Alien: Resurrection - Special Edition

Despite being centred almost entirely around Sigourney Weaver, Alien: Resurrection registers as dashed off, even perfunctory. As a sequel it's a small-scale entry that repeats a lot of the hits but in a faltering, blubbery context, eventually proposing a massive course correction for the series that didn't actually end up going anywhere. Weaver plays Number 8, an imperfect clone of the Ellen Ripley who hurled herself into a lead furnace at the end of Alien³. This military-issue copy is, thanks to genetic tampering, a mutant. Reborn hundreds of years into the future, Eight is both physically and psychologically intertwined with the creature that once grew inside her - a human vessel that has overcome its infection and been irrecoverably changed in the process.

Eight then allows Weaver the opportunity to play a kind of alien empress, the mother of the majestic, pregnant menace at the centre of this sequel's malfunctioning space station. Disappointingly, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and screenwriter Joss Whedon never find the scenes or sequences that really tap into the odd, maternal energy that Weaver is broadcasting. Yes, Winona Ryder's neurotic human-trafficker Call does end up under Eight's wing but the connection is cursory. Similarly, the bond she has with her offspring is less about exploring a peculiar feeling of bereavement or the female dominated hierarchy of the alien race and more about finding a way for Eight to end up, unmolested, in the depths of a hive, witnessing the birth of an abomination.

Although Jeunet and cinematographer Darius Khondji find a variety of ways to keep the film's endless brass corridors visually interesting, the duo struggle when presented with ADI's sopping monsters. Mostly photographed as a mouth probing away at the camera, the special effects house obliterate all sense of detail by drowning the puppets in lubricants. Wider shots default to a CG model that not only exaggerates HR Giger's original bio-mechanoid to the point of parody but also blasts back every instance of light directed at it. The unholy ambulation seen in James Cameron's Aliens is abandoned too, arriving at a beast that moves like a massive instance of the scuttling insect seen in the opening of this fractionally longer Special Edition. The Newborn, Chris Cunningham's contribution to the xenomorph pantheon, fares worst of all; the Rubber Johnny director's diseased, tumescent concept art rendered here as kin to Pizza the Hutt from Spaceballs.