We’re about to get a lot of new Alien fiction and for the first time in a while, Alasdair Stuart considers this is something to be excited about! Later in August, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus hits the big screen with a cast full of young talent who’ve got serious credits already, including Pacific Rim Uprising, Devs and Shadow & Bone. Then next year we get Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, the franchise’s first step across to TV.

If you’re new to the series – and remember, someone is always new – welcome! There’s a lot of Alien and Alien-adjacent movies and the chronology is a bit wacky. What I’m going to do here is run you through some possible watch orders for them, and also give you brief breakdowns of each movie. Like every franchise, Alien has good days and bad days. Like every piece of art, ever, which is which depends on you. My job is just to give you the territory. The map and how you use it is up to you, and a big part of the fun. So, first up, watch orders!

Watch Order 1: Production Order

Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection, Aliens vs Predator, AvP: Requiem, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant.

The advantage to this is it’s all a bit farm-to-table as you experience the franchise evolving across linear time. The other advantage is it gives you every handy off ramp below, with each era (Alien–Alien Resurrection, the AvP duology, the Prometheus duology) discrete enough that you can stop whenever you want.

Watch Order 2: All-In-Universe Chronological Order

Aliens vs Predator, AvP: Requiem, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection

The advantage here is you can see the Weyland family’s desire to live forever bloom and corrupt out into the Prometheus expedition, David’s actions in Alien: Covenant, the consequences for Ash in Alien and Bishop’s excellent arc across Aliens and Alien3. It ties the synthetics to the feral capitalistic desire to expand, ties that to the Engineers’ science and shows the consequences of both. You also get an unintentionally fun bookend plot exploring the Aliens’ mutable nature given AvP: Requiem’s Predalien, the evolution in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant and the human/alien hybrid in Resurrection.

Watch Order 3: Prometheus Chronological Order

Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection

The advantage here is this is the all-Alien all the time order. Start with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant and work through to Resurrection and you get a quite fun, six movie story about corporate malfeasance, space truckers and rich guys who want to use capitalism to hack God. It’s similar to the arc you get above, but less grounded, which maybe helps the big sweeping elegiac beats of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant hit harder.

Watch Order 4: The Ripley Saga

Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection

Pretty inarguably the best, and certainly most coherent arc and the four movies hang together well.

Watch Order 5: The Ripley Trilogy

Alien, Aliens, Alien3

This order gives Ripley what’s arguably a happier ending than Resurrection does and is such a strong, coherent, grim trilogy. Also Resurrection is, by some considerable distance, the weakest of the ‘core’ movies and the story is helped immensely by its removal.

 

The Movies

AvP

The first Alien vs Predator movie is also, technically, the first Alien movie given its set in the present day. Now 20(!) years old it follows Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), a wilderness guide helping a team of scientists get to a mysterious heat bloom under the ice of Antarctica. She’s hired by Charles Bishop Weyland! He’s played by Lance Henriksen! They don’t do as much with that as you might think!

The heat bloom  is, of course, a reactivating Predator game preserve and before you can say ‘TRAVEL IS NOT ADVISED’ the acidic blood has started flying.

It’s a fun time! Lathan is great, there’s a darkly very funny facehugger sequence and a Predator who’s actually pretty nice and helpful. The franchise has never been more B-movie but it works. Lathan should have been brought back for four other movies.

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

An entirely different cast deal with the Predator/Alien hybrid hatched at the end of the last movie in a small Colorado town. In the dark. With almost no lights. Frequently.

The least interesting the franchise has ever been, and the movie’s aged dismally. The script trudges along, somehow wasting the brilliant idea of a Predator ‘fixer’ sent in to clean up messes. Worse, the movie is incredibly dark, as in sufficiently badly lit you’ll have trouble following what’s going on. Reiko Ayelsworth and John Ortiz do their best but this is the least of the franchise and it knows it.

Prometheus

If anyone ever asks ‘How do you possibly screw up Beyond the Mountains of Madness in space?’ the answer is ‘Prometheus’.

Set in 2089, the Prometheus is sent to investigate proof of an interstellar culture predating humanity on Earth. They find it, and in the next two hours we discover that the Engineers were an alien race who built us and the Xenomorph, one is alive and he is SUPER pissed and Guy Pearce does not suit old person make up in the slightest.

This should work. It’s Ridley Scott returning to the franchise, it’s got a great cast and the premise is bulletproof. Instead, Scott’s apparent fondness for improvising on set, and Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts’ script mix like oil and water and you get a film that looks great, tries to do ten things, explains eight of them and expects us to believe its highly competent cast are idiots. A zoologist pokes an unknown alien lifeform and it kills him. A cartographer gets lost in the middle of a building he’s in the process of mapping. A relentlessly competent corporate executive dies because she doesn’t run around a corner. You could argue all of this is unfair, and that we have to view this as a realistic depiction of stress. You could also argue, and people have that this is a deeply mythically resonant movie. I agree with that, and the definitions of it are fascinating. The movie isn’t. Prometheus is a tedious chore that muddies the already confusing origin of the Alien. This many talented people working this hard producing a movie this muddled is truly confounding.

Alien: Covenant

And speaking of talented people working hard to produce a deeply muddled movie… Scott returns again. John Logan and Dante Harper take over scripting. It’s 11 years after Prometheus and the Covenant is a colonization vessel whose crew are offered shelter after an accident by David, from Prometheus.

