RETURN OF THE ALIEN

For those who saw Ellen Ripley commit a noble suicide in Alien 3, the question will be how on earth the filmmakers have contrived to bring her back in Alien Resurrection, the fourth installment of the cult series. It certainly was a question Sigourney Weaver asked herself when she was first approached with the new script.

In Alien 3 when Ripley realises that she has been impregnated with an alien embryo, and that it is now mixed up with her DNA, she decides that the only way to save the world is to kill herself by falling into a vat of boiling liquid. The last shot shows the baby alien emerging out of her chest just as she takes the fatal fall. Curiously, she falls to her death cradling the baby alien in her arms, almost tenderly.

Alien Resurrection is set 400 years later. Generations of humans have grown up and died hearing of Ripley as only a myth, a legend who saved the world from a monster that was never seen again. A giant corporation that acts as a law unto itself plots to harvest the forgotten aliens for commercial purposes. And the only way to do so is to create a clone of the dead Ripley, 400 years after she died, and extract the alien that has been implanted into her chest.

Way back in 1979, Alien was the first film ever to create an action heroine who gave the bad guys a run for their money. To a generation that had grown up on films depicting macho heroes saving hapless women from villains and monsters, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley was a cult figure with a difference. Almost 20 years later, Ripley is still the only female action figure Hollywood has produced. Though Sigourney Weaver is a respected actress for her great roles in films as diverse as Ghostbusters and Gorillas in the Mist, there is no doubt that she will go down in history for her portrayal of Ripley, the quintessential action heroine.

In Alien (1979), director Ridley Scott created an overwhelming sense of tense anticipation, as he teased audiences with tantalising glimpses of the alien’s sliminess, as they waited for the lurking monster to jump out at its unsuspecting victims.

Alien Resurrection is strikingly different. As a rollercoaster ride it is closer to James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), but unlike the original Alien, it lacks the sense of lurking, impending disaster. The aliens are thrust in one's face from the first five minutes of the action, almost as if the film had taken its cue from Spielberg’s disappointing sequel, Jurassic Park: The Lost World which inundated the audience with so many dinosaurs, that the sense of mystery and anticipation generated in the original Jurassic Park was lost. Similarly, it is hard to get rid of the feeling that Alien Resurrection could have benefited by cutting some footage of the aliens.

What is interesting, though, is the plot which is based on creating a cloned Ripley who, for the first time, finds that her loyalties are divided between the aliens (who she has mothered), and the humans she tries to save.

Unfortunately, though all this sounds very impressive as a character description, the result is often a rather confused Ripley (one minute she’s legging it as fast as she can to escape the monsters, and the next she’s crouching on the floor, moaning, “The Queen... she’s in pain!”).

Still, taking a cue from its cloned heroine, the suggestion that every character in the movie is some kind of cyborg, half human-half machine, is intriguing, and an interesting comment on the age of information and technology.

Equally intriguing is the addition of Winona Ryder to the cast, especially since this is the first time that Weaver’s Ripley plays opposite a strong female lead. What’s a doe-eyed shrimp like Winona doing with the muscly Weaver? Especially now that we are all used to seeing her in demure corsets in films like Little Women and The Crucible...

Still, the 26-year old Winona is an old hand at sci-fi, having starred in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She insists that she did not take up Alien Resurrection because she wanted to add a big budget blockbuster-type film to her resume. More than anything, she approached the film as a die hard fan of Sigourney Weaver and the Alien series. As a child she had a poster of Weaver’s Ripley on her bedroom wall, and at the age of eight, even wanted to change her name to Ripley. Naturally, when the opportunity to play a part in Alien Resurrection came up, she jumped at it, not least because she was eager to work with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

For her part, Weaver found it amusing and interesting to work with a younger actress who had been her obsessive fan as a child. Weaver's approach to the film, as described by an awestruck Winona, was one of pure commitment to her character and the series. To Weaver, the Alien series apparently hasn’t been just another way of making some money. If that were the case, she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be killed off in Alien 3. She agreed to Ripley's demise only because she did not want a classic series to be flogged to death... and because she had heard a horrifying rumour that there might be an Alien Vs Predator movie. But intrigued by the premise of a cloned Ripley being brought to life, she agreed to return as the action heroine. She brought stacks of her notebooks to the sets, says Winona, some of the notes dating back to 20 years, so that she could refer to them as her character developed in Alien Resurrection, to make sure that there were no contradictions.

Though some of the most chilling sequences of the film take place in the underwater segments, both Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder have unanimously described the underwater filming as one of their worst experiences ever. The water tank was filthy, the cast and crew were spending 17 hours a day in there, and no one was coming out to go to the bathroom. Having swallowed a lot of the water, Winona ended up, not surprisingly, being rather sick.

Now that Ripley is dead, now that she has been cloned, and now that she has actually given birth to aliens... what next? The only possible concept left, and one which is practically begging to be brought to life, is aliens running amok on earth. And that is a distinct possibility, since, at the end of Alien Resurrection, director Jeunet navigates the crew’s spaceship to hover ominously above planet Earth.