It’s a good time to be an Alien fan. Audiences will soon have multiple opportunities to see their favorite multi-mouthed, acid-bleeding killing machine in action once more. Ridley Scott’s 1979 hybrid of merciless monster movie and grungy futuristic sci-fi returns to theaters today, ready to wage war on nerves and stomachs again. (“In space,” the advertisements promised, “no one can hear you scream.” But in movie theaters? There, the sound carries. There, it’s infectious.) The rerelease is almost surely a way to build hype for the newest entry in the series, opening on August 16: Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, said to take place between the events of the original and those of James Cameron’s radically different but nearly equally beloved 1986 sequel. Need more Alien still? Noah Hawley is working on a small-screen Hulu spinoff about the franchise’s rat-bastard evil corporation, Weyland-Yutani, which is due early next year.
It’s remarkable that the series Scott launched and Cameron nurtured is still running today, if not always running strong. There are whole eras of Alien at this point. The first few movies, once collected in a nifty, nine-disc DVD box set called the “Alien Quadrilogy,” all star Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, an interstellar long-hauler whose entire life is consumed by her era-spanning battle against the Xenomorph. Once Fox had wrung everything it could from that increasingly flawed but worthwhile saga, it took a page from the old Universal Monsters playbook and pitted the alien against another deep-space monster on the payroll, the Predator. And while those derided B-movie smackdowns are rarely regarded as canonical, they arguably have more in common with the spirit of Alien than Scott’s recent prequels, which trade the primal urgency of his first film for something more inquisitive and densely mythological. They’re Alien movies somewhat tangentially.
Still, all of the above have an official place in the series, and so all have been included below in our ranking, which expresses a clear hierarchy when it comes to those various eras of Alien. We’ll have to wait until this summer to see where Romulus fits in that spectrum of quality, spanning from influential masterpiece to shamelessly janky exploitation of the brand. One thing’s for sure, though: It will almost surely be disgustingly wet.
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
Not just the worst Alien movie but also the worst Predator movie, too, this second crossover for Fox’s most famous extraterrestrial monsters reduces both to garden-variety slashers, stalking and killing a gaggle of nobodies (plus John Ortiz) in woodsy small-town Colorado. Directing duo the Brothers Strause, who got their start as special-effects artists and would go on to make the Skyline movies, stage most of the action under cover of impenetrably thick darkness, so it’s often difficult to make out who’s biting, clawing, or laser-blasting whom. (We somehow never get a particularly clear view of the newest member of the franchise family, a hulking Alien-Predator hybrid that essentially makes out with its human victims to pump their bellies full of babies.) The one saving grace of this mercenary gorefest is its pronounced mean streak; not even adorable moppets are safe from the movie’s nasty, messy, indiscriminate bloodlust, which makes the inexplicable decision to release the movie on Christmas Day even funnier.
Alien vs. Predator (2004)
All things considered, Requiem isn’t that much worse than its predecessor, which expanded a jokey Easter egg in 1990’s Predator 2 — a single shot of a Xenomorph skull among the trophies collected by the interstellar game hunters — into a whole B-movie title match for its title attractions. There are faint flashes of fun in AVP, like star Sanaa Lathan going full Ripley and repurposing severed alien anatomy as weaponry, plus an underground arctic-pyramid setting that plays to the geometrical death-trap interests of director Paul W.S. Anderson. But the movie is mostly gimcrack schlock, with choppy action, characters that give new meaning to the words “crew expendable,” and cartoonish CGI that’s aged much worse than the prosthetic-creature effects of earlier entries in the series (to say nothing of the nightmarish imagery of Anderson’s vastly superior riff on Alien, the earlier Event Horizon). Nothing in the movie is half as clever as its tagline, a droll bit of unintentionally truthful advertising: “Whoever wins, we lose.”
Prometheus (2012)
The Batman Begins of Alien movies: an origin story that restored some gravity and craft to a franchise that had fallen to a terminally silly low five years prior. Returning to the roots of the series (and his career) without really recapturing the appeal of Alien, director Ridley Scott fashions an ambitious prequel in which a group of hilariously careless scientists go looking to meet their makers — the “Engineers” they believe responsible for human life — and end up getting into some proto-Nostromo trouble. Prometheus is beautifully shot and well acted (Michael Fassbender makes a captivating impression as the dangerously curious android David), and it offers one gnarly suspense sequence for the ages, a surgical race against the clock. But it’s also a mess of competing priorities, with a script by Lost mastermind Damon Lindelof that can’t quite reconcile its big philosophical questions with its imperative to provide perfunctory franchise fan service. At least there’s some sly meta self-critique in the arc of its plot: As the characters discover, sometimes going back to the origins of a thing can be a huge mistake.
