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Alien Resurrection
Movie

Alien Resurrection

1997 • Unknown

Woke Score
6
out of 10

Plot

Two hundred years after Lt. Ripley died, a group of scientists clone her, hoping to breed the ultimate weapon. But the new Ripley is full of surprises … as are the new aliens. Ripley must team with a band of smugglers to keep the creatures from reaching Earth.

Overall Series Review

Two centuries after Ellen Ripley's death, military scientists use cloning to resurrect her and extract the Alien Queen embryo inside her. The resulting Clone 8, or Ripley 8, is a human-Alien hybrid with enhanced physical abilities and a psychic link to the Xenomorphs. The villains are the scientists and military officers of the United Systems Military (USM), who exhibit an extreme form of corporate-military hubris by treating human life as expendable livestock for their experiments. Ripley and a crew of morally ambiguous space smugglers, including the synthetic Annalee Call, must fight to destroy the USM vessel and prevent the Alien creatures from reaching Earth. The film focuses on themes of identity, humanity's ethical failures, and the grotesque nature of forced gestation and birth. The narrative places the omni-competent female hybrid and the synthetic at the center of the action, while human male characters are largely portrayed as either corrupt military figures or incompetent mercenaries.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics4/10

Characters are defined primarily by their morality and their status as human, hybrid, or synthetic, rather than race or other immutable characteristics, reflecting a post-racial future where new divisions emerge. The most overtly evil characters are the white male military leaders and scientists of the corrupt USM, while the central heroes are a cloned white woman and a synthetic woman of color. This villainization of institutional power figures fits the archetype of white males as corrupt or evil, but the story's focus is on corporate greed over intersectional hierarchy.

Oikophobia8/10

The central conflict is driven by the United Systems Military, representing humanity's highest, most powerful institutions, which are depicted as fundamentally corrupt, unethical, and self-destructive. Human civilization is shown to have learned nothing from the past, continuing to commodify life and risk planetary catastrophe for the sake of weaponizing a monster. This frames the home culture and its institutions as inherently malignant and a greater threat than the external alien menace, fully embracing a theme of civilizational self-hatred.

Feminism9/10

Ripley 8 is the ultimate 'Girl Boss,' displaying superhuman strength, reflexes, and even superior athletic skill over the mercenary men. She is aggressively masculine and dismissive toward male sexuality and advances. The climax involves Ripley killing the Xenomorph-human hybrid that sees her as its mother, an act which is read by some cultural commentators as an unmistakable allegory for abortion and a violent rejection of forced maternity. Men are generally portrayed as comedic foils, easily vanquished threats, or bumbling cannon fodder, reinforcing the emasculation of the male characters.

LGBTQ+5/10

The core of the film’s horror revolves around the deconstruction of biological reality through cloning and forced hybridity, blurring the boundaries between species and sexes in the Newborn creature. The strong, co-dependent relationship between the hybrid Ripley and the synthetic Call is often read as a lesbian pairing. The script originally intended for the Newborn to have androgynous genitalia, which was deemed 'too much' by the studio and removed, showing an overt consideration of gender deconstruction in the creative process.

Anti-Theism6/10

The setting operates within a complete spiritual vacuum where scientific and military hubris is the ultimate force of evil. The USM scientists practice a form of ethical nihilism, treating human life as an interchangeable commodity for experimentation, which establishes a clear moral relativism. No traditional religion or faith is shown to exist or offer any solace or higher moral law to the characters, implying that any sense of transcendent morality has been entirely replaced by scientific-military power worship.