"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."

"'I think that at least design-wise there have always been sexual and sensual overtones to the sets,' says Weaver. 'And I've always thought that the Alien is interested in other things than itself. I think it has other, sexual things in mind. But for Aliens: Resurrection, they've cut out a lot of the kinkier stuff, believe it or not. I'd still classify it as sensual, though. Jean-Pierre really understood the relationship Ripley has with the Alien. The French are great. You can't shock them.' Kicking off production in November 1996 and wrapping up last May, Aliens: Resurrection was a gruelling shoot, confesses Weaver. Particularly tough was an extended underwater sequence, in which the pirates and Ripley are pursued through the submerged kitchens by a phalanx of Aliens. The actors had to spend weeks submerged in a tank with no respirators or face masks. 'It was the worst physical experience of my life,' says Ryder. 'You're in a tank that's filthy - the crew is in there for 17 hours a day and there was no coming out to go to the bathroom.' Weaver adds: 'It seemed to go on forever. It actually took a month. And I'm not brave. Ripley's brave. I can say that nothing exists of Sigourney Weaver in that scene at all.'"

"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."

"Two hundred years after her suicide, Ellen Ripley's cloned by scientists intent on nurturing the alien foetus inside her. The new Ripley couldn't care less - she's dead already - but goes along for the ride when Call (Ryder) and a band of marooned space pirates fight the inevitable rearguard action. In outline, the resilient Alien movies may be little more than slasher movies in space, yet equipped with strong, imaginative directors, each has proved distinctive and surprisingly resonant. Jeunet, the series' supreme fantasist, plunges deep into the nightmarish genetic whirlpool concocted by screenwriter Joss Whedon. After an ominous, memorably ghoulish opening, however, the Frenchman can't disguise a lack of engagement with the action sequences. The laziest stuff is all linear, mechanical business, much of it concerning Ryder, inadequate in a role designed simply to guarantee the teenage male fan-base. With her deep-freeze intensity and sinewy self-sufficiency, Weaver needs no such back-up. Choking as she comes face to face with earlier, aborted clones, grappling with residual maternal feelings towards the monsters she spawned and contempt for the humans she's long since left behind, Ripley Mk II is a terrifyingly ambivalent millennial saviour, more frightening than a score of aliens."

"Witness the resurrection."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"Pray you die first."

"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."

"In the beginning, it was supposed to be Dan Hedaya who got sucked out into space. His character, General Martin Perez, was originally set to exit Alien: Resurrection in spectacularly bloody fashion – his entire body ejected, limb by limb, through a tennis ball-sized hole in the space ship, Auriga. Effects company Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc, spent several weeks in 1996 solving the problem of having a body pulled apart realistically by the vacuum of space. Test footage released by ADI shows the painstaking process of researching and testing practical means of creating Hedaya’s death scene, which would have concluded with his character’s screaming head stripped of its skin until only a gaping skull remained. The results were almost comically grotesque and almost mesmerising to watch – so mesmerising, in fact, that Alien: Resurrection director Jean-Pierre Jeunet eventually decided that such a violent demise was more fitting for his movie’s most formidably villain, the Newborn, and not a relatively minor character. And so it was that the process of designing and testing began once again – this time on the practicalities of having a giant alien’s stomach rip open and its guts spill out on the floor before its skull shatters into countless tiny pieces."

"We are not alone."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."