A strong argument could be made that there has never been a better time to be an Alien fan. Alien: Romulus was a huge success last year ($350.9 million at the box office on an $80 million budget), and a new film in the franchise from Fede Alvarez (who directed Alien: Romulus) begins filming in October. Aliens vs. Avengers from Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic wrapped up earlier this year, and it was one of the best crossover event comics I’ve read in years. Now Alien: Earth from Noah Hawley (showrunner for Fargo and Legion) is drawing praise from critics and fans (with a new episode airing tonight on Hulu and FX if you’re reading this the day it’s being published). Everyone seems to have Xenomorph fever (please go to the hospital immediately if you’ve come in contact with any strange black goo), so it seemed like a perfect time to do a rewatch of every film in the franchise. Yes, I even decided to watch the Alien vs. Predator films despite them not being considered canon. I apparently don’t love myself enough. I’m going to be watching these in order of release date, and I’ll only be watching the theatrical cuts. I know there are plenty of director’s cuts, assembly cuts, work prints, etc. that exist for these films, but I’m going to stick with the versions most people have seen. Also, there will obviously be spoilers. I’m sure you’re all bursting with anticipation to hear my thoughts, so let’s go ahead and dive in.
Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott
The premise of Alien is a simple one. A group of space travelers in the future have to try and survive an extraterrestrial monster that has gotten aboard their ship. That could easily be the description of a number of different 1950s science fiction and horror movies. The Thing from Another World (1951), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and Planet of the Vampires (1965) are all examples of films with very similar plots and themes. What makes Alien different from these other films is its execution. For starters, the aesthetic is completely different than most futuristic science fiction films up to that point. Instead of the typical pristine sets that had become commonplace to depict spaceship interiors, Alien looks like it could be set aboard an old oil rig. Everything is grimy and dirty, and the technology (while futuristic) seems like it’s constantly on the verge of falling apart. That can be extended to the characters themselves. These aren’t scientists or explorers. These people are basically space truckers. They’re dressed casually, smoking cigarettes, pounding coffee, and cracking jokes at each other’s expense. It makes them very relatable despite the fantastic setting. They’re just blue collar workers trying to make ends meet while being exploited by a massive corporation. The acting is also top notch. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Yaphet Kotto are all giving some of the best performances of their careers. You really feel for these people. Lastly, the creature itself has one of the most iconic designs in cinematic history.
The basic look of the creature was pulled directly from the painting Necronom IV by H.R. Giger. It’s a rather…uh…phallic design, but this speaks to the nature of the creature itself. It essentially serves as a metaphor for sexual violence, but I’ll get more into that when discussing the plot.
The story of Alien is about the crew of a mining vessel who receive a distress signal of unknown origin on an unmapped world (LV-426) that they are required to investigate by the company they work for. That company is unnamed in this film, but it will later be identified as Weyland-Yutani. Upon investigating the signal, it’s revealed to be originating from a derelict extraterrestrial spacecraft. In a wonderful bit of cosmic horror, the interior of the ship reveals a gigantic deceased humanoid pilot that appears to have been dead long enough to have fossilized. In its cargo hold are dozens of not hundreds of large eggs. One of these eggs opens to reveal a spider like creature that attaches itself to the face of a character named Kane (John Hurt). He’s brought back aboard the ship, but any attempts to remove the creature (which I’ll refer to as a facehugger going forward) are abandoned when it’s revealed that its blood is so acidic that it could burn a hole straight through the hull of the ship. Fortunately, it ultimately just falls off Kane’s face on its own and dies. Everyone then lives happily ever after. Just kidding! It turns out that the facehugger had deposited some sort of egg or embryonic creature inside of Kane that rapidly grows until it bursts out of his chest and kills him. It then scurries away, so the crew begins searching for it. Unfortunately, it quickly grows into an eight feet tall monster that begins picking off the crew one by one like a giant slasher villain.
