Alien may have surrendered to franchising, but its mutating DNA will never be tamed

With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.

Alien: Romulus marks a turning point in the Alien series. It’s not where the series begins to tumble irrevocably downhill, because it’s already settled into a rollercoaster with plenty of peaks, hairpin turns, and, thus far, just one steep drop. (We’ll get to that later.) It’s not where it becomes either a multi-filmmaker or single-filmmaker franchise, because it’s been both of those already, in some cases multiple times. It’s not even a pivot point in the series’ fictional timeline, because it’s positioned comfortably, perhaps over-safely, in the zone somewhere between Ellen Ripley going into cryo-sleep at the end of Alien and waking up at the beginning of Aliens. But speaking of Ripley: Romulus is the point where, technically speaking, there are more Alien movies without Ellen Ripley than with her. It marks Alien’s surrender into true franchise-dom. 

Maybe it seems ridiculous to argue that Alien wasn’t a franchise before; of course, in the broad strokes, it was, spanning decades and multiple films, plus assorted comics, toys, games, and collectible drink tumblers. But for its first 20 years or so, Alien (on film, at least) felt like more of a series (narrative progression, variations on a theme, same central character) than a modern franchise (branding, branching stories, perpetuating forever). While the Alien name was always front and center, another would truly define it: Sigourney Weaver, whose character Ellen Ripley is the element extracted from Alien (1979) to push those sequels forward, almost (hear me out) more so than the xenomorph.

That’s not to downplay the importance of that H.R. Giger-designed alien, perhaps the single most arresting movie creature since Godzilla. Beyond its sleekly frightening look, the creature originally retrieved by the crew of the 22nd-century spaceship Nostromo at the secret behest of company android Ash (Ian Holm), sports a series of memorable D&D-style attributes/powers (acid blood, claws, devilish tail, speed, dexterity). But really, the specifics of the creature changes by the whims of the filmmaker and the needs of the story. There’s a crawly nest of the damn things in Aliens (1986), giving way to a bigger and more grotesque egg-laying, giant-sized queen. There’s a physiologically altered version in Alien 3 (1992), seemingly affected by gestating within a dog rather than a human, underlining the characters’ sense of desolation. Alien Resurrection (1997) has some more or less “normal” xenomorphs, but also introduces the idea of an alien-human “newborn” hybrid, birthed from another queen that herself has hybridized elements thanks to the cloning process. The prequel films later decide that the creature’s very origins depend on this kind of mix-and-match evolution, as much a product of Frankensteinian tinkering as the unknowable horrors of nature. (You heard it here first, conspiracy theorists: The xenomorph is a lab leak!) To an extent, the xenomorph is whatever the filmmakers need it to be, provided they agree that it should be nasty, Giger-derived, and hard to kill. Ripley, though, is who we’re really following.

And, to be clear, Ripley also changes over the course of her four films. By the time we jump several centuries further into the future in Alien Resurrection, she’s literally not the same person, because that person dies at the end of Alien 3, sacrificing herself in order to deny the evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation access to the alien queen incubating within her. The Resurrection version of Ripley is a modified clone, allowing Weaver to replace her previous weariness with a cagey, sometimes predatory ambiguity. Beyond sci-fi technicalities, Ripley is barely the same person in Aliens as she is in Alien; the experience of the first film changes her, and entering the battleground of the second movie changes her further still, into an avenging-mother figure reconnecting with the humanity she’s spent 57 cryo-snoozing years away from. It might be glib to put it this way, but over the course of four films, Ripley cycles through a sci-fi-compressed contemporary womanhood, from her stratified workplace in Alien to the terror of motherhood in Aliens (though director James Cameron envisioned her as a mother already, learning of her daughter’s middle-aged passing in an Aliens scene restored in his Special Edition, anyone watching the original cut doesn’t really see Ripley this way until she meets Newt) to the grief of Alien 3 to, well, let’s call it the “give-no-fucks old age” of Resurrection.

