The Sexy Alien, the Blair Witch and the Rejected Hunter

Plus: Romulus Bullet Points, FTNC Update and What I'm Reading.

Dec 19, 2024

Alien Resurrection is the most surreal, sexy and weird Alien film

In the 27 years since I first saw it in theaters, I’ve gone from liking to hating to loving Alien Resurrection (1997, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet). I’m not sure if it was subbed or dubbed the first time I saw it in a Moscow movie theater, but I remember thinking it was really good, especially coming on the heels of the disappointing Alien 3.

Screencap: Ripley in an intimate moment with a Xenomorph. Image courtesy of Disney, modified by author.

But about 6 or so years later, after getting it on video, I started to see Resurrection in a rather negative light. Part of this, I think, was due to my realization that there were a lot of people out there who outright hated the movie, including its writer Joss Whedon, who reportedly described it as poorly executed and unwatchable.

“"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently...it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong...They did everything wrong that they could possibly do...it wasn't so much that they'd changed the script; it's that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."”
Source: Interview for Bullz-Eye.com by
Will Harris
, 2005. (I suggest checking out Will’s Substack - he has lots of really cool interviews!)

I also read a lot of critical reviews.

Josh Miller’s entry on this installment of the franchise in particular made what I thought was a cogent argument for why the film largely didn’t work.

So when I tried to watch it on the new DVD from the Alien Quadrilogy box set, I couldn’t get past the opening 10 minutes without being disappointed, without seeing what the detractors had described. For the next two decades, I held on to the idea that Resurrection was a bad film that similarly to Alien 3 should’ve never existed.

And then something funny happened: I started to think about it more and recall elements that stood out to me. The strange, surreal images, like the opening, dreamy birth of the new Ripley. The feel conjured by the score. The basketball scene.

There was also the fact that I’d learned over the past decade to be less trusting of the critical consensus, and to revisit titles that I had previously written off, such as the work of M. Night Shyamalan. So, I decided to revisit Resurrection via streaming.

And I came away with the conclusion that I was so, so wrong to write it off.

Because Alien Resurrection wasn’t just a good movie and the third best installment of the (now 7-film) franchise. It was also the most surreal, erotic and weird Alien movie hands down, a sequel with amazing visual flair that did not play it safe.

What really stood out to me is the way the movie emphasizes its formal elements over the storytelling, such as the images, the editing, and the music, and in the process creates the sense or, more accurately, the feeling that one is watching not so much an objective telling of narrative events, but rather a dream that borders on becoming a full-blown nightmare. A strange and scary yet beautiful and erotic dream.

And I do mean erotic.

The xenomorphs have always been sexy beasts, but Resurrection turns the implications of their design and lifecycle into full-blown text with the introduction of the alien-human hybrid that is Ripley-8 (Sigourney Weaver), a clone of the original protagonist.

From the way she carries herself to the way she talks, this Ripley seems like an animal in human form that wants to both f**k and kill anyone she comes across.

Screencaps: Ripley and Call. Images courtesy of Disney.

Seriously, just watch the first scene between Ripley and Call (Wynona Ryder), and notice how Ripley alternates between seductive and threatening. If the homoerotic undertone of the scene wasn’t evident, a later sequence has Ripley literally reach her hand inside a gaping hole in Call’s chest that is dripping with white ooze.*

*Sure, the hole is a bullet hole and the ooze is synthetic blood, which reveals Call to be a robot, but the metaphor is in hindsight blatantly obvious.

Shortly thereafter, Ripley-8 falls into a ‘viper pit’ full of pulsating xenomorph-like fleshy growths (but apparently no actual drones) only to get swallowed by a large alien orifice. What exactly is happening here? What is this place? Are these all extensions of the Queen? Or is the hive having some kind of orgy?

None of these questions are answered.

Screencap: WTF? Image courtesy of Disney.

The next time we see her (see image at the top of the page), she is ostensibly being carried away by a drone to the Queen. But the way the scene is presented (slow-motion, moody lighting and dissolves) in conjunction with the blocking and Weaver’s performance makes it look like she’s having intercourse with the xenomorph.

Perhaps Ripley-8 is just dreaming it. Even so, the eroticism is palpable. Heck, the music even suggests a sense of progression from beginning to climax!

And then there is also the way Ripley ultimately dispatches the “Newborn” at the film’s end by distracting it with a protracted hugging session before using her acidic blood to send it out into space. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet even confirmed exactly what the scene was meant to suggest.

““I think it’s kind of sexy and weird,” says Jeunet. “They almost make love. It was very disturbing to American people. You know how they are puritan.””
Source: Interview by Tom Fordy, The Independent, 2022

‘Sexy’ and ‘weird’, alongside ‘surreal,' describes the film in a nutshell.* This not at all a movie that could be made today, especially after Disney bought Fox.

