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Alien: Resurrection 1.5/10
We just finished watching the 4th movie in the Alien series, Alien: Resurrection. How was it? Well it was unbelievably bad. It was so bad I’m actually upset that I lost almost 2 hours of my life watching it. After 10 minutes we wanted to turn it off, but since we’d seen the other 3 we wanted to finish it all out with the fourth one. Man so I wish we’d have just turned it off.
Ok, so it’s 200 years in the future, but nothing has really changed. Actually the special effects are worse, everything looks older, not newer at all. Once again Ripley is back (through cloning) to face the evil aliens. The twist is that she’s no pseudo-half alien half human and the mother (basically) of the new alien. She, and a rag-tag group of traders (including a horrible role by Winona Ryder as the new synthetic person (like Bishop before)) are running for their lives trying to get off the doomed science ship. Dan Hedaya (Nick Tortelli from Cheers and the dad from Clueless) is just terrible as the general leading the project. The plot is unbelievably bad and full of holes (surprising given that Joss Whedon wrote it (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Disney’s Toy Story). Honestly it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, I’d say going to the dentist would be more fun.
Just want to defend Joss Whedon a touch on this…Hollywood really screws him everytime he writes a feature-length script (I only pray that ‘Serenity’ will be the exception).
When he (co-)wrote the original Buffy movie, the studio bastardized it so bad he refused to work on-set.
Alien:Ressurrection is also a far cry from the script he wrote. Perhaps in this case that’s not saying much, but still…
I’d have to say the best thing he ever did was the television series Firefly (in my opinion, it’s actually probably one of the best and most intelligent series to ever air; it sits on my shelf next to MASH and the Young Ones
) FOX Television, of course, *absolutely* destroyed it; they sabotaged it from the very start (it’s a story-arc series, and FOX played it completely out of order, forced removal of a lot of drama, terrible time-slot, etc). The series only lasted 11 episodes (on-air. The final 3 episodes of the season are included in the DVD boxed set).
Thankfully, he’s getting a chance to take the series to the big screen, in Serenity: The Movie (Serenity was the name of the ship the lead cast lived/worked on). I can only pray that he gets a *whole* lot more freedom on this movie than on any he’s done before. (written *and* directed by… there’s hope anyway)