I watched “Alien: resurrection” a couple of days ago, but haven’t gotten around to reviewing it before now. If you plan on watching these movies and dislike spoilers, I advise you to stop reading as this review has to reveal a few of the suspense-creating elements from “Alien 3″.

AR begins in an operating room. A bunch of doctors are standing above an anaesthetized female body, cutting into her torso, and removing an alien. It soon becomes clear that the female is Ripley — or a clone of her, anyway — and the alien that was removed from her is the queen she had in her in the third movie — or a clone of it, anyway.

This was also the eighth attempt at cloning them, and the previous seven attempts were horrible failures resulting in amalgamations of human and alien. In this respect the cloning isn’t entirely successful the eighth time, either, as Ripley has some of the aliens’ abilities, and vice versa.

However, it’s taken quite some time to figure out how to do this. Ripley’s death in A3 apparently took place 200 years before the relatively successful eighth cloning attempt, and in the meantime, a lot has changed. The Company is gone, replaced by the United Systems Army, an organisation that feels the aliens could be invaluable in urban warfare, when properly trained. Needless to say, this is one of the stupidest ideas in the history of military science since the nuclear bomb, and before long the aliens birthed by the queen are loose, the marines are dead, and Ripley’s trying to get to a ship along with a suspect bunch of space pirates.

Right up untill the end, “Alien: Resurrection” looked as if it would be better than the other ones. It shared the psychological plot of A3 in that there was a relatively large group of unreliable characters involved, although some of these are even less fleshed out than some of the A3 ones. But hey, they’re alien fodder, so who cares about depth, right? Silly question. I do, of course. Even though depth of characters aren’t exactly the most important part of such a movie as this, some of it would have been better.

It also had moderate amounts of action, combining the awesome firepower of the A2 marines with the almost weaponless situation of the A3 criminal monks. This makes for an interesting combination, which coupled with the lack of any massive “Jaws” scenes gives the movie an atmosphere of its own — just as all the other Aliens movies are different from each other.

However, AR goes wrong when the horrible, horrible, horrible puppy-eyed super alien shows up in the final half hour of the movie. This is why I am skeptical about large-scale Whedon: He always seems to go for finals I find to be too huge. Like the dinosaurs in Fray. The zombie army and giant demons of Bs8. The Danger Room and the bad-ass Alien civilisation in Astonishing X-men. Or the giant samurai demon in Buffy: Ring of Fire (although this one’s not really written by him, so…).

So all in all, a good movie that went horribly wrong in the end. 6.0/10.

But hey, that’s still two points above what I expected. Which means that the only disappointment so far has been “Alien”.