful. Roger Ebert gave the film a 1½/4 star review, translating to a notch under its rating here, and called it one of the worst film of the year. An extended version of the film was released on DVD in 2003, but Jeunet says that the theatrical edition is his favorite. The franchise has since gotten two poor, unrelated sequels (AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)), a prequel by Ridley Scott (Prometheus (2012)), and is getting another Scott entry in 2017 in Alien: Covenant. Jeunet returned with Amélie (2001). Weaver returned in A Map of the World (1999), Winona Ryder (Mr. Deeds (2002)) in The Larry Sanders Show (1998, TV-series) and theatrically in Celebrity (1998). Alien: Resurrection is rotten at 54 % with a 5.8/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
 
What do you think of Alien: Resurrection?

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Eagerly anticipating this week ... (15-24)

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (15-24)
John Crowley's We Live in Time (2024)