Sigourney Weaver names her favourite film in the ‘Alien’ franchise
The debate as to which is the best film in the Alien franchise has raged on ever since James Cameron’s sequel was released in 1986. The fact is that it would be hard to argue that anything other than Cameron’s Aliens or Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is the best of the bunch.
The debate primarily comes down to which kind of movie the answerer likes. Alien was very much aligned with the horror genre, it was slow-paced and claustrophobic, and the crew of the Nostromo were slowly picked off by the terrifying xenomorph one by one.
By contrast, Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, turned everything up to eleven, largely abandoning the horror mood and throwing caution to the wind as a high-action octane flick. Where the Nostromo crew snuck around the ship, hiding from the alien, the Sulaco crew tried (and failed) to gun it down with heavy firepower.
When asked what her favourite film in the franchise is, Sigourney Weaver said: “Oh, goodness, that’s difficult. The best-constructed story for the character to tell was in Aliens, just because Jim [Cameron] has such an amazing sense of structure of story. To take this character out of hyper-sleep, have no one believe her, have her be exiled into this limbo land where no one believes her and her family’s dead.”
She added: “The whole set-up for Ripley in Aliens and then what she ends up doing and what it, finding this new family by the end. The whole structure of that story, to me, was gold. I always felt that I could jump up and down on it. It was such a great, supportive, arc for the character. In that sense, the second one for Ripley is probably the most satisfying.”
Whilst the films after Aliens left an awful lot to be desired, James Cameron did manage to continue Ripley’s story, arguably to the point that other directors felt that they had to continue it even further. We learn far more about Ripley, which is evidently why Weaver prefers it (even if only slightly) over the original.
However, Alien is where it all began; it laid the groundwork for the sci-fi horror genre and created a sense of terror and claustrophobia that hadn’t been experienced in cinema until that point. As such, whilst Aliens is arguably a more exciting film and expanded on the story, Alien deserves its place as the best film in the franchise.
