The Big Picture
- Alien: Resurrection challenges audience expectations with a disorienting future setting and a transformed Ripley, becoming an intensely queer film.
- Ripley’s transformation into a hybrid of human and Alien explores themes of otherness, sexualization, and the birth of a new self.
- The controversial Newborn creature represents a subversion of reproduction and motherhood, showcasing Ripley’s acceptance of her identity.
There will always be debate about the worst film in a franchise. While some audiences find too much action objectionable, others might hunger for a deeper emotional connection between the characters. Even in the Alien series, opinions vary about which film out of the six is the most disliked. While there are those who feel that Alien 3 takes the cake — killing off beloved characters, comitting to strange camera angles, and mirroring the grungy style of its auteur, music video-turned-film director David Fincher — there’s a definite challenge to the title. Alien: Resurrection, the fourth film in the franchise, is regularly cited as a fan-least-favorite, a footnote in the branching lore of the Alien story.
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film transports its audience 200 years into the future in a disorienting change of pace. Even more jarring is the revelation that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who sacrificed herself in the final moments of the previous film, is no longer dead. This doesn’t mean she’s unchanged. Cloned by a team of doctors bent on reviving the Alien species she has tried to destroy, Ripley is now a combination of human and the queen chestburster in her body at the time of her death. Though her fingernails are razor-sharp and her blood sizzles, acidic, it’s her personality that has changed the most. And perhaps it is this shift in Ripley, such a beloved, boundary-breaking character, that earned the film its less-than-stellar reputation. But it could, easily, be any combination of the strange new directions Resurrection takes us in. It’s not as scary as the previous films, but it is more sensual. The characters don’t feel quite as desperate, quite as deep — the thematic strengths of the movie were clearly the priority. And, like so many historically reviled pieces of media, there’s something else quite interesting about the fourth Alien movie: At its heart, it’s an intensely queer film — and not just because of Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon‘s jokey kiss.
Ripley 8’s Birth in ‘Alien: Resurrection’ Is Queer-Coded
Ripley’s death at the end of Alien 3 is a necessary one. Having been infected with an Alien destined to become the most powerful version of its kind — a Queen — she decides she must sacrifice herself in order to save the human race. It’s a bit disappointing then, that her effort has been in vain. Our new Ripley, Ripley 8, is eighth in a long line of clones and the first successful attempt. She has been saved not because the team of scientists who cloned her want her to live, but because they need her to reproduce. From her unwilling body, the Alien species is revived — and she, too, is transformed.
The hardened, whip-smart version of what she used to be has shifted into something otherworldly: She sinks a basket without looking, smiles when she hears the newly-re-made Aliens escaping. She is both more sexualized and more dangerous. However much she might want to save the humans who share her space, she is no longer completely one of them. She’s an outsider now, even more so than she was as the only woman in Alien 3. Now, it is more than just her sex that separates her — there is also something more innate, a quality she can’t escape. Just like one cannot shed their queerness, Ripley cannot unstick her DNA from the Alien’s. She rips her way out of a cocoon, fully formed. (How many queer people have felt that their “coming out” moment was their real birth?) In one of the film’s most grotesque sequences, Ripley stumbles across a room full of the disfigured, half-cooked versions of herself — failed cloning experiments with varying levels of Alien DNA. She blasts them with fire, killing one and destroying the bodies of the others. Ripley 8 is finally her own being, something brand new, an amalgam of her old self and the thing she’s tried to keep at bay — finally, unescapably here.
Ripley and Call’s Relationship in ‘Alien: Resurrection’ Hints at More
The themes present in Alien: Resurrection are similar to those in many instances of queer cinema — the body as unknowable and fearful, otherness as strength, the death of an old self and the birth of a new one. But there are aspects of the film that bring this reading to the forefront, out of the realm of the thematic and into the obvious — namely, Call (Winona Ryder) and her shaky relationship with Ripley. Though Call initially tries to kill Ripley (she has an inkling of what the scientists want from her body), this violence soon turns into tension. Ripley caresses Call’s face, backs her into corners with a wolfish look in her eyes. And things get even stranger when, after Call is shot, it’s revealed through the presence of a milky (instead of bloody) wound that she has been, the whole time, an Android. (If Sigourney and Winona haven’t made things obvious enough yet, the camera shows us Ripley’s fingers plunging into the goo.) When it’s revealed that she isn’t human, another member of this edition’s survival crew, Johner (Ron Perlman) only objects from one angle: “Can’t believe I almost fucked it,” he says. After she’s outed — what else can it be called, really — Call is instantly sexualized, demonized for provoking desire in her crewmate. Thankfully, though, her relationship with Ripley isn’t so one-note. As they escape together to Earth, Ripley holds her android crewmate close to her chest. It had to be somebody’s awakening.
What ‘Alien: Resurrection’s Controversial Newborn Represents
One of the most controversial elements of Resurrection is, of course, that hybrid. A towering animatronic that required nine puppeteers, the half-human, half-alien Newborn is infamous for its ugliness. Its face is nothing but an expanse of slimy skin stretched over a human skull, its arms long, ape-like, and pale. Its very existence, in fact, is due to a twisted kind of childbirth — though Ripley has taken on Alien characteristics, it, too, has taken on some of her. The Queen now has a womb, and from it emerges the nightmarish final product of Ripley’s hundred-year-long fight — its own body queer, in a way, because of its impotence. (The Newborn’s original model included both male and female genitalia, but they were digitally removed post-filming.) Not fully human or fully alien, a helplessness shines in its beady, dark eyes. There’s an understanding between Ripley and her offspring. It’s not violent toward her, and she lovingly touches its body. At once a subversion of reproduction and of motherhood, the creature represents the final stage in Ripley’s battle with what she is afraid to become — what she loves but cannot nurture. There is another sacrifice. Ripley opens a hatch, and she and Call watch, horrified, as the Newborn is sucked outward into space. Hurtling toward Earth, we forget that this is, in fact, not the original Ripley — she has succeeded in becoming singular once more. Though once again the specter of her own improbable existence hangs over her, Ripley has accepted who and what she is. She is no longer, at last, afraid.
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