The first big twist of the movie comes when it’s revealed that Ash (the science officer aboard the ship played by Ian Holm) had secret orders from the company to capture one of the creatures and bring it back to Earth. The company somehow had knowledge that this creature was on the world where the distress signal was coming from, and Ash was placed aboard the ship to make sure they stopped there to collect a sample for their own devious purposes. Also, the directive stated that the crew was expendable. Gotta love capitalism. The second big twist comes when Ash tries to murder Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), and it’s revealed that he’s actually a robot. I assure you that there is no way that anyone could ever predict this reveal without being told ahead of time. The final act of the film basically sees Ripley become the sole remaining crew member as she blasts the creature (which I’ll be calling a Xenomorph going forward) into outer space and puts herself into suspended animation while awaiting rescue.
Alien is damn near a perfect movie. It’s scary, it’s thrilling, it’s imaginative, it’s full of interesting characters, and it has one of the most iconic monsters in movie history. The life cycle of the Xenomorph is a major source of the terror. It first attaches itself to your face, shoves a tube down your throat, and impregnates you with a parasitic embryo. Then it explodes out of your chest once it finishes gestating. It then grows rapidly and begins aggressively hunting down and killing everything it can. It also looks terrifying. It has a bizarre oblong head with no eyes, a second mouth that shoots out of its larger mouth like a deranged frog’s tongue with teeth, a tail with a razor sharp barb at the end, and it has a black exoskeleton like the world’s most terrifying ant. Plus it bleeds acid. It’s pure unadulterated nightmare fuel.
It also does some incredible world building. We get a glimpse at a future that is utterly dominated by powerful corporations that rely on artificial intelligence to do their dirty work while being utterly indifferent to the lives of the workers they exploit. Thank goodness this is a fictional world! It’s dystopian and prescient in a way that makes it feel timeless.
The film was also a massive hit. It made $188 million at the box office on a budget of only $14 million. That’s to say nothing of the home video sales and numerous sequels and merchandise. It’s easy to see why. I adore this film and never get tired of watching it.
Aliens (1986) directed by James Cameron
If Alien is a perfectly realized horror movie set within a science fiction universe, then Aliens is a perfectly realized action thriller set within that same universe. It should come as no shock that Alien received a sequel after how profitable it was, but it’s genuinely surprising that it took seven years to get one. The legend goes that James Cameron pitched his idea by writing “ALIEN” on a chalkboard and then adding an “S” on the end and turning it into a dollar sign. Very clever if true. If audiences loved a movie about one Xenomorph, then just imagine how they’d react to a movie featuring a whole hive of them.
Sigourney Weaver reprises her role as Ripley from the previous film. She is discovered fifty-seven years after the events of Alien in suspended animation. She explains the events of the previous film to the empty suits of Weyland-Yutani, but they don’t believe her. The primary face of Weyland-Yutani in this film is a character named Burke (played by Paul Reiser). He’s a slimy corporate shill with the company’s best interests in mind.
When a colony on LV-426 suddenly goes silent, Burke and co. begin to take Ripley seriously and send in a team of heavily armed marines (accompanied by Ripley and Burke) to deal with the situation. Upon arrival, there is only one survivor: a young girl named Newt (played by Carrie Henn). The rest of the colonists have either been killed outright or used as incubators for the Xenomorphs to reproduce. It’s grim stuff. The supremely confident marines are quickly overwhelmed by a horde of Xenomorphs, and the handful of survivors attempt to come up with an escape plan while simultaneously trying to find a way to wipe out the monsters before they can spread.
It’s a high octane action thriller that swaps out the blue collar characters of the first film with professional soldiers and corporate stooges. Despite the change in genres and characters, a lot of the themes remain the same. The real villain of the film is once again the soulless corporation that is motivated purely by profits and is willing to sacrifice countless lives in order to achieve them.