It doesn’t go well. In any sense.

This is full-on Chariots of the Gods stuff and while it’s got some great spectacle, and a couple of excellent set pieces it aims for horrific but just lands on mean spirited. David’s transformation into a self-constructed god has a lot of mythic resonance but is very difficult to care about and the off-screen fate of Elizabeth Shaw feels like a cheap shot instead of the horrific beat it should be. Katherine Waterston is great, as is Danny McBride, but none of them matter. This is a flat cold story with a dismally predictable ending. You can see far more than you can in Requiem, but that’s about the only upside.

Alien

Years after the events of Alien: Covenant, the Nostromo, a space tug pulling a refinery, investigates a mysterious signal from LV 426, an abandoned planet…

Genuinely one of the best horror movies ever made, Alien’s top flight cast, direction, cinematography and script mean it still feels fresh almost fifty years after release. Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley is the standout but the entire cast, including Veronica Lambert, Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton, are fantastic. A group of blue-collar space truckers on the worst day of their lives, doing their best and knowing it’s not good enough in the face of two implacable killers: the Alien and corporate greed. A legitimate classic that’s been imitated hundreds of times but rarely equalled.

Aliens

Ellen Ripley has been in stasis 57 years when she’s retrieved and immediately blamed for the loss of the Nostromo. Befriended by Carter J Burke, a Weyland Yutani exec who is so on her side you know he’s writing a cheque behind her back, she agrees to return to the site of the alien ship as an advisor to a Colonial Marine Fire Team.

Another absolute, undisputed stone cold classic and one of the two best movies James Cameron ever made. The escalation is key here, as Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill’s script weaves Ripley’s loss of her child, and so many years, around the Aliens’ lifecycle and the endless march of the company. There’s also a rich vein of machismo being mined here as the Marines discover they aren’t even on the food chain let alone at the top of it. Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser are stand outs but it’s Carrie Henn’s quiet, determined Newt, Weaver’s Ripley and Henricksen’s gentle, kind-hearted synthetic Bishop who stick with you most. See any cut you can, they’re all different levels of great and if you’ve never seen this before, I envy the journey you’re about to take.

Alien3

Ah, the weird one. This was David Fincher’s feature debut as a director and to say its production was storied is an understatement. An Alien hatches aboard the Sulaco and the resulting damage leads to Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Hicks being ejected from the ship. They crash on Fury 161, a corporate penal colony and Ripley is the only survivor. Or at least the only human one…

The theatrical cut of this one is distinctly wobbly but Fincher’s Assembly Cut, included in the DV release, has much more room to breathe. The return to a single Alien, on a planet with no weapons, creates a constant sense of ambient threat and Ripley’s own ticking clock lands really well. It also presents far more as a final act than you’d first expect, Ripley stripped back to the basics of her personality and life, fighting her nemesis one last time. Charles Dance, Brian Glover and Charles S. Dutton soar in guest roles and the entire prison colony full of UK character actors is tremendous, spiky and fun. This may be the funniest movie in the franchise and it’s certainly one of the most interesting. Intensely troubled but, like Aliens it’s a step change and, like Aliens, it really works.

Alien Resurrection

Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and Amélie are all stunning movies, actual modern classics. They were directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also directed Alien Resurrection from a script by then wunderkind Joss Whedon. This is neither of their best days.

Two centuries after Alien3, a group of mercenaries deliver human test subjects to the military. One of them, Call, sees a woman who looks like Ellen Ripley and tries to kill her. As the adult Aliens the military are growing escape, the crew must team up with this new Ripley to escape.

Like every Alien movie, there’s some stuff to enjoy here. The mercenaries, including Winona Ryder as Call, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan and Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon are all tremendous fun. There’s some nicely handled action too, including an underwater sequence and a very smart exploration of Pinon’s character’s paraplegia and how the crew work with it. Weaver’s the standout though, finding a very different physicality and presence for this not fully human Ellen Ripley. It’s a fantastic performance, one much better than the film it’s in, and she’s who you’ll be thinking about after the movie ends.

Unfortunately, like almost every Alien movie, there’s a lot to work around here too. The tone oscillates weirdly between flat and wildly OTT and the human/alien hybrid at the core of the story is… just not good. The effects do their best but the horror of the idea is lost between the action requirements of the story and the physical execution. It should be a nightmare. Instead it’s awkward and ungainly rather than actively frightening. Despite that, and just how much of Whedon’s bag of tricks you’re able to stomach, there’s fun to be had as the movie makes a decent stab at (another) ending for the franchise.

Surprise Bonus Round!

Much like the multiple Ninth Doctors, there’s more than one version of Alien3. Vincent Ward’s idea, set on a wooden planet with an atmosphere you could climb out of using a ladder, never made it to screen and that’s a real tragedy. Both of William Gibson’s versions, which brought elements of the Cold War into space, have been adapted, one as an audio drama, the other as a novel.

Editor Job Willins has produced multiple cuts of multiple films including Ripley (Combining Alien3 and Alien Resurrection), Derelict (combining Prometheus and Alien) and Paradise (combining Prometheus and Alien: Covenant into a David-centric story). Find out more here: https://jobwillins.wordpress.com/

Alien: Romulus opens on 16 August.