"Pray You Die First"

Aliens: Resurrection
And now we come to the grand finale of the Aliens tetralogy. In this movie, Ripley is resurrected using DNA from hair and teeth and stuff. I’m not exactly sure where they got the materials from, because she died at the end of the last movie by falling into molten lead, but I don’t think it is that important to the story, really. They did this to clone the alien inside of her so that they could use it as a military weapon, as well as to learn scientific sorts of things from her (antibodies, etc).
There are many who see this as a bad movie, the worst of the four, and I’m not sure I would completely disagree with that. I think the first three were better, but that does not necessarily make this a bad movie. There are some things that mark this movie as being very different from the others. There is more of the standard action movie formula in this movie; people walking in a line and the last person getting picked off by the alien (they were actually swimming, but same idea), and a character who seems to be mostly devoted to snappy one liners and big guns. There is also a great deal more blatant blood and gore in this movie, and just general grotesqueness. In a scene where Ripley finds the failed clones of herself (she was the eighth try), said clones are really quite gruesome, especially the one that is alive and aware of herself. That one is half alien, and very much a monstrosity that is aware of it’s freakishness. It asks Ripley to kill her, so she does. I’m not sure why she uses fire to kill it, plus the others which were in large tubes, also possibly alive. My best guess is that fire is the best way to kill the aliens, according to the previous movies, so she is just making sure they are dead.
The effects in this movie are better than the others, which is good considering it was made in 1997. There was only one scene where I thought the alien looked distractingly fake. Once again, the explosions were much better. If you think that I’m obsessed with explosions, I’m not. I just really quite enjoy them in movies.
Despite the weakness of the story in the sense that it was too much like a standard action flick, it was still good in many ways. Sigourney Weaver plays the cloned Ripley very well. She is a bit odd in that she is not quite the same character anymore. Because she was cloned from herself who had had an alien inside of her, she was basically part alien. This is most evident in her blood, because it is acidic like the aliens blood. Throughout the movie, and especially in the first half, she is very unsettling, just acting not quite human. Being half-alien seems to have made her slightly less antagonistic towards the aliens. She wants them to not be alive anymore, but she isn’t quite so bent on destroying them all herself. She definitely has become more brutal, almost like an unfeeling killing machine when she wants to be. Little compassion for the others is shown, but there isn’t a great deal of malice. It’s like she doesn’t care for them one way or another. It was interesting to watch.
As with the others, there were things about this movie that I enjoyed, and/or found interesting. In this movie, Earth seems to be more like the Earth we know and less like a futuristic Earth, in some ways. There are references to Wal-Mart, and a few other little things that are slipping my mind at the moment.
The script was written by Joss Whedon, the man who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the man responsible for the TV series. For anyone who saw the movie, don’t think of that particular incarnation, because it really wasn’t what he had envisioned for the character at all. He also is the man who created Firefly (and its spin off movie Serenity, which was a good movie as well. Check it out).
At one point a character throws some boxing gloves and hit the camera, which was just amusing.
The general of the Military ship is hairy as a bear. His hair was thicker than his shirt.
One of the characters, the gruff comic relief, calmly shoots an alien that was attacking his friends, and then is spooked by a spider in its web, so he shoots it too. From about two inches away.
Warrick from CSI (the original) plays one of the pirates; he’s their weapons guy, and he does a really good job.
I think the funniest thing was the soldier that they end up taking with them when he gets left behind on the ship. He is totally serious and intense, and the scene is angry and intense, and then one of the characters mentions something about the special guns he has, and this macho soldier turns into a complete geek. He’s grinning like a fool and asking questions. Basically he turns into a trekkie like fan boy. Later, when a character turns out to be a robot, he does the same thing. If he was around these days, he would be someone who spends all of his time in front of a computer learning how to speak Klingon or something. It was rather quite amusing, actually.
So as you can see, there was still entertainment value in the movie. It may not have been cinematic gold, but it was amusing all the same. I’d say that you should watch it, especially if you have seen the others (and especially if you enjoy bloody Sci-fi movies. Which I do).
There you have it, the Aliens tetralogy. Four movies spanning almost twenty years. In total, the number of characters that survive being around Ripley equals three people and a robot. And most of those were in the last movie.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Chicks, man. Chicks.