A disappointment, to be sure. Alien Resurrection works from a science-fiction screenplay that firmly casts its lot with the gynecological horror of the first and third films in the series rather than with the marines-in-space theme of the second. But if arthouse darling Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children) has imagination and idiosyncracy in spades, he lacks the chops to bring off the more visceral side that's essential, I'd argue, to a successful Alien movie. It's not enough that we're made to think about what's happening on-screen. Rather, we should be inhabited by it, as though one of those titular monsters was growing inside our gut.

Alien did all that and more, and even to this day I sometimes think that first movie is underrated. Detractors claim it's nothing more than a slasher movie in outer space, but I can't accept that pronouncement. Alien is an honest-to-god hybrid of science fiction and horror -- the bogeyman in this case is an eight-foot-tall alien monster that's unleashed on a group of blue-collar working stiffs by a faceless corporation that's intoxicated by the possibility of co-opting the toothy bastard for the military/industrial complex back on planet earth. The blankness of outer space in that film is something truly terrifying, as is the potent depiction of invasion of the human body by a truly alien organism.

James Cameron's Aliens was certainly the least intellectually driven film in the series, but he made up for it, to some extent, by turning the volume all the way up to 11 and careening full-tilt-boogie into battle. I was a little disappointed to see Ripley turned into such a literal mother figure -- all the more necessary, I guess, since she had to square off against her alien queen counterpart in the end -- but it's hard to dispute that Cameron created a classic of its kind that will probably be remembered far more fondly by the mass audience than the first film.

And David Fincher, bless him, did his level best to run the franchise into the ground with Alien3. In the very first reel, Fincher killed off the surviving characters that were introduced in the second film, including the adorable Newt, affording himself a fresh start unencumbered by the surrogate family with which Cameron had saddled Ripley. And the film is, to be honest, perfectly fascinating—if deeply flawed and even a little dull. Technically, it's a dank, murky wonder. And at the very least, it has one of the most potent conclusions in genre film history. When Ripley takes the dive into that sacrificial pit of brimstone, you'd have thought the book was closed on the Alien series as we know it.

And you'd be wrong. Sigourney Weaver was enticed back to the franchise by Joss Whedon's intriguing script, which had her cloned and brought back from the dead with a little bit of alien still inside her. And it's a smart enough piece of work, even if it's tied to the same running-down-corridors action that's become standard practice for the series and its imitators. Alien Resurrection has its moments, ranging from Ripley's edgy portrayal of a clone who may or may not prefer the company of aliens to a raft of new material having to do with genetics, reproduction, and even a thoroughly gross abortion metaphor. (The special effects and cinematography are disappointingly routine but impeccable.)

In one scene, Ripley's clone—identified as number 8—comes upon the laboratory where the misfigured bodies of clones 1 through 7 are kept. It's like an uncommonly brightly lit scene from the X-Files as it might be directed by David Cronenberg, and it's terrifically weird. What it's not is disturbing, though it clearly aspires to disturb. Unlike his progenitors, Jeunet is obviously not at all interested in making a horror film or an action film. He's aiming to create instead a garish, darkly comic fantasy. He misses the mark by a wide margin—and he probably shouldn't have tried it with an Alien movie. But I'm tempted to keep imagining the film that might have been.

Jeunet is unable to pull the disparate elements together into something cohesive, and the result is loose where it should be tight, and merely chaotic where it should be nerve-racking. The cast, which includes Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, and a very hairy-shouldered Ron Perlman, plays well against a comparatively hard-boiled Weaver, but the sniping between characters never amounts to much. Fans of Jeunet's previous work may be delighted to find that there are, indeed, scenes in Alien Resurrection where all of the characters seem to be screaming at once. That's still no substitute for urgency and drama, both of which have been sapped from this spastically intriguing but ultimately empty experience.