With the recent release of Alien: Covenant, we’ve decided to celebrate by looking at the movies the acid-blooded creature has appeared and ranked them from worst to best.
Among fan boys and fan girls, this is usually the most hotly contested argument in the movie universe, so we fully expect some backlash to this. Bring on the discourse, but I think we can all agree what the worst one was…
ALIENS VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM
The idea of the Predalien was a good one, unfortunately it was lost in what can only be described as one of the worst movies ever made. Everything from the direction to the script to the acting was god-awful, as two of the scariest killers in all of movie history were essentially turned into mindless jump-scares. Plus that scene involving the pregnant women has got to be THE most distasteful scene that anyone had the audacity to put on screen. Bad bad bad bad bad bad BAD.
ALIEN VS PREDATOR
Again, some good ideas, lost in a bad movie. An ancient pyramid used as a training ground for Predator newbz in the North Pole? Okay, we’re on board… but then the writer/director of Resident Evil forgets what he’s working with, and we get a mostly bloodless excuse for people to die one by one in the most unimaginative ways possible. We are given a pretty cool scene at the end with the Alien Queen going all pissed-off T-Rex, but by then it’s too little too late.
ALIEN: RESURRECTION
Did you know Joss Whedon wrote the script to this one? And that it was directed by the guy behind Amelie? Maybe that’s why it just doesn’t quite work, because the quip-heavy dialogue doesn’t work with the quirky-sci-fi world, and Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman just look lost for the majority of the film. Sigourney Weaver is clearly having a ball playing a version of Ripley completely out of touch with humanity, and we do get two very memorable scenes – Ripley No.8 meeting versions 1 through 7, and that underwater attack scene – but then we get that Milky Bar kid version of the Alien at the end and it all falls apart so, so quickly.
PREDATOR 2
Trivia fans will remember that the Alien skull showed up at the end when Danny Glover falls down a man-hole and into the Predator’s shop, giving a little nod towards the shared universe these two creatures shared. After the macho-action-horror of the first one, resetting it to the gang-war-torn Los Angeles of 1997, and the entire thing feels like a fever dream. Voodoo priests and women getting their spines torn out in the subway and Gary Busey… all while Murtagh tries to keep things light in the face of some tremendously OTT violence. A mess, but a cult-worthy mess.
ALIEN 3
David Fincher would go on to bigger and better things: Fight Club, Gone Girl, Se7en, etc. But we all have to start somewhere, and he got this gig on the back of his music video for Madonna’s ‘Vogue’, so when he delivered a bald Sigourney Weaver fighting off gang rape in a space prison, the producers freaked out at the bleaked-out version of their biggest sci-fi horror franchise. The director’s cut put back in some of that Fincher magic, but the tinkered-with version that was released in cinemas upset him so much that to this day he still won’t talk about it. In hindsight, the drastic new direction was a great idea, the performances by Weaver and her boyfriend Tywin Lannister were fantastic, and the camera swooping-horror of the final 30 minutes are pure nail-biting terror. What we wouldn’t give to see Fincher’s full, unfiltered version of this film.
PROMETHEUS
Ridley Scott was returning to the Alien franchise for the first time since kicking it off in the first place, but the high IQ, constantly philosophising, low-in-horror film he produced left the die-hard Alien fans wanting. A little bit of time and distance show the film for what it really is, a pretty incredible smart sci-fi-thriller that isn’t too concerned with being an Alien movie, but way more interested in the ultimate, self-inflicted down-fall of man. If we go too far with science, we’ll ultimately create the way we’ll destroy ourselves. There is a sense that some late reshoots tried to crowbar in some action and horror, and while some of these scenes work really well (Noomi Rapace’s alien abortion scene is almost impossible to look at without squirming) but others blatantly do not (that whole flame-thrower zombie scene).
ALIEN: COVENANT
For the first 45 minutes, it does a good job of recreating the primal fear of Alien. For the final 30 minutes, it does a good job of recreating the sweat-soaked adrenaline of Aliens. But for the middle section, it grinds to a whiplash-inducing halt when it recreates the ponderous nature of Prometheus. There’s a prolonged flute solo, for God’s (or is that David’s?) sake! Still, you get two Fassbenders for the price of one, the Medical Bay scene is up there with the highlights of the series so far, and you can’t say that when the final scene plays out you don’t immediately want to see what is going to happen in the next one. A return to form, for about five eighths of its running time.
ALIEN
We know that there are so, so many people out there who are currently contemplating throwing their mobile/laptop/desktop out the window when they see this arrived in 2nd place, but do not see this as an insult. Alien is still one of the best horror movies of all time, one of the best science fiction movies of all time, one of the best movies of all time, full stop. The simultaneous and parallel creation of the alien creature and Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley are two of the greatest contributions to cinema, and to this day both are still touchstones for space-set scary-movies and kick-ass female characters. At the time, the completely unpredictable nature of the film – two of the biggest stars are served up pretty early on the Alien’s menu – combined with the “What exactly is it?” nature of the creature (before the sequels showed it in fully-lit glory) gave viewers one of the most sweat-inducing trips to the cinema of all time. Until, of course…
ALIENS
It would be a full seven years later before James “Titanic and Avatar” Cameron would simply drop an S on to the end, replace the “fear of male rape” of the original (Don’t believe us? Look it up) with the “fear of Vietnam war”, and prove that no amount of gun-power can kill or tame an enemy that knows the landscape inside and out. Like the original, Cameron takes his time – it’s nearly an hour before that motion tracker kicks in properly – but once the attack starts, it almost literally never lets up until the ending. In between we get Newt, the relationship with Hicks, the sentient guns (you really should check out the much better director’s cut if you get the chance), that scene with the facehuggers in the locked room, everything to do with Bishop, the Power-Loaders, that incredible score by James Horner, “Get away from her you BITCH!”… we could go on and on and on. But really you’re just better off watching the film again.
