Alien Resurrection

Wow. What ever happened to logging and blogging? Just eight days into September we had 17 posts already. We were on pace for a record-shattering 64 posts in one month. And then we set a different kind of record, going ten straight days between posts. The previous high was six days, a "feat" we'd managed twice in over a year of blogging - once in late October '09 and once in early February '10. Our September pace now stands at 30 posts, which would be an all time low since expanding beyond two members to kick off 2010. Whoops. But enough about that lazy catastrophe; let's talk about the one pictured above. Alien Resurrection was the fourth film in the Alien series, a series I've been thoroughly unimpressed by all along. And this may have been the worst film of them all. Each movie had its flaws - the first was dated and campy, the second was absurdly over-the-top, and the third was incredibly boring. But Resurrection manages to boast each one of those claims. The plot was ridiculous, even by science fiction standards; 200 years after dying at the end of Alien 3, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has been cloned and essentially brought back to life, memories and everything. Along for the resurrection is the embryonic parasite that had died along with her two centuries ago. But in an awful Spider-Man-ish twist, the two lifeforms have undergone some gene swapping and now Ripley's reincarnation has heightened senses and acidic blood while the new old alien has been upgraded with the mammalian ability to give live birth to her offspring. Well, then. At least with something so outlandish driving the story, the action scenes won't disappoint you. The problem is that the movie runs for an hour and forty minutes and the majority of the film is spent on typical dull characters struggling to survive while also looking totally badass. And all of this brings me to my final (first) point: the movie feels far too dated. No 1997 big-budget space movie should look as shoddy and low-tech as this one does; computer animation and special effects had been around all decade. Look at T2 (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), and Independence Day (1996) before you disbelieve that statement. I'm not saying the flick looks straight out of 1985 or anything, but visually it has aged a lot more like milk than like wine. But don't walk away with the wrong idea; I did not abhor this movie and could have rang in my Saturday with something much worse. In fact, if you like the franchise enough, or even the genre - hell, even if you just like Sigourney Weaver - then you'll probably enjoy this film a great deal. The thing is, I never really cared as much for the first three films as the Internet has me believing I should have. I was never looking forward to watching it with any real enthusiasm and only bought it in the first place for the sake of completing my Alien collection. Of course, to any sane person, the question here that needs begging is rather simple: why? Why bother buying the fourth installment of a franchise I don't even really like all that much? Why spend my hard-earned money on a DVD I know I stand no chance of watching more than once? The easiest answer I can offer is simply that this is what I've always done. It's not quite OCD, but that doesn't make it any saner. But sometimes the easiest answers are the ones that need to be reexamined the most. In other words, allow me to rhetorically ask myself, "What the hell, man?" It isn't worth my money - and frankly, it isn't worth my time, even - to buy and watch a movie unless I'm reasonably confident I'll enjoy it. And again, I can't say that this movie was terrible. It just wasn't my cup of tea, which was an inconvenient fact I knew when I bought it in the first place. The good news is that my fascination with series completion is not nearly as strong as my desire to empty out my backlog. The better news is that the rest of the movies I own (thus far) are stand-alones without sequels or prequels that could goad me into more unnecessary purchases. "Unnecessary" actually describes this movie pretty well, but I suppose it wasn't actually my least favorite one in the series. It beats 3, I think, and maybe even Aliens. In fact, my apathy for the series is so vast that I don't even know how to rank the individual movies despite seeing all four of them in the past couple of months. Oh well. It's time to move on from this franchise and most likely not look back. God help me if I ever feel the need to pick up Alien vs. Predator.