Despite Ripley’s spiritual shapeshifting, however, the character has her memories—and the audience has theirs, of Weaver’s indelible performances. This creates a human continuity there that similar-but-different versions of a snarling beast with an extra attack-mouth can’t supply on their own. While the sequels couldn’t recreate the way that Weaver emerges from the ensemble to become the surprise Final Girl of Alien’s haunted house in space, they could rely on Weaver to surprise us with the depth and variety of her performances. That’s what her famous line of “get away from her, you bitch!” does in Aliens: Rather than the slow-burn gathering of grit we see from the first film, Weaver and Cameron distill Ripley’s transformation into a perfect blunt-poetry ’80s-action one-liner, summoning chills out of what could easily sound like canned bravado. That sense of surprise is also what makes Alien 3, in its weary despair, and Alien Resurrection, in its playful Ripley-not-Ripley discomfort, so alienating—and so provocative as later-stage sequels. Their power, positive and negative, derives from Weaver and Ripley.

So it’s understandable that for many years, the idea of a Ripley-less Alien movie was a nonstarter. But over the course of luring Weaver back repeatedly, the movies also became, quite accidentally, something that could survive her absence: an auteur showcase. It’s not as if 20th Century Fox had some grand vision for a rotating series of visually distinctive artists. (For a time, Fox barely seemed interested in sequelizing the original at all.) But thanks to various development pains, that’s what they wound up with, doing the Mission: Impossible thing over a decade earlier. 

Unlike the first Mission: Impossible, though, which tantalizingly sets up a sequel in keeping with its origins as a weekly TV show, Ridley Scott’s Alien stands alone magnificently, with no real prompt for a sequel beyond the fact that it does turn out to be a horror movie. Purely on a level of production design, visual effects, and atmospheric direction, it’s one of the most eerily convincing and immersive sci-fi movies ever made, taking the “used” aesthetic of Star Wars in an even more workaday direction with its crew of space truckers. The damn thing just feels real, traversing any believability gaps with an ease that few space-set movies can hope to imitate. That’s why the “haunted house in space” descriptor (given voice by, among others, Siskel and Ebert in their contemporaneous reviews) feels both fitting and insufficient: It nails the isolation and relative simplicity of the story without quite copping to the uncanny way that Alien feels more vivid, more corporeal by design, than most ghost stories. Space can look ghostly, yes. But the horror of the xenomorph’s parasitic life cycle centers a violation of the body more viscerally invasive than, say, a possession narrative. As many have pointed out, the mostly-male members of the film’s crew are experiencing a version of the sexual violence often committed against women. This doesn’t let Ripley off the hook, but perhaps it makes her better-equipped to address this horrifying threat as she steps into the Final Girl role. 

Regardless of individual reads on Alien, Scott makes it one of the great tactile experiences of sci-fi cinema. That’s why James Cameron’s dollar-signed pivot to a military-action version of sci-fi in Aliens works so well: The relentless all-senses assault of its second half doesn’t just pay off the build of its first half, as Cameron action movies so often do, but also the audience’s buy-in from the original film. If Alien was inspired by Scott’s gobsmacked reaction to Star Wars, Aliens plays like a mutated, weaponized version of that space-opera relentlessness, taking the Wars part seriously without sacrificing its kineticism. It’s also Cameron’s first real opportunity to build a story around a mother figure’s ferocity. Interestingly, this emerges most clearly in Terminator 2 and Avatar: The Way Of Water, as if Cameron takes the sequelizing process so seriously that it can only remind him of a mother turning near-feral in her desire to protect a younger generation. Ripley doesn’t begin Aliens as committed to this task as Sarah Connor or Neytiri, mirroring the way that Cameron himself grows into this theme throughout his career. Like Scott, he nailed something near-perfect as his second credited feature.

Which of the first two films is better truly depends on the day and the mood. With the fullness of time, it’s easier to appreciate the way that both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection opt out of that debate entirely, with tonally divergent approaches. Rainy, grimy, hopeless Alien 3 doesn’t particularly want to be your favorite, and if some of the big-ticket suspense sequences are marred by repetition, unready visual effects, and the difficulty of keeping track of so many terrific but bellowing bald character actors, the movie’s doom-ridden atmosphere is as intensely memorable as other, more beloved David Fincher movies. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Resurrection filters another aliens-on-a-ship story through his sense of dark whimsy (remember, he made this before Amélie), albeit with more ideas—mostly about Ripley’s connection to the creature and whether the human race as we know it is really worth saving; kind of a neat companion to Alien 3 on both counts—than follow-through.

