Alien: Resurrection (1997)

At least the Alien-human hybrid is creepy.

Alien: Resurrection (1997): written by Joss Whedon; directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; starring Sigourney Weaver (Ripley 8), Winona Ryder (Call), Ron Perlman (Johner), Gary Dourdan (Christie), Michael Wincott (Elgyn), Brad Dourif (Gediman), Raymond Cruz (DiStephano), Dominique Pinon (Vriess), and Dan Hedaya (General Perez):

Sigourney Weaver resisted post-Alien 3 attempts to get her into another Alien movie until Fox offered her enough money (reportedly $11 million) to change her mind. That Fox hired Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct seemed like a good idea at the time, though his most acclaimed movie, romantic comedy Amelie, was still years away. 

Alas, hiring a French director working in a second language may have led to some of the problems that caused screenwriter Joss Whedon to later explain in 2005 "It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong they could possibly do. That's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking. Because everything they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from it. And people assume that if I hated it then they'd changed the script...but it wasn't so much they changed it, they executed it in such a ghastly fashion they rendered it unwatchable."

Pretty much true. The most interesting thing about Alien: Resurrection is wondering if Joss Whedon read the first four Frank Herbert Dune novels. Ellen Ripley died at the end of the dull but stylish Alien 3. Here, she's been resurrected as a clone, her DNA blended with the alien she was hosting throughout Alien 3 until she threw herself into some molten metal at the end of the movie. So she's a super-strong, super-fast, somewhat predatory Ripley who remembers her past life because the alien DNA stores memories of the host. Or something. And she's got acid for blood!

This is similar to a lot of material in Dune and its sequels. Duncan Idaho gets resurrected again and again as a clone because Leto II in God Emperor of Dune believes Idaho to be the only being who can figure out how to kill him (I'm not explaining that!). Ancestral memories are a recurring theme in the Dune series. So, yeah, that's interesting.

Everything else, not so much. The crew in this movie do seem like a bit of a dry run for Firefly, at least in terms of What Not To Do. Winona Ryder is comically miscast as a hardass member of the pirate transport Betty. Dan Hedaya is comically miscast as the General in charge of the secret alien breeding program on the spaceship Auriga. Sigourney Weaver does her best. Brad Dourif is a delight as always, one of the five or six most reliable character actors in the history of the universe.

The story is dumb. On the bright side, FTL travel in the Alien universe has gotten a lot faster in the 200 years since Alien 3. Gun technology has regressed to about 1915. Everything is stupid. I like the design of the final Alien/human hybrid. Well, its head is hellacreepy. Whatever. Still not as stupid and pointless as Alien: Covenant, though. Not recommended.

Fever Dream

A Scanner Darkly: adapted by Richard Linklater from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name; directed by Richard Linklater; starring Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor); Robert Downey Jr. (James Barris); Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck); Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman) (2006): Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fueled mental breakdown.

Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.

Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.

Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.

The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.

The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety. Highly recommended.