Saw Alien 4 (should that be Aliens 4 maybe, or Alien: Resurrection?) It was certainly the strangest installation. The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, does his usual thing of jarring close-ups and raw, awesome spectacle. The writer, Joss Whedon, does his usual unpredictable homage/deconstruction thing. The two are not exactly an easy marriage though. By all accounts, Jeunet wanted to focus on strange sexual themes, with the human/alien at the end being hermaphroditic and the aliens explicitly having sex with Ripley. There are residual weird scenes of kinda-sex and one incongruously religious scene in a church. Whedon seems to be trying to flesh out what would later become Firefly (a group of hard-scrabble space-mercenaries with Ripley as the creepy space-witch. The total result is that Joss's clever dialogue and scenario serves only to disarm which leaves the viewer overwhelmed by Jeunet's parade of grotesques.
Because each installation of Aliens has had a different writer and director, I treat each film as though it were no more related to the others in the series than the two spidermen are to each other. But this time even I have to concede that this is really some other film (possibly two other films) that were fit awkwardly into the Aliens franchise (including some bad-science stretches. Cloned with DNA-memories? AND the alien inside of her? knee-jerk nerd rage everywhere.) There is none of the usual struggle against corporations/armies, only aliens vs humans. There's no uncomfortable Cronenberg-ish technology (Cronenberg-ish body-horror and creatures, but I'm thinking more back to Aliens 3 when a half-alive android torso comes to horrible life.) I hasten to add however that the spectacle is spectacular and treated as an original movie, I found it an interesting quasi-modo of a sci-fi.
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