Ranking every movie in the ‘Alien’ anthology
When Ridley Scott released his second directorial effort, Alien, in 1979, he accomplished two significant feats. The first was to establish himself as one of the masters of the science fiction genre, and just three years later, he’d release another masterpiece in the form of Blade Runner. The second was that he birthed an entire franchise of sci-fi horror movies that would become written into the very fabric of our cultural consciousness.
The film, starring Sigourney Weaver in her most iconic role of Ellen Ripley, told of the crew of a commercial starship, the Nostromo, who investigate a distress signal from an alien vessel. This only results in being terrorised by a near-invincible extra-terrestrial entity considered “the perfect organism”.
James Cameron’s widely beloved sequel, Aliens, arrived seven years later and largely abandoned the slow-paced tension of Scott’s original in favour of high-octane action as Ripley and a band of Colonial Marines take on a whole group of xenomorph terrors. However, from there, a series of ill-fated and admittedly poor films bearing the Alien name followed. Though more recent efforts have rescued the franchise as a whole, it remains one tarnished by its lesser attempts.
We’ve put together the worst-to-best ranking of each of the Alien movies, including the Alien vs Predator crossovers, to help decide which of them are worth your time and which ought to be relegated to the bargain bin. So, don your spacesuit and grab your flamethrower because it’s about to get tense in here.
The Alien movies ranked from worst to best:
8. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (The Brothers Strause, 2007)
Universally considered the worst movie to even dare to put the Alien name in its title, the second AvP movie, released in 2007, largely disposed of any quality its predecessors had shown in favour of a completely forgettable. It had an unforgivably boring story, one-dimensional characters and some of the worst lighting in cinema history.
Narratively (ahem), AvP: Requiem tells of a hunt for an Alien-Predator crossover called the Predalien. After escaping and causing havoc in a nearby town, a Predator is sent to kill said Predalien, and that’s about as rich as the story gets at any point. Even feeble attempts at outrageous gore could not save this diabolical film that’s so dark you can barely even see what’s going on.
7. Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997)
The brilliance of Ridley Scott’s original movie and James Cameron’s excellent sequel had been largely undone by David Fincher’s 1992 directorial debut Alien 3, and a fourth movie in the franchise was devised to try and rescue the franchise’s declining fate. Future Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was tasked with handling a movie in which Ellen Ripley was brought back from the dead, as Alien: Resurrection’s title suggests.
Sigourney Weaver did what Sigourney Weaver does in giving a commanding physical performance. Still, the actual viewing experience of the fourth Alien movie is all over the place, making for a film that is downright difficult to engage with. Desperate attempts at interesting kill scenes marred what is admittedly a brilliant cast, including Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman, but this movie simply shouldn’t have been made.
6. Alien vs. Predator (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004)
The crossover franchise that no one really asked for – although the commercial potential of bringing Alien and Predator together in one movie was just too tempting for Twentieth Century Fox not to take a stab at. The introspective tension of the first two movies is starkly missing from AvP, though, and it quickly becomes a mindless romp that wasn’t even particularly violent or scary per its PG-13 rating.
The prospect of two of the most iconic foes in science fiction cinema facing off against one another is primarily undone by too heavy a focus on its human archaeologist protagonists. What might have been better was to just let Predator and the Xenomorph let loose on one another for an hour and a half and see what happens, but sadly, this occurs far too infrequently.
5. Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)
David Fincher would make some of the most gripping American movies of all time, including Fight Club and Gone Girl. Still, his directorial debut put a massive dent in the legacy of the Alien franchise and almost prevented his career from getting off the ground to begin with. The first two films are science fiction masterpieces, so Fincher always had a task on his hands to replicate their brilliance, and Alien 3 certainly failed to live up to expectations.
Taking place after Cameron’s movie, Ripley finds herself crash-landed on a criminal colony and must fight off a series of violent bad guys as well as the iconic xenomorphs. Chase scenes become incredibly tedious, and even though Alien 3 looks truly stunning at some points, Fincher’s debut marked the first bad entry in the series.
4. Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)
After a long string of admittedly poor movies since the mid-1980s, Ridley Scott came back into the fold with Prometheus, his Alien origin story. 2017’s Alien: Covenant served as the sequel and saw the franchise once again retain its credibility with fine performances from the likes of returning Michael Fassbender, plus some of the most impressive action sequences in the film series as a whole.
There’s clearly a passion from Scott in this movie, who may well have become fed up by the kind of reputation the Alien franchise had garnered since he handed over control to other directors. As with Prometheus, the English icon asks his audience philosophical questions about human existence whilst approaching the kind of quality he’d shown with his original sci-fi horror masterpiece.
3. Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)
As mentioned above, it was with Prometheus that Scott returned to the fold to save the true wreckage that had befallen his beloved sci-fi horror series. Though the origin story of the entire franchise was divisive upon release, to say the least, it’s undoubtedly one of its better movies. There’s a patience and, therefore, tension to Prometheus that doesn’t egregiously lean into gore and horror, and audiences can certainly tell that a master director is back in the hot seat once again.
In addition to the usual tropes of the Alien movies, which are handled with expected respect by Scott, there are also questions of existence, faith, evil, destruction, artificial intelligence, morality and origin. While that can sound like a lot to cram into one film (it is), Prometheus served as the moment that one could be genuinely excited by and impressed with an Alien movie again. Even though it fails to capture the genius of the first two movies, it’s one that provokes the senses and the mind in equal measure.
2. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
Well, there’s no surprise with the two movies remaining, and separating Scott’s original and Cameron’s sequel is the kind of conversation to cause a few glasses of spilt (or even thrown) red wine over the Christmas table. For our money, though, Cameron’s 1986 action-heavy classic is pipped to the post by the claustrophobic terror of the 1979 masterpiece of science fiction horror.
Featuring with ease some of the franchise’s most iconic moments of dialogue, wildly impressive special effects and just a heart-pounding plot that never relents or abates, Aliens is one hell of a film that sees Ripley team up with a group of smoking, swearing Colonial Marines to take out a whole fucking band of xenomorphs armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry. The second Alien movie is the franchise at its most badass, epitomised by the butch fearsomeness of the one and only Vasquez, who will forever remain in our hearts, minds and on our bedroom walls.
1. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
So many science fiction fans seem to prefer Cameron’s sequel, with its gun-toting action, over Scott’s tense space-horror original. Still, our hearts will always lie with the original 1979 masterpiece. Setting the tone for what a science fiction horror ought to be, Alien crept along slowly, revealing its terror at the perfect pace to keep audiences hooked on the edge of their seats. By patiently revealing the H.R. Giger-designed xenomorph in glimpses and snippets, Scott retained an element of intrigue, which balanced perfectly with the kind of fear experienced only in the darkest of our nightmares.
Charting the tragic journey of the commercial starship Nostromo as they investigate a distress signal from a strange floating vessel, Scott introduced the world to his reluctant protagonist, the cool, sexy and resolute Ellen Ripley, played masterfully by Sigourney Weaver. Throw in a legendary performance by Harry Dean Stanton, moments of sheer gore and absolute horror, and a genius tagline of “in space, no one can hear you scream”, and it suddenly becomes easy to see why Alien is an absolute monolithic achievement of cinema and is far and away the greatest movie in the franchise.
