Symptom 61: Ripping On Ripley
Xenomorph March is going strong and this week, well, this week we move on from the great entries in the Aliens franchise into the one that, well, make no sense whatsoever.
Alien to the power of 3 - the one where Ripley crash lands on a prison planet full of sex offenders and murderers and proceeds to become an idiot. Also known as the one where absolutely none of the characters aside from Ripley are likable or redeemable in any way.
Alien Resurrection - The thing that almost ended Joss Whedon's career? You know, the one where they cloned Ripley 200 years later from some old blood samples to bring back the Xenomorph's because she had a queen in her? Yeah, her blood had human and alien DNA in it and that means a clone of her clones the growing Xenomorp and dear god, ok, lets say I buy this, why did it take 200 years to figure this out and try it? Also, this movie as well has almost no redeemable characters. We have shady military people killing civilians to grow Xenomorphs in an effort to weaponize them and we have horrible space pirates willing to kidnap people in cryofreeze and deliver them to be experimented on by the shady military jerks. Aside from the android all these characters are hatable, even Ripley because Ripley 8 is clearly not Ellen Ripley but some weird, soulless echo of her combined with an alien queen. We also get whatever the newborn is and that uncomfortable bonding scene between it and its adoptive mother, Ripley 8. No, don't youtube it if you have never seen it or are lucky enough to have deleted the dramatic memory from your brain, I am considering therapy to deal with having seen it.
So yeah, Xenomorph gets to Alien Cubed and Resurrection this week. I'd like to say better things are ahead but next week we tackle Prometheus, AVP, AVP Requiem and Covenant. So, yeah, joy. Ok, Covenant was good and the first half of Prometheus was amazing, and AVP was a fun action movie, so there is some good ahead next week and we did find some good in both of these turd sandwiches this week. Maybe its just comparing them to the masterpieces that came before in Alien and Aliens that make them seem so bad...and maybe, they just aren't that good either.