I found that second film dark and depressing, but skillfully directed by James Cameron (Terminator II). I lost interest with the third, when I realized that the aliens could at all times outrun and outleap the humans, so all the chase scenes were contrivances.
Now here is Alien Resurrection. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is still the heroine, even though 200 years have passed since Alien3. She has been cloned out of a drop of her own blood, and is being used as a broodmare: The movie opens with surgeons removing a baby alien from her womb. How the baby got in there is not fully explained, for which we should be grateful.
The birth takes place on a vast spaceship. The interstellar human government hopes to breed more aliens, and use them for—oh, developing vaccines, medicines, a gene pool, stuff like that. The aliens have a remarkable body chemistry. Ripley’s genes are all right, too: They allow her reconstituted form to retain all of her old memories, as if cookie dough could remember what a gingerbread man looked like.
Ripley is first on a giant government science ship, then on a tramp freighter run by a vagabond crew. The monsters are at first held inside glass cells, but of course they escape (their blood is a powerful solvent that can eat through the decks of the ship). The movie’s a little vague about Ripley: Is she all human, or does she have a little alien mixed in? For a while we wonder which side she’s on. She laughs at mankind’s hopes of exploiting the creatures: “She’s a queen,” she says of the new monster. “She’ll breed. You’ll die.”
When the tramp freighter comes into play, we get a fresh crew, including Call (Winona Ryder), who has been flown all the way from Earth to provide appeal for the younger members of the audience. Ryder is a wonderful actress, one of the most gifted of her generation, but wrong for this movie. She lacks the heft and presence to stand alongside Ripley and the grizzled old space dogs played by Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Dan Hedeya, and Brad Dourif. She seems uncertain of her purpose in the movie, her speeches lack conviction, and when her secret is revealed, it raises more questions than it answers. Ryder pales in comparison with Jenette Goldstein, the muscular Marine who was the female sidekick in Aliens.
Weaver, on the other hand, is splendid: Strong, weary, resourceful, grim. I would gladly see a fifth Alien movie if they created something for her to do, and dialogue beyond the terse sound bites that play well in commercials. Ripley has some good scenes. She plays basketball with a crewman (Perlman) and slams him around. When she bleeds, her blood fizzes interestingly on the floor—as if it’s not quite human. She can smell an alien presence. And be smelled: An alien recognizes Ripley as its grandmother and sticks out a tongue to lick her.
These aliens have a lot of stuff in their mouths; not only the tongue and their famous teeth, but another little head on a stalk, with smaller teeth. Still to be determined is whether the littler head has a still tinier head inside of it, and so on. Like the bugs in Starship Troopers, these aliens are an example of specialization. They have evolved over the eons into creatures adapted for one purpose only: To star in horror movies.
Mankind wants them for their genes? I can think of a more valuable attribute: They’re apparently able to generate biomass out of thin air. The baby born at the beginning of the film weighs maybe five pounds. In a few weeks the ship’s cargo includes generous tons of aliens. What do they feed on? How do they fuel their growth and reproduction? It’s no good saying they eat the ship’s stores, because they thrive even on the second ship—and in previous movies have grown like crazy on desolate prison planets and in abandoned space stations. They’re like perpetual motion machines; they don’t need input.
The Alien movies always have expert production design. Alien Resurrection was directed by the French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children), who with his designers has placed it in what looks like a large, empty hangar filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts. There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder—nothing like the abandoned planetary station in Aliens. Even the standard shots of vast spaceships, moving against a backdrop of stars, are murky here, and perfunctory.
I got a telephone message that Inside Edition wanted to ask me about Alien Resurrection, and what impact the movie would have on the careers of Weaver and Ryder. Financially, it will help: Weaver remains the only woman who can open an action picture. Artistically, the film will have no impact at all. It’s a nine days’ wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory. Try this test: How often do you think about Jurassic Park: The Lost World?
Alligator
(Directed by Lewis Teague; starring Robert Forster; 1980)
This movie was probably inevitable. What’s amazing is that they took so long to make it. Alligator is inspired by one of the most persistent fantasies of recent years: That countless pet alligators, given as gifts when they were babies, were flushed down toilets when they grew too large . . . and that down there in the sewers of our major cities, they’re growing to unimagin-able size.
My own fantasies about sewers go all the way back to the old Honeymooners TV skits, with Ed Norton breathlessly telling Ralph Cramden about the beasts he encountered on his daily patrols beneath the city streets. But Norton never met anything like the alligator in this movie. In the tradition of Jaws, this creature is gigantic, voracious, and insatiable. It will eat anything (as you might imagine, considering where it lives).
The story opens as it’s gobbling down dead dogs from a laboratory that’s experimenting with new growth hormones. You got it: The alligator reacts to the hormones and grows to a length of thirty or forty feet. People start disappearing down in the sewers. A New York cop (Robert Forster) goes down with his buddy to see what’s happening. The alligator eats the buddy. But Forster can’t get anyone to believe his story.
These early scenes in the movie are probably the best, because they work on the dumb fundamental level where we’re all afraid of being eaten by an alligator in a sewer. (Show me a man who is not afraid of being eaten by an alligator in a sewer, and I’ll show you a fool.) Forster splashes along with his flashlight and the alligator slinks around just out of view.
Come to think of it, the alligator does a lot of slinking in this movie—maybe because it was too difficult to show the whole alligator. There are a couple of fairly phony special effects shots, as when the alligator bursts up through the sidewalk, but for the most part we just see parts of the alligator: His mean little eyes, his big tail, and his teeth. Especially his teeth.
The plot is absolutely standard; this story has been filmed dozens of times. You have, of course, the small-minded mayor who is concerned only with reelection. The police chief, a folksy character who fires Forster for not catching the alligator, but later rehires him. The girl scientist, who falls in love with the hero and helps hunt for the alligator. The villain, an out-of-town big-game hunter brought in to replace Forster.
All of these people do incredibly stupid things, like walking into dark alleys after the alligator, or putting a dynamite charge on a time-delay fuse while they’re still trapped in a sewer with the alligator and the dynamite.
The alligator, on the other hand, is smart enough to travel all over the city without being seen: In one shot, he’s in a suburban swimming pool, and seconds later, he’s midtown. You would not think it would be that easy for a forty-foot alligator to sneak around incognito, but then, New Yorkers are awfully blasé. Meanwhile, I suggest a plan: Why not try flushing this movie down the toilet to see if it grows into something big and fearsome?