Sequel Films

"Stupid friends are dangerous."

"Reiko Dan - Chidori"

"Mutsuta's wife: You're too sharp. That's your trouble. You're like a drawn sword. Sharp, naked without a sheath. You cut well. But good swords are kept in their sheaths."

"Tatsuya Nakadai - Hanbei Muroto"

"Yūzō Kayama - Iori Izaka"

"Mutsuta's wife: Killing people is a bad habit."

"Akira Kurosawa's Powerful and Newest Japanese Masterpiece"

"Mutsuta, the Chamberlain: Once as I rode by, someone said "the rider has a longer face than the horse.""

"Toshiro Mifune - Sanjûrô Tsubaki"

"A fast sword, keen perception used well to SLAUGHTER HIS ENEMIES."

"According to Den of Geek, Whedon's first draft of "Alien Resurrection" has the Betty crash-landing in a forest, which becomes the setting for a fight between Ripley, Call, and the skull-faced human-Xenomorph hybrid, the Newborn. Ripley wields a grenade launcher and Call drives a flying harvester with threshing teeth. After that, Whedon rewrote the ending several times, with the final earthbound version shifting to a desert location. As he explained: "The first [version] was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard. The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert. Now at this point this had become about money, and I said, 'You know, the desert looks like Mars. That's not Earth; that's not going to give people that juice.' But I still wrote them the best ending I could that took place in the desert." Whedon was dead set on an Earth finale because he felt, "The reason people are here is we're going to do the thing we've never done; we're gonna go to Earth." However, the aforementioned budgetary concerns led to the abandonment of this and other ideas in the movie. What's left is a film that the screenwriter was unhappy with and that came in dead last in our ranking of the "Alien" movies."

"Uh...you know, it wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending, it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

"There are a few fun touches that superficially play on the original film. Call is part of a group of robots who rebelled and won back their freedom. It seems the top-down structure of Weyland-Yutani was so oppressive that even the previously obedient machines couldn’t stand it. And the military’s central computer now has a male voice and is referred to as “Father,” cementing the patriarchal role of those in power, in contrast to all the maternal imagery of Alien and the “Mother” console. Ryder, who didn’t manage to use her 90s “it girl” rep to make Resurrection a hit, is one of the few people who actually remembers the film fondly, and is largely responsible for making it “kind of like a really cool art film,” as she described it in a 2013 interview with the Huffington Post, praising the direction of Jeunet, who was gaining fame for his offbeat French films and would eventually become an international star with Amélie. It turns out Jeunet was Ryder’s idea, and he gives the film an eccentricity that may dull the horror a bit but gives Resurrection a really distinct style. At times, it feels like a vaudevillian theatre troupe putting on an Alien play, and I mean that in the best way. The actors playfully dive deep into their roles, and camp things up for a director who can appreciate the absurdity of it all."

"Ms. Weaver says it was the reinvention of the Ripley character -- this spirit of nihilism, as she calls it -- that persuaded her to do a fourth Alien film after she had all but decided that three were enough. "It seemed a challenge," she says. "You know, we all feel that when things get too difficult we have a way out, that it's finally up to each of us, that we can exit. And I thought, how awful it would be to find yourself in a world where you had exited, with all sincerity, and they had brought you back against your will. I tried to go with that idea as far as I could.""

"French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the cinematic visionary who (with partner Marc Caro) gave us Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, brings an "other" Ripley to life, cloned, transformed, quietly cynical and possessed of inhuman strength. Working from a tight, quirky script by Joss Whedon (Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Jeunet makes this Alien into an extravaganza -- a movie narrated by its own look -- a deep, dark, sci-fi tableau in which the shadows around Ripley throb with malevolence."

"Jeunet has marked Resurrection with his telltale signature of unsettling, even disgusting, spectacle: A close-up of an ear getting singed by a drop of alien acid; the deep-set, needy eyes of a freak hybrid; even an impossible traveling shot down the throat of a screaming human victim. Standout sequences include an underwater chase that seems more dream than reality, a horrifying DNA-lab showdown and a truly awesome alien birth. With members of his French production team at the controls of photography, editing and visual effects, Jeunet has given this film a haunting presence, like the scent of formaldehyde in a jar of caviar."

"Then there’s Ripley herself, whose transformation has all the hallmarks of a Whedon heroine. Nearly every Whedon project seems to have a woman with special abilities given to her by one shadowy cabal of men or another. Inevitably, she rebels and takes back her autonomy with force. This happened with Buffy, it happens with River in Serenity, and it happens with Echo in his later series Dollhouse. Ripley’s rampage in Resurrection is textbook Whedon patriarchy smashing, but it’s also a fitting conclusion to her relationship with Weyland-Yutani. The company is replaced by a galactic military, but it’s all part of the same consolidation of power. The aliens represent the line corporations, governments, and armies (are these three even distinct?) are willing to cross to achieve their own ends, so Ripley’s resistance is always essentially pitted against the same thing. In Resurrection, they accidentally empower her through the very process that was meant to use her up. By reducing her to the level of meat to be experimented on, she and the xenomorphs literally become one. Everything and everyone is just a plaything for those in power. In one of the film’s most cathartic (and disturbing) scenes, Ripley torches a lab full of failed Ripley clones, one of which painfully begs her for death. One of Ripley’s new crewmates, played by the always scene-stealing Ron Perlman, doesn’t get why she’s so angry as to be wasting ammo. He chalks it up to being “a chick thing,” which is a fitting final note. The control over human bodies has always had gendered undertones in the Alien films. Ripley is a woman whose physical autonomy is always under threat, either from the aliens or from her patriarchal corporate overlords. Here, she takes back control more divisively than ever before."