This auteurism even extends, believe it or not, to the Alien Vs. Predator movies—or the first one, anyway, which was produced during a mutual lull in the cinematic prospects of either series. The first Alien Vs. Predator (2004) is a low-rent B-movie, to be sure, but it absolutely reflects the retroactive central question of most Alien movies, which is: What would this director do with the xenomorphs? Naturally, Paul W.S. Anderson (of the Resident Evil films) would make them fight Predators in a giant underground maze. It’s arguable that Alien vs. Predator is, in its shlockiness, closer kin to the Predator series (which also happens to rotate filmmakers every time, by the way) than the elegantly designed horror of the Alien pictures. At the same time, the Predators in AVP ultimately fight to stop the acidic beasts from escaping and overtaking Earth, which lands the hunters squarely in the good-guy role of an Alien film, rather than their traditionally antagonistic role in a Predator film. It’s a touching tribute, really, that the first Alien movie without Ripley would insist on swapping in a whole other iconic movie monster to cover for her absence. Hell, if you still need your gender-role subtext, the movie pits the phallic heads of the xenomorph against the vaginal imagery of those Predator mouths, rendering whatever metaphor at once more abstract and more explicit (and still ultimately on the side of the woman warriors). As for the lower-rent, Anderson-free, genuinely hard-to-watch Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)—literally, who turned out the lights?—well, look: It did obsessive listmakers a kindness. There’s an easy movie to stick at the bottom of any Alien or Predator ranking, as well as most rankings of “versus” movies.

Requiem also returned the series to stasis; who knows how many of those would have come out had it been a bigger hit, or even a little bit good. In a way, it’s only fair that Ridley Scott be allowed to return to Alien at this low ebb—not necessarily because his entry was never topped, but because that central what-would-this-director-do question wasn’t part of the deal back in 1979. Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) are a lopsided two-thirds of a prequel trilogy that offers a discursive and inventive answer to a newly modified question: What would Ridley Scott do with the xenomorphs, after he helped invent them? Or, rather: What would this series look like if it suddenly became a vehicle for Scott, and not a rotation of wonderfully incompatible artists? 

The answer is that he’d more or less ditch them, at least temporarily. Prometheus takes the creation-myth portent of the typical prequel and literalizes it; it can’t explain where the xenomorph came from without exploring the origins of human life on Earth, which makes a bunch of lore become, at the same time, counterintuitively demystified. Instead of a spiritual secret, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers a hostile creator who seems to regret his race’s involvement in the genesis of humanity, sticking them with a mutagen designed to be their undoing, hence the eventual presumed emergence of the xenomorph from a series of horrific, writhing creatures. Only the ship’s Weyland-loyal synthetic David (Michael Fassbender) appears unfazed by this development.

Covenant continues that story in a roundabout manner, sticking David’s ghoulish aims into a speedrun of Alien, reimagined as even more of a slash-and-grab monster movie. It’s more inventive than your average Friday The 13th, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that at one point a near-final xenomorph stalks and kills two attractive crew members while they get it on in the shower. The dark corners of Alien: Covenant, where David continues to lurk and, at one point, seemingly attempts to seduce his more docile counterpart Walter (also Fassbender), are some of the strangest and most intriguing moments of the series, with Scott eager to complicate the simplicity of his original film. The alien bits are satisfyingly nasty, but have little of the creeping patience Scott showed in Alien—or, for that matter, Prometheus, which turns that old Alien doominess into something stately and often mordantly funny. Both Scott prequels are sleeker and slicker than their predecessors, and not just because of 2010s-era visual effects (which included some terrific 3D in the theatrical release of Prometheus). The crews in these movies may be under the future Weyland-Yutani’s thumb, and some of them retain a bit of the rough-hewn trucker and/or military-grunt aesthetics of the first two films (one is played by Danny McBride, even), but they’re a lot higher up the chain than any of the survival groups in Ripley’s misadventures. Compared to others in this universe, their ships, uniforms, and jobs are downright cushy.