Our primary protagonists this time around are Ripley (Weaver), Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), Newt (Henn), and a synthetic (robot) named Bishop (Lance Henriksen). The Xenomorphs themselves largely look the same save for a few cosmetic changes to the suits worn by the stunt performers (some additional ridges on the heads for example).
The major contribution that Aliens makes to the biology/established lore of the Xenomorphs is the introduction of a queen. Created by the legendary Stan Winston, this behemoth animatronic stands at about fifteen feet tall with a massive head, an additional set of smaller arms, and a huge egg laying sack reminiscent of a queen termite. It is terrifying.
The film concludes with Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop escaping the planet before setting off a nuclear explosion to kill all of the remaining Xenomorphs. Unfortunately, the queen has snuck aboard their ship. After a climactic battle, it’s flushed out of an airlock into space. Our heroes go into suspended animation knowing that they have saved the day, and they’ll never have to worry about the Xenomorphs again.
Alien 3 (1992) directed by David Fincher
So much for that happy ending. Aliens had made $183.3 million at the box office on an $18 million budget, so it was only a matter of time before another sequel was made. Once again, the only surprise was that it took another six years to get one. This film production is rather infamous for going through multiple scripts before finally settling on one followed by constant studio interference once actual filming began. David Fincher was brought in to direct, but he was still very inexperienced at this point in his career. That likely leant itself to even more brazen interference from studio executives. Regardless of the issues facing the production, Alien 3 still had a $60 million budget to work with in the hopes that it would be another sure fire critical and commercial hit like the previous two films. How did it turn out? Let’s see!
The film opens immediately after the events of Aliens with our surviving heroes in suspended animation when we see that a facehugger has apparently snuck aboard their shuttle. Uh oh! The shuttle promptly crashed, and everyone we’ve come to love is basically killed offscreen save for Ripley. Bold move! The shuttle has crashed on what is basically a prison planet. Everyone here is an inmate serving a sentence, and they are all men. I guess there is at least one dog on the planet as well, but it immediately gets a facehugger latched onto it. You can see where this is going. Eventually a Xenomorph bursts out of the dog and begins stalking the inmates as Ripley tries to explain what’s going on. This film introduces a new twist on the Xenomorph biology: apparently they take on some of the physical attributes of the host organism. The previous Xenomorphs all had some humanoid features because they were birthed by humans. This new one has some canine features because the host organism was a dog. It’s an interesting idea.
About midway through the film we learn that Ripley is apparently “pregnant” with a Xenomorph as well. A facehugger somehow attached itself to her while she was in suspended animation. To make matters worse, it’s apparently a queen. The rest of the film is spent trying to kill the Xenomorph before representatives of Weyland-Yutani show up to try and claim both it and Ripley’s unborn queen for themselves. Ripley does succeed in rallying the inmates to kill the Xenomorph, and she manages to kill both herself and the queen chestburster before they can fall into Weyland-Yutani’s hands. Yay?
I know there have been some reappraisals of Alien 3 in recent years, but this movie is a dud. The nihilistic tone and poor visuals make it difficult to sit through. I hope you like the color brown because that’s the only color you’re going to see for two hours. The visual effects are also the worst of any film in the franchise by a significant margin despite having a budget larger than both previous films combined. The practical Xenomorph looks good when it’s an animatronic or someone in a suit in the same frame as the actors, but it looks ridiculous whenever it is running. I do appreciate that it tries to go back to the horror roots of the original film, but none of the scares are particularly effective. There’s also a distinct lack of tension. Instead of building stress, this film mostly just builds boredom. What an unfortunate misfire.
Alien: Resurrection (1997) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
I find it funny that it only took five years this time to crank out a new film in the franchise after the least successful film up to that point both critically and commercially (Alien 3 made $180 million at the box office on its $60 million budget). How do you reinvigorate the franchise after the previous misstep? Apparently you hire an indie director from France, give him a $70 million budget, have him work off of a Joss Whedon script full of quips and one-liners, and convince Sigourney Weaver to come back even though she was extremely deceased at the end of the last film. It should be a sure fire success!