"A series such as the Alien films, with hordes of fans worldwide and much acclaim under its belt, has a lot to live up to when a new sequel hits the collective retina. So, with the release of Alien Resurrection, the fourth chapter in the Ripley saga, audiences should be surprised by changes in the heroine we've come to know like a sister."

"Alien Resurrection is sometimes glib and repetitive, but it stays worthy of its predecessors by staying close to its two battered heroines. There is more to understanding the bond between them than Johner’s supposition that “it must be a chick thing.” Ripley and Call are fighting for the same thing that Jeunet achieves in making movies: the chance to dream."

"The fourth film in a series that started with Ridley Scott’s widely appreciated 1979 original, the current “Alien” has devolved into something that’s strictly for hard-core horror junkies who can’t get enough of slime, gore and repulsion. While progress in some areas of civilization is problematic, one thing that continues to go from strength to strength is the ability of special-effects technicians to up the ante for state-of-the-art revulsion. There’s an audience for this kind of stuff, as there was for public executions, and starry-eyed movie executives no doubt stand up and cheer when new levels of disgust are reached and surpassed."

"Now here is "Alien Resurrection." Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is still the heroine, even though 200 years have passed since "Alien3." She has been cloned out of a drop of her own blood, and is being used as a broodmare: The movie opens with surgeons removing a baby alien from her womb. How the baby got in there is not fully explained, for which we should perhaps be grateful."

"The studio hero this time around is French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose fascination with highly stylized grotesquerie and pretentious dead-end weirdness was last on display in the unfortunate “City of Lost Children.” Working with some of the same actors and technicians from that film, Jeunet has also re-teamed with cinematographer Darius Khondji. His visual style, grandly described in the press kit as “signature chiaroscuro lighting and muted colors,” in practice means that “Alien Resurrection” looks as if it were shot under the sickly fluorescent lighting of a decrepit hospital emergency ward. One reason “Alien Resurrection” places so much emphasis on the stomach-turning is that only so much can be done with these films in terms of plot. In fact Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) neatly summarizes what’s to come when she says of the monster, “She’ll breed, you’ll die, everyone will die.”"

"The birth takes place on a vast space ship. The interstellar human government hopes to breed more aliens, and use them for--oh, developing vaccines, medicines, a gene pool, stuff like that. The aliens have a remarkable body chemistry. Ripley's genes are all-right, too: They allow her reconstituted form to retain all of her old memories, as if cookie dough could remember what a gingerbread man looked like. Ripley is first on a giant government science ship, then on a tramp freighter run by a vagabond crew. The monsters are at first held inside glass cells, but of course they escape (their blood is a powerful solvent that can eat through the decks of the ship). The movie's a little vague about Ripley: Is she all human, or does she have a little alien mixed in? For a while we wonder which side she's on. She laughs at mankind's hopes of exploiting the creatures: "She's a queen," she says of the new monster. "She'll breed. You'll die." When the tramp freighter comes into play, we get a fresh crew, including Call (Winona Ryder), who has been flown all the way from Earth to provide appeal for the younger members of the audience. Ryder is a wonderful actress, one of the most gifted of her generation, but wrong for this movie. She lacks the heft and presence to stand alongside Ripley and the grizzled old space dogs played by Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Dan Hedeya and Brad Dourif. She seems uncertain of her purpose in the movie, her speeches lack conviction, and when her secret is revealed, it raises more questions than it answers. Ryder pales in comparison with Jenette Goldstein, the muscular Marine who was the female sidekick in "Aliens." Weaver, on the other hand, is splendid: Strong, weary, resourceful, grim. I would gladly see a fifth "Alien" movie if they created something for her to do, and dialog beyond the terse sound bites that play well in commercials. Ripley has some good scenes. She plays basketball with a crew man (Perlman) and slams him around. When she bleeds, her blood fizzes interestingly on the floor--as if it's not quite human. She can smell an alien presence. And be smelled: Her baby recognizes her mother and sticks out a tongue to lick her."

"It's been more than 200 years...The beginning has just started."

"Mankind wants them for their genes? I can think of a more valuable attribute: They're apparently able to generate biomass out of thin air. The baby born at the beginning of the film weighs maybe five pounds. In a few weeks the ship's cargo includes generous tons of aliens. What do they feed on? How do they fuel their growth and reproduction? It's no good saying they eat the ship's stores, because they thrive even on the second ship--and in previous movies have grown like crazy on desolate prison planets and in abandoned space stations. They're like perpetual motion machines; they don't need input."

