This guest post is written by Tiago Svn.
1997’s “Alien Resurrection” is a piece of art so bizarre it felt less like a movie and more like the most ‘90s of sci-fi music videos stretched into feature-film length by decree of a mad god. Its unabashed wackiness sent the mainline Alien series into a coma so deep it would only, more or less, wake up for with “Alien Romulus” two whole decades later. Still, many important things have happened to the Xenomorph during those dark times, including a passing of the torch that the studio failed to capitalize on.
It all began with the “Alien Resurrection” video game from 2000, which never got its due credit. Despite it sharing the plot with, well, one of the most poorly plotted movies in an often wacky genre, its revolutionary handling of the first-person perspective allowed fans to get as scared as they would when they first saw the original “Alien” — had that been set in “Silent Hill.” People loved “Amnesia” for kickstarting the trend of the defenseless main character who has to endure an entire castle’s worth of monsters, but “Resurrection” was doing something similar.
Though we had weapons, they often proved lacking in terms of keeping up with the Xenomorph threat, and the game really did play more like a survivor horror title in a sci-fi setting than a shooter where we’re clearly the hero. The borderline superpowers that Ripley had throughout the entire film due to her mixed alien DNA? Completely gone here. The main character is always a lamb one false move away from the slaughter, and that’s great.
I truly believe this game would’ve opened the eyes of many in both industries if anyone had dared really take a look into this seemingly cursed property. And, just this one time, I can’t even really blame execs, as gamers were equally as blindsided by “Alien Resurrection’s” prowess. As someone who’s read and done a lot of video game coverage over the past decade, I know most of the hate pointed at video game journalists is dumb bull crap that began for sinister ulterior motives. Then again, I’ve also read a few wacky takes over the years, none of which aged as poorly as Gamespot’s take on “Alien Resurrection’s” video game adaptation.
In case that take has left you baffled, yeah, those weird controls the reviewer is complaining about have been the default control scheme for console games — not just FPS titles — for decades now. They weren’t popularized by “Resurrection” because not enough people sang its praises, but this was the first console game to do it.
“Alien Resurrection” wasn’t a tie-in, usually a kind of weak game meant to release alongside one movie to surf its wave of fan hype and sell well regardless of quality, but solely because its development took too long for it to release alongside the film. To make matters worse, this was a tie-in to a terrible movie, one possibly launched much later in the hopes not that it would make use of the movie’s popularity, but that people would’ve already forgotten. “Alien Resurrection,” the game, had the entire deck stacked against it.
That sucks, because it should’ve set the standard for FPS titles on consoles before “Halo,” which would come out a year later and get all the credit. And yeah, “Halo” is a much better shooter than “Alien Resurrection,” but “Resurrection” is a much better “Alien” experience than anything after “Aliens.” It’s even, on many levels, a better horror experience and sequel to the original than “Aliens.”
As I’ve mentioned before, the plot of “Resurrection,” the movie, takes bizarre turns, even when there’s seemingly nowhere on the road to turn. The game mostly follows the plot, but its simplified nature forced the devs to cut a lot of the wackiness, and that’s all for the better. The game works great, even with the parts that they just couldn’t change from the movie. Nobody liked the “Newborn”, the weird, seemingly human-skinned ultimate threat presented in the film, but it’s an expected evolution of the Xenomorph by the hands of the crazed human scientists from that bizarre — albeit not longer as distant — world.
It makes sense, and it expands upon the existing lore organically. It creates a future — just not the one fans wanted. Just as importantly, it doesn’t mess with the canon. “Aliens,” on the other hand, introduced the Alien Queen, a creature most love despite its changing and ultimately undermining the perfect cycle of the Xenomorph seen in the first film. Even if most of “Resurrection” didn’t land, weirdly, we cannot accuse it of being disrespectful towards the source material.
I’d much rather have that over the exaggerated adoration and repetition that “Alien Covenant” forced us to witness, and from the complete disregard for canon that “Prometheus” presented. And, if there’s any doubt that even the people behind “Covenant” agree, well, I’ll be damned if the third act of that movie isn’t actually a toned-down (and thus less fun) remake of “Alien Resurrection’s” third act. Plus, the newborn is truly scary in the game, which pretty much absolves it in my eyes.
“Alien Resurrection’s” lukewarm reception failed to pass along the message that the xenomorph should be in games, so, instead of us getting possibly one original “Alien” game, or even more awesome “Alien Versus Predator” games, we saw the “Alien Versus Predator” series of great games getting turned into movies. These, well, kept all the loathed wackiness from “Resurrection,” and threw away all the (intentional) fun.
The first film sucked for many reasons that many others have pointed out better than I can in one thousand words, but also purely because of their nature, they failed to do the thing that made the games shine: Making players feel just like one of the three very different main characters. Also, I could be wrong about the second “AVP” movie, “AVP: Requiem,” which might even be a great movie that checks all the boxes I just mentioned, but I’ll never know, because the entire thing was just too dark to understand what the hell was happening.
The “AVP” movie misfire on top of the “Alien” movie misfire should’ve taught FOX that there was probably a better way to go with the property that’s not movies, so they made “Prometheus,” an “Alien” prequel that didn’t have the guts to market it as such. It was bad and also misfired.
It was only after banging their heads on all the walls that we got “Alien Isolation,” which, despite a derivative plotline, really does excel at once again making players feel like a puny human doing whatever it takes to survive a xenomorph. It’s great fun, and should’ve already inspired a sequel, or, even better, finally an original movie.
We didn’t get that, so far, but we got “Alien Earth,” an Alien TV series, which is not only possibly even sillier than “Resurrection,” but this time the alien isn’t even a weird baby-shaped monstrosity, he’s like a dog you can control via whistles — but that also seemingly spent all the budget in the first episodes and then started looking like a low budget YouTube short. Who’s going to tell FOX that there’s an ecosystem where the xenomoprh can thrive, and he’s already been thriving in it for a while.
Image Credit: “Alien Isolation,” Creative Assembly
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