Despite some merits and the effort of the director and cast, it is the weakest of the Alien films.
This was the fourth film in the Alien franchise, and the last one for many years. The franchise started well and developed nicely into three films that, while not without criticism or problems, work really well and have a lot of coherence as a joint work. The fourth film, unfortunately, completely breaks with this coherent and harmonious union.
Jean Pierre Jeunet has done a pleasant and undoubtedly strong job. It is one of the films that made the director's career and that we remember when we talk about him. And there is no doubt that he managed to prevent this film from being even worse, putting great effort into his work, coordinating his technical team and guiding a strong and highly competent cast.
Sigourney Weaver is back with the character that launched her career, despite the very understandable reluctance to accept the project (after all, Ellen Ripley had died in the immediately preceding film). She herself stated, without any fuss, that she agreed to do the film because she was handsomely paid. I don't blame her. For an actor, who lives off the jobs he's called to, and who never quite knows when they'll appear, it's important to accept lucrative opportunities. And we have to be honest, the actress committed herself to the work and did everything to give us a performance at the same level as we have seen in previous films. However, she unfortunately did not have been material with the same quality. Winona Ryder, who was experiencing a particularly happy period in her career, is also here, and she also gives us a very reasonable job, although far from matching the great performances she achieved in other films of the same period. Ron Perlman, fairly unknown, is in good shape, as is Brad Dourif.
On a technical level, the film is frankly inferior to its predecessors, and considering that all this is a set that should be cohesive and homogeneous, it is difficult not to make some comparisons. It's a film that continues to rest solidly on very strong visual and special effects, which are very reasonably done considering the age of the film and what has gone before it. It's not as spectacular as its predecessors, and any originality has been lost, but it's not bad, and it's worth seeing. Unfortunately, for a horror film with monsters on the loose, the action scenes are sparse, and seem very weak copies of what was done in the other films (to give an example, this film also has an alien sucked through a hole, in a very similar way to what happened in the first film). The tension and suspense are still present, and it's a truly unnerving film, which can be unsettling for some people. However, the really effective scares are few, even if it is a more visual and bloody film than its predecessors. An excellent cinematography helps to set this all up reasonably well.
Between merits and demerits, what really has no salvation is the script. The story we see in this film, in my opinion, not only has a very poor articulation with the films that preceded it, but actually ends up contradicting them. All it takes is to bring back to life, through a rather lame artifice, a character we saw to die with dignity. If this film needed Ellen Ripley – and indeed it needed, she was the character who gave the previous films its strength – the most logical thing was not to make a sequel, but a prequel or a spin-off with a story that was credible and logical, considering what was already done.