"We are not alone."

"The "Alien" movies always have expert production design. "Alien Resurrection" was directed by the French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("City of Lost Children"), who with his designers has placed it in what looks like a large, empty hangar filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts. There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder--nothing like the abandoned planetary station in "Aliens." Even the standard shots of vast spaceships, moving against a backdrop of stars, are murky here, and perfunctory."

"Witness the resurrection."

"There were plenty of problems that plagued the production of Alien Resurrection, but despite the movie’s convoluted set-up and knotty plot, its creation was not quite as strained as its predecessor Alien 3. Future Amelie director Jeunet thought that the franchise ended with Alien 3 and, like producer Walter Hill, he was skeptical about continuing the story, but the movie’s large budget tempted him to take on the job. The helmer hired visual effects specialist and future Catwoman director Pitof to work with him, which could, in retrospect, be read as an early indication that things were taking a bad turn. But the problems didn’t become clear until the movie’s secret weapon—the newborn Alien—was unveiled. Like the Predalien in the later (underrated) Alien Vs Predator spin-off series, the Newborn Alien was intended to be a huge draw for Alien Resurrection, as the movie would be unveiling a new hybrid form of the title monster with a previously unseen creature design. The Alien Queen of James Cameron’s Aliens was one of the sequel’s best-loved additions to the franchise, so expectations were high. The Newborn Alien did not live up to them. Slimy, gangly, and hilariously human, the newborn was a laughable, giant-headed mess of overlong limbs and pot-bellied oddness. Originally intended to have human genitalia until the studio balked and Jeunet admitted that “even for a Frenchman it’s a bit much”, the Newborn was, nonetheless, a disaster even without its private parts appearing in the finished movie. An earlier design would have seen the creators model the monster’s appearance on Weaver herself, but this was abandoned for fear of resembling Species’ Sil. It’s a shame, as anything would have been an improvement on the prune-faced ghoul viewers were eventually left with."

"Weaver and Ryder have a ball playing yang and yin action figures with a common foe. Science is that foe, as it is in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, the provocative French features Jeunet co-directed with Marc Caro. Like the scientist in the latter film who invades the dreams of children, Brad Dourif’s kinky Gediman – he licks the glass that separates him from an alien’s darting tongue – learns the hard way not to mess with Mother Nature."

"Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley looks pretty frisky for someone who killed herself to save humanity from the demon seed in her belly in Alien3. There is more to Ripley’s rise from the ashes than Weaver’s rise in salary from $33,000 for the first Alien to $11 million for Chapter 4. Credit the script by Joss Whedon (Toy Story) for making a joke of it. To the remark, “I thought you were dead,” Ripley replies, “I get that a lot.” You go, girl. In space, no one can hear you scream, “Hey, stupid, ever heard of DNA?” Ripley gets cloned just like the dinos of Jurassic Park. Better to ask: Is there life left in a franchise that began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s Alien, expanded to James Cameron’s smash 1986 sequel, Aliens, and shrunk – in grosses, not daring – with David Fincher’s 1992 take on the aliens as an AIDS metaphor? You bet. Alien Resurrection is juiced by the fresh thinking of visionary French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the teaming of Weaver’s Amazonian warrant officer, Ripley, with Winona Ryder’s diminutive space smuggler, Call. In a shit-can universe where human aggression handily beats out alien retaliation for gross-out depravity, these two female warriors can outsmart any freak of nature, be it man or beast."

"Pray you die first."

"[A]t least part of Alien Resurrection’s failure to win over even existing fans of the franchise can be attributed to the movie’s failure to nail down a definite, specific tone. The movie is too quippy and action-oriented (thanks to screenwriter Joss Whedon’s contributions) to be as authentically scary as Ridley Scott’s critically acclaimed original movie. 1979’s Alien was pitched as a “haunted house movie in space” for good reason, as it begins dark and only grows more brutal throughout its duration. James Cameron’s sequel Aliens, meanwhile, is a less grim affair, with the cast well-armed and better prepared to take on the titular threat. In contrast, in Alien Resurrection, the characters never seem to be in mortal peril; they’re toughened mercenaries and scientists developing bio-weapons, neither of whom seem ill-equipped to take on a threat."

"Geraldine Chaplin — Iris"

"Jeff Goldblum — Ian Malcolm"

"Isabella Sermon — Maisie"

"Daniella Pineda — Zia"

"James Cromwell — Sir Lockwood"

"Rafe Spall — Eli"

"Justice Smith — Franklin"

"Toby Jones — Mr. Eversol"

"The park is gone."

"Chris Pratt — Owen"

"Ted Levine — Wheatley"

"Bryce Dallas Howard — Claire"

"Genetic power has now been unleashed. And of course, that's gonna be catastrophic."

"Welcome to Jurassic World."

"B. D. Wong — Dr. Henry Wu"

"Life finds a way."

"(to the Stygimoloch) Hey, buddy. You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?"