You know you’re in for a weird one right off the bat. The film opens with what appears to be a very young Sigourney Weaver without any hair whatsoever suspended in a tank of water. That transitions into a scene with an adult version (with a full head of hair!) undergoing surgery. It would appear that scientists have somehow found a way to clone Ripley complete with the embryonic queen Xenomorph inside of her, and now they are surgically removing it. The main takeaway here is that the scientist overseeing the procedure is played by Brad Dourif. The operation is a success, and now we have both Ripley and a queen on our hands.
This film is set two hundred years after the events of Alien 3, so things are a bit different. Weyland-Yutani is no more, and the people wanting the Xenomorphs are part of the United Systems Military. A band of mercenaries have been hired to deliver some humans currently in suspended animation to be implanted by facehuggers in order to breed more Xenomorphs for whatever military program is being conducted aboard their ship. You can probably figure out where things go from here. The Xenomorphs breakout of their cages and start slaughtering people, and Ripley takes charge of the situation to try and kill them before they reach Earth and wipe out the human race. Also, Ripley has special powers now because some of the Xenomorph’s DNA mixed with hers during the cloning process. She’s basically super strong and has slightly acidic blood. Sweet. The big climax is that we learn that the queen also picked up some human DNA from Ripley, and it ends up giving birth to a freaky human-alien hybrid referred to as the Newborn.
Ripley ends up having it sucked out into space, making this the third film out of the four in the franchise that ends with Ripley flushing the final Xenomorph into space.
This is not a good movie. The visual effects are a big step up from the previous film, but that’s really the only positive I can glean from it. The film shifts back to a more action oriented approach instead of the horror of the previous film, but this is nowhere near the level of quality of Aliens. There is plenty of gore and violence, but it’s too goofy to take seriously. It also looks and feels very cheap despite the comparatively larger budget. The whole film has a very surreal quality to it that pulls me out of it. It makes it extremely hard to feel invested in the outcome. I think the concept of the Newborn is pretty interesting, but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the film. Audiences apparently agreed because it only made $161.4 million at the box office, the worst performance yet for a film in the franchise.
Alien vs. Predator (2004) directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Hoo boy. You can tell that 20th Century Fox had run out of ideas for what to do with this franchise when it came to this film. The concept of having the Alien franchise and Predator franchise was not a new one. This was first introduced in the comic book Dark Horse Presents #36 back in 1990, and Dark Horse had published numerous comics featuring the two alien monsters battling each other for the fourteen years prior to the release of this film. What became readily apparent to me was that Fox had no intention of treating this film seriously.
The budget of $70 million was fine. That was in line with the previous two films (though obviously not adjusted for inflation). The two things that indicated to me that this was little more than a shameless cash grab were the rating (PG-13) and the choice of director (Paul W.S. Anderson). If there has been one thing that had been consistent throughout all four films in the franchise up to this point, it was the gore. This is an exceptionally bloody franchise. I mean every entry in the series had featured an alien fetus exploding out of someone’s chest at some point! Cutting out the gore really neuters the film from the outset. As for the director, Anderson was not exactly known as an auteur in 2004. He had made films like Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Soldier, and Resident Evil. At best, these would be considered guilty pleasures. At worst, they would be considered unwatchable. I can also safely say that his subsequent films have only gotten worse. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t hire Anderson because you want quality. You hire him if you want something fast and cheap, and Alien vs. Predator definitely fits the bill.
