A Retrospective of the 'Alien' Franchise

Alien: Covenant rolls into theaters this month, boasting a marketing campaign as subtle as a hypothetical franchise that has well outstayed its welcome yet stays desperate for relevance because it thinks it can milk a connection to some beloved property of the past. In that hypothetical regard, Alien: Insert Subtitle Here is very similar to Terminator: Did You Mean Genesis?, Robocop (2014), Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Franchises Tell No Decent Tales, Saban’s Power Rangers, It (2017), Rogue One: A Star Wars Snorefest, Fantastic Series & Where To Bury Them, Finding Dory, Ghostbusters (2016), Independence Day: Retribution, Jurassic World, Spectre, Maleficent, The Amazingly Horrendous Spider-Man 2, The Hobbit: The All Of Them, Casablanca (2015), and Do You See Why Hollywood Needs Fixing Now 3: Those Were Just The Ones Off The Top Of My Head From The Last Three Years.

Also I made up the Casablanca remake, but you weren’t sure for a second there, and that’s the bloody point. Mark my words too, remakes of Singin’ in the Rain, An American In Paris, The Wizard of Oz, and other such classics are all in the works after the success of La La Land.

Anyway, I was talking about Alien: Isolation, wasn’t I? Well it’s a sequel to Prometheus, because that’s easy to tell from the title, and wait a minute, who asked for a sequel to Prometheus? Do you remember Prometheus? I sure don’t remember Prometheus, but I think it was mostly about some people on a space-ship landing on a planet only to find a weird monster that somehow sneaks on board using a person as a host body. There was probably an android at some point too.

So let us now turn our attention to the trailer for Alien: Covenant: What Does That Even Mean? It looks to be about a group of people on a spaceship arriving on a strange world only to find a weird monster has snuck on board somehow. And oh look, now there are two androids. I just want to point out that I could very easily have copied and pasted that last paragraph for the sake of the point I was making, but I chose not to because that’s the high standard of quality I uphold.

But while my production values are off the charts, the team behind Alien: Seriously Is An Alien Making A Promise To Someone? seem to be lagging a bit in that department, as they’ve just copied and pasted the story of Prometheus and mixed in a little of the original Alien. Or vice-versa. It’s so hard to tell who ripped off what first in Hollywood these days. The interesting thing about the Alien: Covenant team though, is that it’s headed up by Ridley Scott - the director of the classic 1979 Alien.

Sidenote: did you know there was a seven year gap between Alien and Aliens, which is regarded as one of the best sequels of all time. Not an important observation, just remember that Spider-Man was rebooted twice in the space of four years, and we have three Marvel movies a year now.

Ridley Scott seems to want in on that action though, because after Prometheus was so well received, he’s saying that Alien: Is Someone Promising Something To An Alien? will be part of a five movie series. Gotta love how watching a film isn’t an experience anymore, but is instead a damn investment project. Same goes for James Cameron - the director of Aliens - who seems to think that there are people who actually want four more Avatar films twelve years after the original. I appreciate that I was just talking negatively about how quick we are to make sequels currently, but twelve years isn’t a gap between films, it’s a breakdown of the space-time continuum.

So with the creators of the two original Alien(s) films both seeming fairly bonkers these days, I felt it was worth looking back at Alien and Aliens in order to see if the Alien movies were ever any good, or if maybe just Aliens was good, because the director of Alien hasn’t made many good movies since Alien, although the director of Aliens has started exclusively making dumb movies in a series called Avatar about aliens that aren’t the ones from Aliens or Alien. Are you confused yet? Great, me too.

Regardless, in answer to the question of whether or not the first two Alien movies were any good, the answer is yes.

Right, back to the new E.T: Covenant movie, because that’s all I actually want to talk about since it’s not really up for debate whether or not Alien or Aliens are any good. To be honest I just made up the title to make the article seem more interesting. Is that click-bait? Probably, but who cares? This is free content here, so you can enjoy me slating Alien: Covenant or you can... not. Maths, folks!

So I may not have found any revolutionary new opinion on the first two Alien films, but while watching them I did discover what I enjoyed about them on a basic conceptual level. In the very first movie - Alien - it’s a thrilling experience because you spend the whole film on the edge of your seat in fear of the Xenomorph as it goes through various forms and you discover terrifying things about it. Even the famous marketing for that film was fascinatingly enigmatic, with trailers often showing nothing but a slow unveiling of the title with a background of space. Following on from that, Aliens functioned well as a sequel because it didn’t attempt to replicate that fear, but rather offered the catharsis of Ripley getting her revenge on the Xenomorphs.

Ever since then the films have just been trying to magically replicate the original film’s terrifying build up to the reveal of something nightmarishly beautiful. However, nothing can recreate that fear of the unknown like the first Alien did, so now we’re just saying “we haven’t done THIS with the Xenomorph yet” and making a film about it.

For example, Alien: Covent Garden said to itself “we haven’t yet completely ruined the Xenomorph by displaying it in full light smashing its face into glass like an especially oversized fly” and then it ran with the idea. I must say I have to agree that it’s definitely a strong enough concept to build five movies upon. Sure, it took Star Wars a whole new galaxy full of space magic, future tech, and robots to get three good films under its belt, but I see no reason why you can’t build an Alien mega-franchise out of a Xenomorph sustaining brain damage.

To be honest, I actually can’t imagine a much better idea for a new Alien film, since the first two movies - that’s Aliens and Alien unrespectively - pretty much use up all the good ideas which directly relate to the Xenomorphs. Perhaps introducing another monster into the mix is the best way to go, but it would likely fail to match the genius of the Xenomorph. Another option is to try putting the alien in a new scenario, perhaps shifting the perspective towards a lone Xenomorph as we see it destroy some evil civilisation. Is that too radical an idea? Certainly for a studio executive, but I think I’d like to see a sort of fun slasher film in the Alien universe. One can never underestimate the joy to be found in watching despicable people get mutilated in the safety of the fictional world.

In conclusion, Alien: Covenant doesn’t seem like the injection of life this series needs to get me on board. But hey, it might buy the folks at 20th Century Fox a couple of new yachts, so I guess it was worth taking the art out of a business that exists to sell me film: an art form.

That being said, there’s still a chance that Alien: Covenant will be not-terrible. On the whole though, I’d say the probability of that is similar to the probability of you having gotten to this point in the article.

Without skim-reading.

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