Alien Resurrection

To paraphrase a well-known saying, you can’t keep a good franchise down. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into space, those acid-dripping aliens are back, and this time they’ve brought a few surprises.

200 years after 1st Lieutenant Ellen Ripley swan-dived into a fiery furnace at the end of Alien 3, taking the newborn alien Queen with her, United Systems Military (replacing ‘the Company’ as the sinister quasi-corporate defence conglomerate) has plans to breed more of the critters for use as weapons of “urban pacification” back home on Earth. Aboard the vast medical research ship the USM Auriga, scientists have recreated Ripley using a blood sample they found lying around from the third film. Not out of gratitude for thrice saving the universe mind, but with the sole intention of extracting the foetal Queen currently resident in Ripley’s rib cage. This cloning malarkey being such an imprecise science, Ripley isn’t quite what she used to be. Clone 8, as she is known, has alien DNA mixed with her own, while the Queen, as we later discover in the film’s most stomach-churning scene, has more than its own far share of human characteristics.

Resurrection is easily the goriest addition to the series with no less than a dozen creatures running rampant, bursting unsuspecting heads with aplomb and causing all manner of bloody mayhem.

Simon C. Williams