Word: alienation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Familiarity also breeds affection. The aliens still have pretty teeth, ooze slime from every pore and maintain their relentlessly hostile attitude toward all things human. But by now--Alien Resurrection is their fourth screen appearance--there's something funny about their reliable malevolence. It's sort of like Mr. Magoo's nearsightedness; you await its inevitably disastrous consequences with high comic anticipation...
...director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, hurries us past all the desperate explanations required by sequels to movies that ended up pretty definitively (the last we saw of Ripley in Alien 3, she was taking a dunk in molten metal). Since most of these are incomprehensible anyway, especially as they are constantly interrupted by fires, floods and explosions, Jeunet is eager to get on with the really scary stuff. This is not, given the movie's self-satirizing impulse, as terrifying as it once was. But on the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being...
...very first tale, In Broad Daylight, invites Western readers into an alien landscape and a harrowing situation. White Cat, the young narrator, learns from his friend Bare Hips that the Red Guards have caught Old Whore, a local woman accused of prostitution, and will parade her through the streets to the place of public denunciations and punishment. White Cat is excited at the promised spectacle, as is everyone in the town; a bleak place like Dismount Fort offers few public diversions...
Like the way-too-wide-eyed Cusack, Eastwood lingers over these mild deviates from the norm as if they were the critter in Alien Autopsy. This film might have trusted more in Spacey's sly glamour, and in Williams as a wily game player to the death. Possibly...
...YEAR'S RESOLUTION] In Alien 5, get the creature down to Earth where it can do some real damage...