As Slime Goes By
Sigourney Weaver, who plays
an acid-blooded Ellen Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection , the fourth
installment of the gory Alien "franchise," has made a career out of
putting herself into ridiculous situations and managing never to look
ridiculous. Her immersion in her roles commands respect and awe: She surges
past embarrassment, past fear, and even when she makes a misstep, she lands
catlike on her feet. That strong, Brandoesque jaw gives her a pugilistic
cast--laugh at her and she'd slug you. No one giggled at her when she communed
with apes in Gorillas in the Mist , and no one will giggle at her in this
epic oddity, even when she's writhing around in a mucousy pit of alien viscera,
communing with the queen and its unborn fetus--an image so strange that it goes
beyond the Jungian vampiric phalluses and womblike hatchways of earlier
Alien films into what is possibly the collective unconscious of
extraterrestrials.
When we
last encountered Ripley, she was doing a backward swan dive into a pit of
molten lead with a bewildered baby alien erupting from her chest. That kind of
finale pretty much rules out another one with Sigourney, right? Well, Gene
Hackman once described how the Poseidon Adventure producers wanted him
back for a sequel, and when he pointed out that his character had been
incinerated (in a pit of molten lead, coincidentally), they said he could greet
the previous film's survivors as they exited the upside-down vessel with the
line: "Did my brother make it?" Now, thanks to the rise of cloning in the
popular imagination, no twins are necessary.
In Alien Resurrection , we meet a set of conceited,
sadistic scientists--the kind of dangerously hubristic Prometheans who are
convinced that they can harness the aliens for the good of mankind. ("Once
we've tamed the ..." etc.) Two hundred years after the events of Alien
3 , they obtain a vial of Ripley's alien-infected blood and grow her--and
the creature that she was carrying to term--in a laboratory. They lock Ripley
in a futuristic gothic cage and proceed with their hopeful experiments, while
the aliens, their elongated black helmet-heads glistening with goo, regard
their would-be trainers (among them J.E. Freeman and the great Brad Dourif)
with a mixture of rage and amusement, the way that Clint Eastwood looks at
punks who momentarily have the upper hand but who he knows will be a bloody
pulp in a matter of moments.
This
milieu isn't much of a stretch for the French director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who
(with Marc Caro) made the squishy horror picture Delicatessen (1991) and
City of Lost Children (1995), a surreal hybrid of Terry Gilliam and
David Lynch. Though brownish, the new picture is less monochromatic than the
last two, and the giant space station in which it takes place is both steely
and drippy, with the techno-organic feel of the belly of a beast. The aliens
themselves have never been animated with more virtuosity. You get to see one
swim: It whips itself forward with its tail at about a hundred miles an hour.
There's also a scene in which an alien gets slowly sucked out of a hole into
space, a process that makes a meat grinder look merciful. The movie's other
Wagnerian set piece features the Ripley clone--who has an "8" stenciled on her
arm--coming upon a room that contains the previous seven attempts to bring her
back. This there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sequence almost justifies the movie's
absurd premise.
Alien Resurrection is reasonably entertaining,
but it's the unwieldy product of what I call the "Two Romans Syndrome," based
on the experience of a friend of mine who worked on the soap opera Days of
Our Lives . Briefly (or semibriefly), Roman was married to Marlena, who was
played by one of soapdom's divas. When she decided to leave the show, her
character got killed in a plane crash, and the guy playing Roman decamped, too,
to be replaced by another actor about 10 years younger, six inches taller, and
built like the ex-baseball player that he was. Except that when the diva
rejoined the show a few years later--it turns out her character didn't die in
that plane crash but had amnesia ,etc.--she said, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to
work with my Roman again?" And they said, "Er, there's another guy here
now, and he's really popular." And the diva said, "Work it out." So in wanders
Roman I to announce that he has been held prisoner on an island for the last
five years and--wait a minute, who's this other guy? Zounds, Roman II doesn't
know either! It took six months to execute a plot--involving mad scientists and
personality transplants and amnesia and plastic surgery--to account for what
was, in essence, the idiotic whim of some diva.
I digress
about the Two Romans Syndrome out of sympathy for the writer, Joss Whedon.
Because once you immolate your leading lady, you have to execute some mighty
violent narrative contortions to bring her back, and by the time you've
explained what she's doing there and why, half the movie is gone. And what's
left--despite all the offal--feels inorganic. In addition to Ripley coping with
her personhood/alienhood, you have a setup out of The Poseidon
Adventure , with a bunch of people trying to push their way through the
watery space station to reach their little ship, with one after another getting
gobbled down by aliens at regular intervals.
Aside from Weaver, there's another wild card--Winona Ryder
as an enigmatic character named Annalee Call, who comes on board the station
with a team of smugglers and an agenda of her own. It's possible that Ryder
gets worse the harder she tries to act. Her scenes with Weaver are sad: She
doesn't have the older actress's histrionic resources, plastic physique, or
energy. And she's playing a role that would likely confound the most able minds
of her generation.
Ryder and Weaver have
exchanges as stilted as anything in Plan 9 From Outer
Space --surprisingly, since Whedon (who wrote Buffy the Vampire
Slayer , Toy Story , and did the uncredited rewrite of Speed )
has a pretty good ear. (One character actually snarls, "I am not a man with
whom to fuck.") But even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as
flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard,
and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien
in its right mind would mess with her. Her skin has an unearthly glow, which
might be the work of the brilliant cinematographer (Darius Khondji, of
Seven ) or--Weaver being Weaver--might just be coming from within.