*My thoughts overlap with those of KeN-K, who wrote “In Defense of Alien Resurrection, The Most Distressingly Horny Entry in the Franchise” on MEDIUM.

That’s not to say Resurrection is perfect. It definitely has script issues and a tone that is all over the place, likely due to the actors, director and writer not always being on the same page in regard to the movie they were making. But it is coherent enough narra-tively and thematically to work. And even those instances where plot elements are seemingly forgotten or not explored enough arguably contribute to its surrealism.

For all these reasons, I’d argue Resurrection is underrated and constitutes the third best Alien movie. And though I’m not sure it qualifies as what has been termed the ‘arthouse blockbuster,’ I’d say it definitely comes close.

This is the second issue of what I like to call “Scrapbook,” where I collect a bunch of random things I find interesting, including short thoughts I have about film and pop culture, links and comments about what I’m reading, and attempt a looser, more traditional-style newsletter. If you like this article so far, please subscribe to receive new posts and support my work.

Notes on Alien Romulus

I didn't hate Alien Romulus. But my God, this movie just can't get out of its own way. For almost every moment that is impressively executed or narrative beat that feels well done, you have a distracting, immersion-breaking reference or callback to a previous movie. The one to the famous line from Aliens made me groan.
Just a thought: there's a moment in Alien where it cuts from the fake Ash head prop to Ian Holm in makeup that is glaringly obvious. It distracts me every time I rewatch the film. But I wasn't nearly as distracted as when I saw Digital Replica Ian Holm in Romulus.
Other than fan service, I was like: why Ian Holm? Don't know if he was AI but the FX were just cartoonish and distracting. Which is ironic, given that Alvarez keeps propping up Romulus as a 'Virtually NO CGI' movie.
Really, that ‘No CGI’ stuff is almost certainly a marketing tactic.
I really wish Romulus had further explored the additions it makes to the Alien lore. Because the film does indeed reveal more about the Xenomorphs. We finally, finally get an idea of how the heck a tiny chestburster quickly grows into an adult via cocoon, which was a missed opportunity for Resurrection.
Plus, it turns out the Facehuggers basically have infrared scanning and are attracted to body heat? Kinda like the Shriekers in Tremors 2. Which are cool ideas. But the movie doesn't really delve into them enough, imo.
The much touted ‘third act’ of this film is really a ‘fourth act,’ which is an Alien movie convention that already got old by the time of Covenant. And really, it feels very extraneous here. As in, there is nothing in it that feels truly indispensable or necessary for the story being told and it does absolutely nothing to advance the character arcs. It’s overrated, like the film itself.
That said, if the film does help revive the franchise and allow more experimental entries to be made in the future, I’d say it’s a good thing.

Revisio-News: The New Blair Witch Edition

Though this might be a little past Spooky Season, I feel the need to inform folks that The Blair Witch Project has received a new special edition video release from UK company Second Sight Films in November.

Among other things, the set includes over 90 minutes of previously unseen deleted scenes and a new 2.5-hour making-of documentary. Its key selling point though is that it has three different versions of the film: the original 35mm theatrical version plus new remastered versions of the theatrical cut and the initial ‘festival cut.’

Producer Mike Moniello reveals on Twitter here and here that until now the film has never been properly transferred to video from the original source materials. Rather, the previous video transfers were derived from a 35mm film negative, which had been initially transferred from a DigiBeta video master, meaning the movie subsequently got re-transferred to video and so picked up multiple unintended artefacts.

Thus, the new version is supposedly the best and ‘most correct’ one. (Probably until the next edition a decade later, who knows?) Honestly, I don’t know if the new transfer would really be all that appealing. After all, the film’s grainy, low-res look has arguably been part of its appeal for a long time now, so if the new version looks more high-quality, then that might actually in a way make it look worse.

You can judge for yourself by checking out the trailer:

Personally, I’m far more intrigued by the special features, even though the release is apparently Region B only. Sadly, even the standard edition seems to be out of stock now, but it looks like it’ll be back at some point.

Kraven discourse

So, the day after I posted my ‘rebuttal’ of the claim that the Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) was dead, Adam Vary published an article in Variety that basically said the exact same thing and used the exact same reasoning.

Now, of course, there was a lot more in Vary’s article that I didn’t talk about in mine, but I was nonetheless happy to see that I was ahead of the curve when it came to parsing what actually was transpiring with the SSU versus what the ‘jumping to conclusions’ headlines were leading people to believe.

The article, unfortunately, includes the odd and now widely cited claim that Sony’s Universe technically never even existed. I believe the author meant that the films comprising the universe were never part of or building towards a larger serialized narrative continuity. Even if this is the case, however, I’d argue this claim is incorrect.