My chief frustration with this film is that it borrows some story elements from the great Aliens vs. Predator comic from 1990 that was written by Randy Stradley with art by Philip Norwood and Chris Warner, but it crams those story elements into a much less interesting overall narrative. That comic book series took place around the same time as the first couple Alien movies and was set on an alien world that had been colonized by humans. There are lots of fun science fiction elements as well as the usual Weyland-Yutani shenanigans that the Predators just kind of drop into the middle of in the same way that they had in the original film. The Alien vs. Predator film takes place in present day (2004) in Antarctica where there is a secret underground pyramid where Predators have been hunting Xenomorphs for centuries. What? Why? One of the things established in the previous two Predator movies is that they prefer hot temperatures, so this movie makes zero sense right off the bat. The only thing worth mentioning regarding the plot is that an expedition to explore this area in Antarctica is being organized by Weyland Industries (they apparently haven’t merged with Yutani yet), and Charles Weyland is played by Lance Henriksen. The implication is that the synthetic Bishop from Aliens was made to look like the founder of the company. Sure.
Anyway, the humans end up getting caught in the middle of a fight between the two iconic monsters. Anything else related to the plot is unimportant. The filmmakers know that you’re here to watch the creatures fight each other, so that’s what they’re going to focus on. How do those scenes look? Honestly? Not bad! The practical effects are actually pretty damn good. The suits worn by the stunt performers look great and were created by Amalgamated Dynamics who were responsible for the previous two Alien films as well as Starship Troopers. The fights themselves aren’t bad either. Since neither alien species bleeds red, they were allowed to show them inflicting plenty of damage on each other without fear of losing their PG-13 rating. The climax of the film is fairly similar to that of the 1990 comic book series in which a lone Predator and one surviving human (played by Sanaa Lathan) have to fight off a queen. There is some sequel bait dangled at the end promising a Xenomorph with Predator characteristics after bursting out of a Predator.
This is obviously not a good movie, but it doesn’t even really try to be. If you’re planning on watching it, I would recommend just skipping ahead to the fight scenes. In fact, just save your money and look up those scenes on YouTube. The film only made $177.4 million at the box office despite its more kid friendly rating, so it was all but assured that a sequel would receive an even smaller budget.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) directed by Greg and Colin Strause
I wasn’t kidding when I said any sequel to Alien vs. Predator would have a smaller budget. This film had a budget of $40 million, so $30 million was chopped off from the previous movie. On the plus side, Fox at least allowed this one to be rated R. That is quite literally the only positive to be found in this entire movie. I’m going to be giving my personal rankings at the end of this piece, but I’ll save you some suspense: this one is hands down the worst of the franchise. It’s nice to have some gore again, but it doesn’t really matter because you can barely see anything. I don’t know why, but the brightness on this movie has been turned all the way down to the point that it’s difficult to tell what is even happening. I award this movie no points, and may God have mercy on its soul.
Prometheus (2012) directed by Ridley Scott
Five years after the debacle that was Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Ridley Scott returned to the franchise that he initially helped create back in 1979. To say I was excited for this film would be the understatement of the century. The teaser trailer (posted above) is still possibly the best trailer I’ve ever seen. If the goal of a trailer is to get you excited for a movie, then it doesn’t get more effective than that. It looked like it was going to be a fusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Alien. I was basically expecting cosmic horror and existential dread on a level hitherto unseen. Combine that with the largest budget of any film in the franchise (a whopping $130 million which still hasn’t been surpassed) and a phenomenal cast, and there was simply no way that it wouldn’t become an instant classic. Right?
