Alien: Resurrection - The Experiment
Details:
My first fan edit, <span class=“Italics”>Alien: Resurrection - The Experiment</span>, will be based upon and use footage from 20th Century Fox’s theatrical release of Alien Resurrection (Dec ’97) and the ‘alternate cut’ found in the Alien Quadrilogy box set (2003). I expect the original runtime of 104 minutes to remain largely unchanged. I expect to complete the project by June 2008.
Intro:
Alien: Resurrection annoys me intensely. I have a great love for the Alien films & universe as well as the Predator and AVP films, but this film makes me angry.
Whilst Alien 3 (possibly my favourite of the saga) had its problems rooted in nightmarish pre-production multiple scripts, negative studio involvement and shockingly abusive cutting of material, Alien: Resurrection did not. Alien 3’s redemption came about because of its tumultuous history.
The fundamental flaw with Resurrection is the script, and to a lesser degree the casting. The concepts and ideas (particularly the cloning DNA metamorphosis and newborn) that could have made this film genuinely interesting are underdeveloped and what is present gets buried beneath the mire of Joss Whedon’s band of pirates.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s visual style however does not seem out of place when the themes and ideas of mutation are concerned. Whilst Alien: Resurrection looks pretty good, the visuals cannot disguise what is a badly told half thought out story.
Heck, the first half an hour or so aren’t that bad, but once the ‘evacuation’ scene is over the film becomes ‘walk down a corridor, find a room with something in it’ ad nausea till the anticlimactic end.
Project Brief:
Given all this you might wonder what can be done (and why I’d bother). Well, simply put not a lot can be done. There is no missing footage that fills plot holes, all there is to work with is the film as it is (and the alternate cut with the extra 5 mins of mostly bad dialogue and awful ending).
What can be done however and what I intend to do is to restore some of the ‘feel’ of the Alien trilogy to this bastard son, mostly through tweaking parts of the dialogue.
What I hope to achieve is a cut of Alien: Resurrection that has greater dramatic tension and less comic nonsense. For this reason, and also because this is my first fan edit I’ve decided to subtitle my cut “The Experiment”.
Why the film doesn’t work and what I intend to do about it:
The ‘rehabilitation’ of Ripley 8, which is by far the most intriguing and well constructed part of A: R is the whole of the first 10 or so minutes of the film.
Restructure the first 20 or so minutes of the film to introduce the Betty and crew sooner and inter-cut with Ripley 8’s scenes. Hopefully this will add a more interesting build up and show that the crew of the Betty are blissfully unaware of the trouble they’re in.
The ‘witty banter’ and one-liners only undermine the film, destroying any sense of drama and tension in each scene and making the already two-dimensional supporting cast even more annoying.
This will be the easiest and most rewarding task. Simply edit out the bad lines (this does mean watching the film repeatedly and essentially transcribing it)!
The character Call is awful. This is most likely due to Winona Ryder’s appalling lack of acting skills. The back-story of Call being on a personal quest to kill Ripley 8, the aliens and generally save the universe is totally undermined by the whining ‘emo’ that miss Ryder portrays.
Removal of choice dialogue, mostly between Call and Ripley 8 in her cell and again in the chapel, will present a different take on Call who is merely a droid with various hang-ups and a streak of self-loathing.
The Aliens are simply not scary, and are barely featured in the film as any sort of adversary. In fact there’s practically no tension in the second half of the film. The Auriga approaching Earth does little to add any kind of pressure.
This will be the hardest thing to sort out. Reworking Wren’s dialogue to suggest they’re much closer to Earth might help, as would inserting shots of the Auriga travelling towards Earth. As for the aliens, perhaps adding in occasional shots of them could suggest the crew are (or rather Ripley 8 is) being watched/stalked.
The ladder scene is terrible. Christie’s meaningless self-sacrifice, Johner’s shooting a spider and Call’s miraculous return (after we’ve been told no alternative route is available) are all garbage.
<span class=“Italics”>Remove Johner shooting the spider. It’s pointless and another ‘comic moment’ in the middle of a tense scene. Altering Wren’s dialogue before the underwater kitchen scene would make Call’s return seem a little less contrived.</span>
Other things to go – the ‘viper pit’, I mean come on, wtf?
So there you have it, this will be something of a learning curve for me as I get to grips with editing a whole film but it’ll be fun! Any comments & criticism will be gratefully recieved.
Cheers,
Mabrothrax.