“For one thing, technically speaking, there never really was a Sony Marvel Universe, or a Sony Spider-Man Universe, or any other official designation akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the newly relaunched DC Universe. Sony has never approached its comic book adaptations with that level of intentional narrative cohesion…”

Sony, as I hope to show in the future, did have bigger plans and narrative ambitions. But those plans ended up changing behind the scenes. I have a lot more to say later but for now, I‘d point to J. Kim Murphy’s own Variety article from the beginning of the year, which directly talks about Sony minimizing the interconnectivity between its movies, possibly in response to the negative reception of their attempts at doing so with Morbius (and the decline of shared universe storytelling in general).

But unlike Disney and Warner Bros., the studio isn’t presenting its films as installments in a years-spanning narrative architecture…. So far, post-credits teasers bridging Sony’s spin-offs to Disney’s own continuity via interdimensional travel have been seen as half-hearted and, ultimately, unsuccessful. Those appendages aside, Sony has largely minimized the interconnected nature of its superhero films, even as the studio taps more heavily from the well of Spidey-based characters that it licenses.

In any case, the Variety article seems to have only added to the rampant controversy in the press and on social media surrounding Sony’s handling of its universe, which in turn seems to be feeding into the negativity surrounding Kraven The Hunter (dir. J.C. Chandor), which, in addition to having the lowest opening weekend box office of the SSU’s Venom-verse branch, also received its lowest RT score.

Critics and longtime Sony detractors were predisposed to hate it for merely existing and continuing Sony’s ‘misguided experiment’ or ‘fundamentally wrong approach’ to adapting Spider-Man characters, and that hate was on full display over the weekend.

Putting aside all the instances of what a colleague of mine referred to as the ‘social media brainrot’ that has affected our pop culture discourse, the fact that the movie is a critical and commercial flop makes me personally quite sad, as I’ve seen Kraven last week and I can tell you unironically that I think it’s actually kinda great.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is the case, to the extent that I’m tempted to write a full-blown ‘in defense of’ article, akin to what I did for Glass, which some have even encouraged me to do on Notes.*

*If you are interested in reading an extensive defense of the movie, please let me know in the comments. You can also check out my 2.5-hour conversation about the picture with my friends Elvis Dutan and Roliver Queen on the Unsourced Wall Radio Podcast.

Briefly though, I will say that this picture knows what story it wants to tell, and unlike its predecessors, feels truly wholesome and unified, without evident compromises made for world-building, a PG-13 rating, a short running time, or budget cuts.

It is a film with a solid script, a strong emotional core, and a sense of style that allows it to stand out visually from the typically bland superhero blockbuster. Yes, I could complain about occasionally obvious uses of ADR and the quality of some CG effects. Yet none of that prevents the film from being its best self and providing a complete cinematic experience. I hope that in a few years, this film will get positive re-evaluations, and Sony will bring its characters back for a new movie in some capacity.

FTNC Updates

As mentioned before, I have been going through a backlog and adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory. Here are the most recent additions:

Underexposed
// Alex Rollins Berg
That Final Scene
// Sophie
Movie Industry Musings with Tepper
// Kristen Tepper

What I’m Reading/Responding to

The excellent AVPGalaxy website has published a really cool article called “The (Almost) Resurrection of Rebecca “Newt” Jorden.” This is my favorite kind of post, one where the author cites a series of disparate sources to paint a full overall picture of something that is not widely known.

Resurrection, as it turns out, could’ve very well been focused around the return-via-cloning not of Ellen Ripley but rather another character that was taken from us: Newt, Ripley’s foster daughter, who was unceremoniously killed off in the opening scenes of Alien 3. Don’t get me wrong, I love the current form of Resurrection but this could’ve been a potentially more interesting direction for the franchise, had it happened.

Click on the image below to check it out:

Here is a quote:

But there was a time in the mid-1990s when Newt’s untimely demise was about to be undone. I would wager that most Alien fans are unaware of this footnote in the development of Alien Resurrection where we would have seen a cloned Newt, rather than Ripley, resurrected to combat our favorite acid-blooded extraterrestrial Xenomorph XX121.
I think it’d be a safe bet, not just because the film’s lack of popularity within the fandom leading to less exploration of it, but because until relatively recently there was just so little known about this direction that Alien Resurrection could have taken.

But What about you?

Do you agree/disagree about Alien Resurrection or Romulus? Any thoughts on the Blair Witch, Kraven or the controversies surrounding Sony and Spider-Man? Should I indeed go and make an extensive defense article of Kraven? Please,

Textual Variations

Discussion about this post