So my expectations may have been a tad unrealistic. I think Prometheus is a good movie, but it’s far from a great movie. The premise is a very interesting one. Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce) is the billionaire founder of Weyland Corp. Prior to his death, he commissioned a scientific expedition to a distant moon identified as LV-223. This moon was identified on star maps located in various locations around the globe that were drawn by various unconnected ancient civilizations. The hypothesis is that human evolution may have been spurred on by an advanced extraterrestrial race that hails from that moon. Dubbed the Engineers, this scientific expedition hopes to meet our makers and understand why they made us. As a quick aside, going from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem to this is giving me whiplash. Anyway, the crew on this ship is incredible. You have a pair of archaeologists named Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (played by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green respectively) who also happen to be in a romantic relationship. There is a synthetic named David (played by Michael Fassbender) whose motivations might differ from the rest of the crew. Meredith Vickers (played by Charlize Theron) is the face of Weyland Corp. on this trip (and later revealed to be Weyland’s daughter). Captain Janek (played by Idris Elba) is piloting the ship. Sean Harris plays a geologist named Fifield who frankly seems sick of everyone’s shit. The biologist on the expedition is named Millburn and is played by Rafe Spall. There are also various security forces aboard who may as well be wearing red shirts with targets on them. There is also a very young and skinny Benedict Wong on board that caught me completely off guard on this rewatch. As you may have guessed, things don’t exactly go as planned.
I think the primary issue I have with Prometheus is that it can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. At times it wants to tackle big ideas and existential questions. Other times it wants to be cliche horror film where supposedly brilliant scientists are making outrageously stupid decisions just so something spooky will happen. Sometimes it wants to completely distance itself from Alien and the Xenomorphs themselves. Other times it can’t help but plant little teases about them and have gruesome callbacks to the facehuggers and chestbursters. Ultimately, the connective tissue that bridges the gap between this movie and Alien is the existence of the Engineers. These gigantic humanoid extraterrestrials are the same species as the huge fossilized extraterrestrial that we see in the derelict ship in Alien. Once our protagonists land on LV-223, they discover a pyramid that was clearly constructed by the Engineers. It appears that they have all fled save for one who was accidentally decapitated by a sliding door as he was leaving. Whoopsie. Within that pyramid is a chamber full of canisters filled with a strange black goo and a mural that appears to depict the life cycle of the Xenomorphs with one of them prominently featured in the center that appears almost angelic in nature. What does it all mean? That is left up to interpretation.
What really matters is that black goo. This strange substance seems to have the ability to alter the genetic makeup of any life form that is exposed to it. Little worms in the soil turn into large snake-like creatures after coming into contact with it. Charlie’s body essentially breaks down when he unwittingly consumes some, but it’s not before he sleeps with Shaw. Fifield is mutated into a hideous monster when it gets inside his helmet. Worst of all is Shaw. She becomes pregnant with what can best be described as a squid monster after she sleeps with an infected Charlie. That also leads to the most memorable scene of the film when she’s forced to perform a C-section on herself in order to remove it.
The third act of the film kind of runs off the tracks. We learn that Weyland isn’t actually dead. In fact, he has actually been secretly aboard the ship the whole time. He was hoping that the Engineers would be able to grant him immortality. David has secretly been working for him this entire time, and he’s been a little agent of chaos by infecting Charlie with the black goo and hoping to smuggle Shaw and her squid baby back to Earth. Very Ash of him. Most importantly, he discovers an Engineer that is still alive and stuck in suspended animation. He intends to take Weyland to meet him and hopefully get the answers he desires. The big reveal, however, is that the Engineers did create us, but they have turned on us for some reason and intended to wipe out all life on Earth before something happened to sabotage their bombing run. Waking up this survivor is just going to make him restart his mission. To make a long story short: our heroes stop the Engineer from getting off world, but everyone but Shaw and David are killed in the process. Shaw and David (technically just David’s head) commandeer an Engineer’s ship and fly off to find their homeworld to ask them all of the questions they had at the beginning of the movie. We do get one last little tease when Shaw’s squid baby basically turns into a proto-facehugger and impregnates an Engineer with a proto-Xenomorph, so there’s that.
Prometheus was a modest critical success, but it was a much larger commercial success. It ended up making $403.4 million at the box office, which is still the most of any film in the franchise. While it didn’t live up to the substantial hype, it’s still a solid movie with rewatchability. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that the plot is eerily similar to Jack Kirby’s Eternals comic that he wrote and illustrated back in 1977. He’s still the king.