Alien: Covenant (2018)
Not simply a reaffirmation of the brand, the title of Scott’s sequel to a prequel teased that it would be much more of a bona fide Alien movie than Prometheus. And sure enough, there’s a definite uptick in Xenomorph action in Covenant, which deposits another doomed crew on another deadly alien world, then subjects it to one agreeably visceral scene of gnashing death after another. All the same, Scott still seems only half-invested in revisiting his 1979 classic. In this case, he treats the run-and-scream material as a host body for something more gratifyingly weird: a gothic horror movie about creation and destruction, set partially in a downed spaceship that’s really more of a Transylvanian manor, with two Frankenstein monsters trading lines of Byron and Shelley. In fact, Fassbender’s kinky dual performance as “brothers” David and Walter — named for the Alien franchise’s long-running producers — almost makes you wish their curious relationship was the whole show here, rather than a subplot smuggled in via the corpse of ancient IP.
Alien Resurrection (1997)
Before it turned to Predators and prequels, the Alien series dual-functioned as a kind of creative baton, passed to a different visionary with each new installment. Befitting its gene-splicing premise, Resurrection actually cross-pollinates the distinctive voices of two very different filmmakers, daring to ask what an Alien movie from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the director of City of Lost Children would look like. The answer: quippy and baroquely, strikingly weird! Plenty of critics trashed this dubiously necessary fourth installment, but time has been kind to its oddball recycling, enlivened by cool set pieces (like a chase sequence that proves that the aliens are good swimmers) and a ragtag supporting cast that includes Dan Hedaya, Brad Dourif, Ron Perlman, and “That Guy” character actor Leland Orser. And while bringing Ripley back to life through cloning is, on paper, a cheap betrayal of the character’s sacrifice in the previous entry, Sigourney Weaver once more justifies the prolonging of her suffering, anchoring Resurrection with her undiminished hardass cool and conflicted pathos.
Alien 3 (1992)
A blockbuster film maudit so underrated, even its own director hates it. However forcefully David Fincher has renounced his feature debut, early glimpses of his sleek craft remain in the finished film, in which Ripley (a returning Weaver, anguished and newly buzz-cut) crash-lands on a floating penal colony and rallies a repentant block of maximum-security inmates into a weaponless battle against the enemy that hitched a ride with her — a beast that’s come to look like the stalker boyfriend from hell, especially after the script unveils its cruelest twist. Whether you’re watching the maligned theatrical cut or the more affectionately regarded but equally patchy “assembly cut” made without Fincher’s input, Alien 3 is a bitter pill to swallow. (Aliens fans seemed especially, understandably hurt by how it walks back the hopeful ending of that movie.) But if the creative differences and studio tinkering took their toll, they didn’t extinguish the operatic power of Alien 3, a ferociously bleak sequel that wears its behind-the-scenes troubles like battle scars. And why shouldn’t a horror movie about a hardened survivor fighting one last battle against her tormentor boast a few of those?
Aliens (1986)
How do you top or even match the reptilian dread of Alien? James Cameron had the good sense not to try. In fashioning a sequel to Ridley Scott’s impeccable outer-space thriller, the Terminator director tried something different, moving the genre dial from horror to action, trading mounting suspense for nonstop intensity, and increasing the enemy threat from one relentless monster on the loose to a veritable army of them, swarming from the vents and rafters to tear through a tough-talking platoon of space grunts. Aliens remains one of the best Hollywood sequels (to say nothing of its place in the action- and war-movie canon) because it evolved from the classic that spawned it rather than just trying to imitate it. And if it lacks the minimalistic integrity of Scott’s movie, there’s a real poignancy underneath its slam-bang spectacle, inextricable from Weaver’s stirring performance as a bereaved mother transforming herself into a force of protective fury. The franchise logic is at once cynical and therapeutic, giving Ripley catharsis while putting her back through the wringer for the sake of the payday Cameron promised execs when — as legend has it — he wrote “Alien$” on a whiteboard.
Alien (1979)
“A perfect organism” is how Ian Holm’s coldly calculating Ash describes the monster killing his crewmates, awe on his mechanical breath. Decades of imitators, all built in the sleek, leather-black image of H.R. Giger’s iconic creature design, would seem to support the robot’s opinion. If this is the greatest of monster movies, that’s partially because it boasts the greatest of monsters — a force of slithering hostility with a bio-organic aesthetic, a glistening inkblot of doom. Of course, Alien is much more than just a monster movie: Like John Hurt’s unlucky, ghoulishly congested Kane, Ridley Scott’s influential smash is an incubator, its slicked surfaces concealing an allegory of uncaring capitalism, a nightmare of sexual anxiety, and a kind of reverse Psycho, slowly whittling down an ensemble cast until all who remains is Weaver’s nascent action heroine par excellence. That Alien does all this without violating its ruthless simplicity — one monster, one ship, one crew, you do the math — is proof that Ash’s complimentary words could easily be applied to the movie itself. Decades later, the awe hasn’t faded.
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