This brings us back to Alien: Romulus (2024), which is either a back-to-basics act of retro-conscious remixing, or a soulless act of deep-faked, Disneyfied nostalgia that manifests the spirit of Weyland-Yutani itself. What both of these arguments—essentially two descriptions of the same thing—are reacting to is the film’s attempt to bring all these different phases of the series full circle into a franchise. It sounds craven, but the thoroughness of the project is what makes the movie hard to pin down. Its timeline location between Alien and Aliens, as well as plenty of its visual references, suggests an originalist fealty similar to what drove Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Some of those grimacing the hardest at this notion may have forgotten just how genuinely fun The Force Awakens is, and also what constitutes actual, scannable fan service. (Romulus has some dumb quotations, but was anyone clapping like a seal for the appearance of, say, the drinking-bird prop in the background, or did it pass by unnoticed by the 90% of the audience that’s simply receiving the film as a straightforward sci-fi horror film?) Anyway, that’s also an oversimplification, because the movie’s reference points go beyond the two movies everyone likes, including some Prometheus lore, with the movie bookended by bits briefly reminiscent of Alien 3 and Resurrection. Romulus also brings in new-to-series director Fede Álvarez, which in spirit is closer to the hiring of Fincher or Jeunet—until the realization, in a full-circle-within-a-full-circle moment, that Álvarez’s approach in treating an abandoned, Alien-ized ship as a non-supernatural haunted house in the style of his Don’t Breathe is also a variation on Scott’s original film.

Don’t Breathe also connects to Romulus’ nominal subtext about dire economic circumstances that force young people into desperate scenarios. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and the other lead characters in Romulus have been consigned to a life of servitude, doomed to follow in their parents’ woeful footsteps until they suffer a similarly early demise in a sunlight-free mining colony. This offers a notable peek at an actual functioning colony in this future, and it turns out that they’re not vastly better-off than the colonists destroyed by xenomorphs and/or experimenting androids. If Romulus lacks the terrifically weathered character actors of the first four Alien movies—its one major older character baffling CG’d from beyond the grave—that also makes sense: The whole movie is about young people desperate to avoid becoming weathered space truckers, mining-colony lifers, or grizzled mercenaries. 

Whether that and some revived body horror—as with Prometheus, Romulus pivots to the female body in a way that feels decidedly pro-choice—are electrifying enough to power a whole new Alien movie will probably vary from fan to fan. The Scott-engineered space abortion from Prometheus proves difficult to top; hell, this year’s The First Omen has a gnarlier forced-birth horror scene than Romulus. Regardless, this isn’t the first time an Alien movie has wrestled with “just” being a stylish monster mash. Like Romulus, Resurrection and Covenant have some ideas that don’t feel fully developed, alongside notably inventive episodes of gore that feel like the gleeful product of someone who just really likes staging new ways for slimy bastards, big and little, to burst through chests, burn people’s faces, and generally rip humans apart. (It’s another reason why Alien Vs. Predator isn’t quite the outlier that it seems like at first.)

Romulus, however, may represent the first time an Alien movie has been expected to choose a side between fan-pleasing homage and bold originality. This false binary is more the stuff of Very Online franchise debates than thoughtful and/or terrifying sci-fi horror, even though, paradoxically, as a bit of sci-fi horror, Romulus is a great ride. If coaxing the xenomorph into full-on franchise maintenance threatens to demystify the creature further, turning it into yet another IP mascot, some faith in the supposedly perfect organism may be in order. The series-to-franchise transition may be complete, but this doesn’t mean that Alien can be consistently reworked into a crowdpleaser. If the beast can outlast Ripley, it can probably outlast attempts to replace her, whether they’re successful variations like Spaeny or placeholders like Covenant’s Katherine Waterston. Someone will keep tinkering with its DNA, with good intentions or bad. This thing is going to keep mutating and, with any luck, devouring anyone who tries to tame it.

Final ranking:

1. Alien (1979)
2. Aliens (1986)
3. Prometheus (2012)
4. Alien 3 (1992)
5. Alien: Romulus (2024)
6. Alien: Covenant (2017)
7. Alien Resurrection (1997)
8. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
9. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)