Alien: Covenant (2017) directed by Ridley Scott
The sequel to Prometheus would come five years later in the form of Alien: Covenant. I was cautiously optimistic about it. Based on the name and trailer, we were guaranteed that there would at least be a Xenomorph in this one after not seeing any in Prometheus. There were also so many questions that were teased in Prometheus that I was genuinely curious to get answered. Why did the Engineers create us only to then decide to try and wipe us out? What is the true connection between the Engineers and Xenomorphs? Are the Xenomorphs revered and worshipped by the Engineers like the mural implied? Were they some sort of biological weapon of mass destruction? Were the Xenomorphs and humans somehow connected? Would Shaw and David find the answers to these questions and more? There was just so much on the table to explore.
So it turns out that none of those questions were answered in Alien: Covenant. Or they at least weren’t answered in a satisfying or logical way. The film takes place around a decade after the events of Prometheus and follows a group of colonists searching for a planet that could sustain human life. After a freak accident aboard the ship burns the captain alive (played by James Franco for some reason), the crew picks up a signal emanating from a nearby planet that turns out to be Shaw singing some John Denver. The colonists decide to reroute to this nearby planet to investigate, and shit immediately hits the fan.
The only sentient being on the planet just happens to be our pal David from the previous film. The colonists have their own synthetic with them named Walter (also played by Fassbender), so we get plenty of fun scenes of the two of them interacting. It doesn’t take long to find out that David has gone full supervillain in this film. He committed genocide against the Engineers upon his arrival by unleashing the black goo on the planet, and then he killed Shaw by subjecting her to cruel experiments in his quest to create a perfect life form. So much for getting any answers from the Engineers! We see that David has created some creatures that bear resemblance to the Xenomorphs, but they are white and more fleshy looking. They’re just as vicious though. We also get a scene where one of them bursts out of the back of one of the colonists that I think is easily the best horror moment from the movie.
David eventually succeeds in creating a traditional Xenomorph by implanting a colonist played by Billy Crudup and having it burst out of him. Strangely, the tiny chestburster just looks like a miniature version of an adult Xenomorph despite that never having been the case in previous films. From that point forward, the movie speed runs the basic plot of Alien as the Xenomorph starts picking people off one by one until it is finally killed. The movie ends with a reveal that David has replaced Walter and is planning to implant all of the colonists with Xenomorphs while they’re in suspended animation.
I find this movie baffling. It feels like Scott came away from Prometheus wanting to please everyone who was disappointed in it, and he ended up alienating (sorry, not sorry) fans of Prometheus while still not pleasing those who were disappointed in it. It’s a movie for no one. It’s also a movie that just doesn’t make any sense. Are we to believe that David simultaneously created the Xenomorphs and exterminated the Engineers? If that’s the case, then why did the Engineers have a mural of the Xenomorph in Prometheus? Also, the events of these two prequels take place less than thirty years before the events of Alien. The derelict Engineer ship discovered in Alien is so old that the pilot has been fossilized, and the cargo bay is full of Xenomorph eggs. How is that possible if David wiped out the Engineers less than thirty years ago and didn’t create the Xenomorphs until about eighteen years ago?
I also think it relies far too heavily on CGI. This film had a budget of $111 million, and I wish more of it had been allocated to practical effects. The CGI creatures give a kind of glossy sheen to the visual effects that make them feel less real and diffuse the tension. It’s a shame because the pacing and cinematography of those scenes are really sharp.
Despite the many issues I have with this film, it’s at least never boring. The action and horror sequences are very intense, and Michael Fassbender is magnetic whenever he’s on screen as either David or Walter. Also, there’s a homoerotic scene where David teaches Walter how to play a flute. I think it might be the first time in cinematic history that an actor has sexual tension with himself where he is playing two robots playing a flute, but I haven’t been able to verify that. Anyway, this movie is more or less a “turn your brain off” movie in order to enjoy the ride. It’s just unfortunate that Prometheus had promised so much more.
