Movies: An Alien Retrospective

The decades-old Alien franchise is receiving a new installment this weekend, Alien: Romulus, so I thought it would be fun to take a look back at all the movies in the series, excluding the iffy Alien vs Predator crossover movies, and ending with a review of the new film...

Alien

Very few space movies from 1979 still hold up today (this was the same year The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture were released), but Ridley Scott's Alien is absolutely one of them. The special effects have aged fine, the cast is still one of the best ever for a sci-fi/horror flick (Sir Ian Holm! Sir John Hurt! Three-time Academy Award nominee Sigourney Weaver!), and the story effectively pits a blue-collar team of civilians against one hostile xenomorph.

Rating: 10/10

Aliens

Jim Cameron's sequel famously turned the volume up to 11 on the series.  While there are moments of tension and horror, Aliens is more of a sci-fi action/war movie than anything else.  Everyone knows all the catchphrases ("Game over man, game over!", "Get away from her, you b----!"), and the runtime gets a little bloated in true Cameron tradition, but this is still one of the greats.

Rating: 10/10

Alien 3

It's fairly rare that a sequel completely reverses what happened in previous movies, and when it happens, it is usually disastrous (cf. The Rise of Skywalker).  Alien 3 made this mistake by unceremoniously killing off several beloved characters from Aliens, and things just went downhill from there.  This was also David Fincher's directorial debut, and we should all be glad that the troubled production didn't put him off of directing forever, or we would have never gotten Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network. 

Rating: 4/10

Alien Resurrection

This was the first Alien movie I saw in theatres, and I recall being psyched that Sigourney Weaver was (somehow) returning to the franchise. Alas, the movie was a cruel tonal mismatch between content and director (I liked director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children and Amélie as much as the next guy, but they are very different from an Alien film). There are some interesting ideas here that later films would develop, but it was an uneven movie overall.

Rating: 5/10

Prometheus

Prometheus marked Ridley Scott's return to the director's chair in the franchise, the first film without Sigourney Weaver, and a shift in direction to focus on the history and machinations of the nefarious Weyland-Yutani Corporation.  It's a strange movie, because it tries to do its level best to be an Alien movie without being an Alien movie, as if Scott had been hired by The Asylum and was worried about infringing on his own creation.

Rating: 7/10

Alien: Covenant

Ridley Scott's next film is a sequel to Prometheus in all but name, with more Michael Fassbender on screen than ever before.  Still, fans were treated to the return of the Xenomorph we all know and love, with a lot of other throwback elements mixed in for good measure (the protagonist, Daniels, is essentially Ripley-lite, down to the final battle). It's an okay movie, but some truly boneheaded characters and bizarre sequences ("I'll do the fingering") undercut any suspense or horror.

Rating: 6/10

Alien: Romulus

Fede Álvarez successfully rebooted the Evil Dead franchise, so I can see why Ridley Scott tapped him for Alien: Romulus. It's a tough film to review. On the one hand, it's well-made, has fine special effects, and plenty of horror. 

On the other hand, almost everything in Romulus, including entire scenes, are lifted from past films in the series. Sadistic android taunts from Alien? Check. Sentry gun sequence from Aliens? Check. And despite the supposedly stripped-down, back to basics nature of the plot, even elements from Alien Resurrection and Prometheus surface, especially in the third act. If you're an Alien superfan like me, you might get a lot of nostalgia mileage out of this, but I think more casual viewers might be lost.

Rating: 7/10