Ripley Has Mad Basketball Skills in the Loony 1997 Flop Alien: Resurrection But the Movie is Anything but a Slam Dunk
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The older you get, the more difficult it becomes to stay on top of things pop-culture-wise. When I was the head writer of The A.V. Club in my twenties and thirties and my beat was pretty much all of pop culture I felt like I was on top of everything.
Well, not everything, obviously, but nearly everything. That was my job. I had to remain plugged into the cultural zeitgeist where music, movies, books and television were concerned.
It was much easier to stay on top of things back then because I was single and did not have children. There was nothing, really, to distract me from indiscriminately consuming as much new pop culture as humanly possible.
When I was hired by The A.V. Club my job was much more than the means by which I made a living. It was my identity. It was the source of damn near all of my fragile self-esteem.
For sixteen years I was Nathan from The A.V. Club. That filled me with pride. When I parted ways with The A.V. Club I didn’t just lose an employer or a freelance outlet: I lost some of my identity as well.
Then I fell in love and got married and left The A.V. Club for The Dissolve. At The Dissolve my focus shifted exclusively to film. It became easier to stay on top of everything because I only had to worry about movies.
Then I got married, became the father of two neurodivergent boys and became a full-time freelancer/website proprietor. I went from feeling like I was on top of everything to feeling like I was mostly on top of everything to feeling like I was on top of some things at least to feeling like I am on top of just about nothing.
That is not entirely true. When I began my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas it was with the intention of returning to writing about new movies in the theater the weekend they open.
I’m seeing the latest iteration of The Crow tonight. That’s the film my paid subscribers voted for me to see but last week’s movie was Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus.
It was the first new Alien movie I’d seen since David Fincher’s controversial 1992 debut Alien 3. That was thirty-two long years ago. Needless to say, I am most decidedly not on top of the Alien franchise.
I lost interest decades back but they just keep making more movies.
I’d like to be more on top of things. That could only help my career. God knows being lost and behind has hurt it. So I was relieved when a kindly patron switched their Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choice to 1997’s Alien: Resurrection.
If you’re a fan of the series, you might recall Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley dying at the end of Alien 3. That would seemingly complicate her appearing in future entries in the series.
It’s worth noting, however, that the name of the fourth Alien movie is not Alien: Ellen Ripley is Still Dead but rather Alien: Resurrection.
The filmmakers resurrect Ellen Ripley in clone form two hundred years after the events of Alien 3 for the purpose of unleashing the li’l baby Xenomorph inside her.
Alien: Resurrection belongs to the weirdly deathless subgenre of horror/science-fiction movies where stupid scientists of the future go out of their way to bring back monsters or make monsters even deadlier.
I’m talking about movies like Deep Blue Sea, where a bunch of chuckle-heads decide that the problem with sharks is that they aren’t intelligent or deadly enough, so they need to make them smarter and more dangerous.
The surreally misguided scientists of Alien: Resurrection choose to bring back the acid-spitting killing machines of the three previous films because eggheads think they can use their bodies as paper, a building material, biofuel, and a textile.
Basically, anything that you can do with hemp in our world, you can do with the body of an acid-spitting alien killing machine in the kooky, upside-down world of Alien: Resurrection.
A movie would have to be terrifying and suspenseful to overcome the screaming implausibility of seemingly only half-insane/mostly mad scientists purposefully choosing to unleash something that will most assuredly kill them in the most agonizing manner imaginable.
Then again, one of the main scientists is played by Brad Dourif. If anyone can convincingly play someone who gazes adoringly at a horrifying alien monster with an expression that screams, “You’re the only one who understands me, my beautiful alien space baby” it’s Dourif. He makes the impossible seem plausible. That helps in a film that defies realism at every turn.
Weaver is back, baby! She’s back because they paid her 11 million dollars, which was a lot of money back in 1997. She’s better than ever, as evidenced by a scene where she proves her athleticism by slam-dunking a basketball.
Thanks, www.hollywoodinsider.com, for the insider info!
Yes, Alien: Resurrection contains a scene where Ripley, who has been cloned specfically for the purpose of unleashing a xenomorph, gets in touch with her inner Dominique Wilkins by slam-dunking like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
If you were to single out a moment in the film when the franchise jumped the shark it’d probably be the outer space hoops or the many scenes where it seems like Ripley is on the verge of passionately tongue-kissing xenomorphs.
I don’t want to kink-shame anyone but xenomorphs are bad news. All they do is spit acid and kill people. You do not want to indicate to one of these monsters that you’re interested in them romantically or sexually. Even a closed-mouth smooch would be inappropriate yet Weaver spends a disconcertingly large amount of the film within kissing distance of one of the alien villains.
Get a room, guys!
The film’s script was written by the then red-hot Joss Whedon, who was revered for his snappy dialogue and strong female protagonists. Then, in a surprisingly predictable turn of events, it came out that the male feminist who understood women on such a deep and profound level was actually an asshole misogynist who was verbally and emotionally abusive to women and also actors of color.
It was Woody Allen all over again. It was almost as if Whedon was merely pretending to be a feminist as a pretext to mistreat women. Whedon’s fall from grace is the filter we see his work through now rather than his previous, now ironic acclaim for being one of the good guys who empowered and celebrated strong women.
The work itself hasn’t changed but the way we see it has. What once came off as snappy banter from a man with a unique gift for one-liners and wisecracks now feels glib and snarky.
Whedon has written all sorts of snappy answers to stupid questions for Ripley. She’s a comedy clone machine who favors off-color cracks like, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” There might as well be rimshots following Ripley’s one-liners. Whedon’s conception of the character is sassy, non-human, a mother to disgusting alien creatures, and a wisecrack machine.
Like the previous three entries in the series, Alien: Resurrection reflects the aesthetic of its director. The third Alien sequel was French arthouse favorite Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s unexpected follow-up to 1995’s The City of Lost Children.
Jeunet leans into the situation's kinky weirdness. He gives the proceedings a comic book absurdism rooted in crazy angles, tight close-ups, and a love of faces with character.
The film’s supporting cast is made up of the expected roughneck character actors oozing testosterone and bravado, most notably Ron Perlman and Michael Wincott, who gets an “And” credit here because his agent must be really good.
Jeunet does not seem particularly concerned with scaring audiences. The film has a much lighter tone than Alien 3, due in no small part to Whedon’s quippy script.
I wanted to watch Alien: Resurrection because I was appalled by Offspring, the human/xenomorph whose appearance in Alien: Romulus’ third act ruined the movie for me.
Alien: Resurrection plays with a similar idea by having the evil scientists experiment in combining human and xenomorph DNA. Like so much in the film, however, this idea is introduced and then more or less abandoned.
It feels like there were twenty drafts of a screenplay that changed constantly and arbitrarily.
Alien: Resurrection is a vehicle for Weaver but also Winona Ryder, a melancholy waif who is about five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet, and consequently an unusual star of a science-fiction-horror-action hybrid.
Ryder’s character turns out to be an android, a predictable revelation that lands with a thud.
Alien: Resurrection was so intent on bringing Sigourney Weaver back to a franchise she dominates that they were willing to go to ridiculous extremes to integrate her into the action.
The filmmakers assumed, with reason, that an Alien movie without Weaver is no Alien movie at all. That contention is contradicted by the existence of five Alien movies Weaver is not in: Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Romulus, Alien Vs. Predator and Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem.
It turns out that you definitely can make an Alien movie without Weaver but you probably shouldn’t!
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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