Send in the Clones

An artful director brings flair to the Alien franchise

Comments (0) By Peter Rainer Thursday, Dec 4 1997

He has staged an underwater sequence that manages to be both terrifying and dreamily lyrical. Ripley and the mercenaries swim away from the pursuing aliens, and it's a true nightmare: The humans' movements are slowed by the water into a kind of sinuous ballet, while the aliens dart frictionless through the fluid. The entire passage has a frightful clarity. It's also a prime example of how an artist can take a conventional horror concept and really run with it. Jeunet is essentially a hired hand in Alien Resurrection -- he's preserving the franchise -- but in scenes such as these, he manages to join his own aesthetic obsessions with those of the popular audience.

Today's bottom-line Hollywood is no place to be an artist, but the realms of sci-fi and horror may still provide a playing ground where visionaries can try things out. Studio executives will license the experimentation because they understand that audiences want bigger and better gizmos. The irony is that -- if you're an artist in Hollywood right now -- you stand a much better chance of making a daring and "personal" film if you make a megazillion sci-fi epic such as Alien Resurrection than if you attempt a small-scale human drama.

Alien Resurrection.
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. With Sigourney Weaver, Ron Perlman, Winona Ryder and J.E. Freeman.

Rated R.
109 minutes.