My list currently has two alien movies next to each other Alien Apocalypse & this Alien 4 both of them scored a 65% from me. One had a budget of $1.5m and this one had a budget between $60m-$75m. The other one was a stand-alone Sy-Fy channel late night movie the other was following on from one of the most successful movie franchises and was expecting to make millions. Well it did make nearly $100m over its budget but when you estimate that on average a Hollywood movie will double its budget in marketing to see the movie it means it didn’t net that much return in actual terms.
I am not exactly sure my point here other than spending lots of money on something doesn’t make it any good. The fourth alien movie in the Xenomorph story was released in 1997 and I think I went to the cinema to see it first. I think on this occasion I really didn’t enjoy it as I would do normally with cinema trips. It could have been that I was becoming a critic back then and was looking to pick holes in it and I just did!!
This film is set hundreds of years after the third movie which I had given one whole percentage point higher than this one but I am not sure whether that is justified as there are elements in this movie that were far superior the its fore runner but I had to remind myself that this is my list and I ever so slightly prefer 3 over 4 but not by much.
This film see’s the return of Sigourney Weaver returning for the fourth time and looked pretty good for someone killed off 200+ years ago in the third movie. I know it’s too late for the spoiler alert warning for the third movie but to be honest you know she’s not going to make it very early on in the third one. Well so we think as she’s back for the fourth one. Confused? You will be when I try and explain the plot.
Well, here goes, some scientist type fellows have cloned a version of Ripley in order to extract the Alien DNA from the two combined bodies. For some reason the aliens are aliens but Ripley is a bit of both still. Some mercenaries have been out collecting humans that are in stasis to hand over to the mad oh sorry I mean Military Scientists who are testing the aliens and now have lots of eggs they can use the humans to grow more Aliens in the hope of using them like a weapon. Now where I have seen the military coming up with animals to be a weapon. I am instantly reminded of the bats that were trained by the Americans to have explosives strapped to them and then they would released over an enemies town. The plan being its daylight they so naturally find somewhere to roost as soon as possible and once they are all over town they flick the switch and BOOM half the town gone. The problem was the bats flew home to the American base and BOOM!!
Sorry I digress.
Guess what the Aliens have come up with an escape plan which is extremely devious and shows the extent that these guys would go to just to keep its species alive. The mercenaries have a member that recognises Ripley’s name and works out what they might be up to so decides to kill Ripley but fails they then have to evacuate the ship as the aliens are unsurprisingly running amuck. The only problem is that the standard protocol for a military vessel when in distress would be by default to return to earth and in this case would bring death to the entire human race left there. So, they set the ship to crash into the earth killing both any survivals but more importantly the Aliens on board. The betrayer of them all wants to prevent this and a fight and some gory deaths occur as the group are chased around the ship before this. So, we head to the final conclusion of the movie which I will try not to spoil but I will leave this section hanging so at least I can pre-warn you. So, here’s my post review comment here –
So, this is or would be a higher scoring movie for me if it wasn’t for the finale which could have been so much better than it was. If you really don’t know the end please be warned its shit. I wish I could be more elegant with my words and go into the artistic merits of this and the cinematic glory of that but all I can say without giving everything away was that baby xenomorph just didn’t wash it for me. I have no doubt they spent a small fortune on its design and practical methods of ‘brining it too life’ it just did not work for me. I found myself watching the first half or three quarters of this movie. It is normally (by its nature) on late of an evening if on one of the movie channels and you could blame tiredness or more so once you have seen the first three quarters of this movie you’ve seen enough. Again, another movie I wanted to like and enjoy but failed. It could be me failing it but it feels like I felt let down by this conclusion to the Aliens story. This movie could have been so much more than its final cut concluded.
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