Ranking the Alien Films (& Television Seasons)

 

The best franchise in the history of film! All of the films are were once good and all feel completely different from each other. Keep making them, Ridley. The evil Disney corporation needs to go back to letting Ridley make them. Here is a ranking of the supporting performances in the series.

8. Alien: Earth (Season 1)

Noah Hawley is simply one of the biggest frauds with any semblance of creative power in Hollywood today. It is not to say he is completely worthless. I even think season 2 of Fargo is quite great. No one demands so much of your attention though for so little payoff in whatever he does. He writes bad novels. He made a movie nobody liked or cared about. And now, he has infected my very beautiful Alien world. The fucking perverts who own the Alien “intellectual property” are determined to make it so painfully uncool. I cannot believe they managed to make bad Alien movie and now a bad Timothy Olyphant television show. Those two things should be fucking impossible – and yet, here we are. I am sure other people out there have broken down in more detail why this show is boring and does not work. I would only add that the only episode that comes close to working is a mid-season episode where people are stuck on a ship being hunted by a xenomorph. It is hard to imagine why that episode worked! What about that premise could possibly make for an entertaining Alien story??

 

7. Romulus 

I went into this film with extremely low expectations. Fede Alvarez is a hack who says all the right things but does not have the skills to back any of it up. I had heard about the CGI/AI crap to recreate Ian Holm to play a new version of the Ash android. And this film managed to live down to those expectations.

Combined, these two issues explain why this movie is an artistic failure: it has both the condescending key jangling bullshit, and it’s not good enough to stand on its own two feet even if you took the key jangling out. Casting a bunch of actors that look like models did not help either. If this is the future of Alien, we are in terrible hands.

 

6. Alien: Resurrection 

Maybe one more pass at the script to tighten some things up, and we would have a real winner here. Regardless, it’s still just a fun goofy movie and continues the most important part of Alien movies. They are all very different from each other. This one goes down easy and is never boring.

 

5. Alien3

When I first watched this film on the heels of being blown away by Alien and enjoying Aliens a great deal, I was deeply underwhelmed by David Fincher’s first feature. Time has been kind to my opinion of the film though largely due to the first hour and the obvious strong characterization of Ripley. The first hour is just absolutely beautiful in a totally new and unique way for the Alien films, as we just got to spend time with Sigourney Weaver and Charles Dance flirting and spending time together. This was great. I demand a romantic comedy starring them in 2022. The film gets less interesting after the (effectively) shocking death of Dance’s character halfway through, as the rest of the ensemble struggled to make an impression despite the makings of a strong setup for them.

 

4. Aliens

While in many respects, this film is in of the least interesting of the series two things carry the day to make it extremely successful. First of all, as is essential for all Alien films, it feels quite unique compared to what came before it. James Cameron has wildly different sensibilities compared to Ridley Scott, and he managed to do a truly extraordinary job of being true to himself but also building on what Ridley had started off. Secondly, the work of Sigourney Weaver here is just out of this world. A world class performance and characterization of one of cinema’s best protagonists ever.

 

3. Covenant 

What a crazy film in so many ways! In the grand Aliens tradition, the film feels wholly unique especially in comparison to the most recent one in the series. While not everything in the film is a homerun and there are very few impactful characterizations/performances, the film is carried on the backs some incredibly strong sequences and the prequel’s center, Michael Fassbender’s work as the android(s). The real winner of a sequence was when the shit first fell apart on the new planet they landed on, and the mad dash to survive. Beautifully shot, horrifying music, and total insane manic carnage. Ridley at his best in some ways. The ending moment with the Walter/David reveal was also just one of the most quietly horrifying moments in the entire series. Well done.

 

2. Prometheus

The biggest sins of this film is that it tries to do too much, is serving too many masters, and is too ambitious in general. These are not necessarily fatal flaws though and instead are just reasons why A LOT of things are happening and the film is never boring. It is not wholly successful at any of the things it is going for, but it’s just a fun space film so that’s a good thing. Fassbender’s android character was also fairly inspired in a great way, and Guy Pearce’s CGI old man was fairly inspired in a hilarious way. The supporting cast is filled with actors that find a way of standing out, and the pace is just relentless at the expense of coherence. It somehow works though.

 

1. Alien

Comparing the original film to all the subsequent ones is almost unfair. Alien is not simply the best Alien film but one of the very best movies of all time. As detailed above, each film does at least something very well (and it is almost always something very different from the other films). The original though is both masterful in creating genuine horror and also being a beautiful story about human beings trying to survive under the crushing weight the world they exist in.