We all love a good alien movie, whether cute and friendly in ET to the hostile extraterrestrial species that we’re going to focus on here. There’s been six in the series and two made with the Predator with a brand new movie coming out next year (2024). I can’t wait.
Here they are in order:
Alien – 1979
Aliens – 1986
Alien 3 – 1992
Alien Resurrection – 1997
Alien vs. Predator – 2004
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem – 2007
Prometheus – 2012
Alien: Covenant – 2017
Alien: Romulus – coming soon
Alien is a science-fiction horror and action franchise centered on the film series which depicts warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and her battles with an extraterrestrial lifeform, commonly referred to as the Alien.
The success of Alien spawned a media franchise of novels, comic books, video games, and toys, as well as three sequels and two prequel films. It launched Weaver’s acting career by providing her with her first lead role, and the story of her character Ripley’s encounters with the Alien creatures became the thematic thread that ran through the film sequels.
The original films
While returning to earth, the commercial star Freighter Nostromo is diverted to a deserted asteroid by a cryptic signal from a poorly conditioned alien spacecraft. Inside the alien ship, the crew discovers thousands of egg-like objects. A creature, released from one of the eggs, attaches itself to a crewman’s face, rendering him unconscious. The others break quarantine to return him to the Nostromo. The parasite dies and the crewman wakes up, seemingly unaffected. Soon afterwards, an alien organism bursts from his chest and grows rapidly into a large lethal creature, which the surviving crew attempt to kill. The Nostromo is destroyed in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the creature, leaving Ellen Ripley as the only survivor in the ship’s lifeboat.
After 57 years in hypersleep, Ripley awakens aboard a medical space station orbiting Earth. She recounts the events of the Nostromo but is disbelieved by her superiors in the Weyland Yutani corporation, which has now begun toterraformand colonies the planetoid from the first film. When contact with the colony is lost, Ripley is persuaded to accompany a squad of marines to investigate. They discover the colonists have been wiped out after being directed by the company to secure the derelict ship reported by Ripley. There is only one survivor, a girl named Newt. The aliens vastly outnumber and quickly overwhelm the marines, who fight for survival. Only a handful, including Ripley and Newt, escape.
Immediately following the events of Aliens, the military ship USS Sulaco, carrying the survivors, catches fire. The occupants are ejected in an escape pod, which crash-lands on the refinery/prison planet Fiorina “Fury” 161. All on board except Ripley are killed. An alien facehugger is also aboard, and impregnates an animal with an alien, which soon begins killing inmates and wardens. Ripley discovers an alien queen is growing inside her, and is determined to kill both herself and the creature before Weyland Yutani can exploit them.
New film due to release
While not much is known at this time, the studio did reveal that the film will follow “a group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe.”
Alien video game
Alien: Isolation, the first-person horror game that dared to capture the magic of Ridley Scott’s original masterpiece. It truly felt (and still feels) like lightning in a bottle, and the fact it was developed by a studio with no prior experience with first-person titles made it even more anomalous.
Taking cues from indie horror hits from the early 2010s, such as Amnesia (2011), Creative Assembly was able to inject back some genuine horror and tension into an IP which had focused for far too long on action-heavy scenarios and colonial marines. The story takes places 15 years after the events of the first movie, following Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, as she investigates the disappearance of her mother aboard a space station that’s reliving the xenomorph terror.
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