Alien: Romulus (2024) directed by Fede Alvarez
We have finally made it to the end of this little marathon. Originally Ridley Scott had planned to make another movie as part of the final film in a trilogy with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, but that fell through when Alien: Covenant only made $240.9 million with its budget of $111 million. It also didn’t help that Disney had acquired 20th Century Fox not long after its release. Now it exists as a division of Disney called 20th Century Studios (gotta keep that recognizable branding). Instead, directing duties for the next film were handed to Fede Alvarez after he had pitched his own story to the studio. He was given an $80 million budget (down substantially from the previous two films) with the intention of releasing the film directly to Hulu/Disney+ (much like Dan Trachtenberg‘s Prey and David Bruckner’s Hellraiser in 2022). Fortunately, the studio had a change of heart and released the film theatrically in 2024. So how did it turn out?
I’m not going to bury the lede here. I think Alien: Romulus is awesome. The film follows a group of young people who live a life of what is essentially indentured servitude on a mining world belonging to Weyland-Yutani. Our protagonists are a young woman named Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny) and her synthetic “brother” Andy (played by David Jonsson). They recruited by a group composed of Rain’s ex-boyfriend Tyler (played by Archie Renaux), his sister Kay (played by Isabela Merced), their cousin Bjorn (played by Spike Fearn), and his girlfriend Navarro (played by Aileen Wu) to fly up into space and dock with what they believe is a decommissioned ship belonging to Weyland-Yutani in order to steal enough coolant to put themselves into suspended animation long enough to reach a planet not controlled by the evil corporation. They just need Andy to use his clearance as a Weyland-Yutani synthetic to be able to bypass the security system on the ship. Not a bad plan. Unfortunately, what they thought was a decommissioned ship is actually a space station that had been doing research on the Xenomorph from the original Alien (it had gone into a hibernation state in space) until it got loose and killed everyone on board before it was finally killed itself. Now they’re on a space station with a sizable population of facehuggers. You can probably guess where things go from there.
What I think makes the film work so well is how committed it is to the elements that made the original so compelling. It’s a horror movie first and foremost with a reliance on practical effects over CGI wherever possible. That said, Fede Alvarez tackles the franchise in much the same way Grant Morrison tackled their run on Batman. By that I mean he’s a huge nerd who has plunged deep into Alien lore and has decided to include all of it in his film. He’s just like me for real. While the film is most obviously influenced by Alien, it also includes aspects from the other films. It features the weapons (and some of the one-liners) from Aliens, it features an oppressive mining world reminiscent of the prison planet from Alien 3, it includes a horrifying hybrid monster in the third act like Alien: Resurrection, it has the black goo and a visual reference to the Engineers from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and it even has the save stations and a synthetic jump scare like in the video game Alien: Isolation. I know some have complained that it’s just fan service and nostalgia bait, but it comes across to me as just Alvarez’s genuine love for the franchise in all of its forms. He has even floated the idea of co-directing an Alien vs. Predator reboot with Dan Trachtenberg (director of Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers, and the upcoming Predator: Badlands). I’d love to see it. Clearly handing the franchise over to Fede Alvarez has paid off thus far as Alien: Romulus ended up making $350.9 million at the box office (second most in franchise history behind Prometheus).
I also want to highlight the Xenomorph design in Alien: Romulus. It’s probably the closest in appearance to the Xenomorph from the original Alien than any other film to date. It ditches the head ridges from Aliens in favor of a smoother dome, and its build and posture more closely mimic the original as well. I honestly think the practical Xenomorphs in Alien: Romulus are the best we have ever seen on the big screen.
Before getting to my franchise rankings, I figured this little image explaining the dates when all of these films take place would be helpful.
Now let’s get to the rankings!
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
Alien: Romulus (2024)
Prometheus (2012)
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Alien 3 (1992)
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Alien vs. Predator (2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)