The Alien franchise is one of the most totemic in sci-fi and horror cinema. A lot of that legacy comes from the first two installments, which are universally considered great and have inspired a lot of spirited debate over which is superior. Beyond those films, the additional seven that feature xenomorphs have experienced varying degrees of appreciation over the years. Outside the variations in tone, that appreciation usually comes down to the difference between intent and execution.
There have been Alien movies that attempt ambitious expansions of the franchise by going well off course and there have been technically well-made movies that stay safely on the established rails. Individual appreciation of those films can really come down to the singular preferences of each fan. All that debate and personal differences can be put to bed now that we’ve officially ranked every Alien movie.
9
‘Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’ (2007)
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A movie that even the most die hard fans of either franchise would have trouble defending, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem fails in almost every respect. It’s a bad Alien movie, it’s a bad Predator movie, and it’s bad at being a movie. The film’s notoriously poor lighting and editing make many scenes near incomprehensible, not that being able to see or understand what’s going on would make the movie much better.
Picking up directly after Alien vs. Predator, the movie at least makes good on its predecessor’s promise of the Predalien hybrid monster, which crash lands back on Earth and begins wreaking havoc on a small town in Colorado. Space truckers, scientists, and Colonial Marines are replaced here with stock characters more suited to a slasher, which is really what this movie is, just dressed up in the hollowed out corpses of both beloved franchises. The only element worth applauding in the movie is the effects work, which should come as no surprise as directors Greg and Colin Strause have a background in visual effects. Even then, the creature effects, by Amalgamated Dynamics, are hidden in almost complete darkness. The abject failure of this film is what led both franchises to split back apart to try and find their own identities again.
8
‘Alien: Resurrection’ (1997)
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Alien: Resurrection is not a good movie, by any measure, but it is a weird movie, and that counts for something. It was ill-advised to bring the character of Ripley back after her demise in Alien 3, even if she is a completely different clone character here. Sigourney Weaver, at the very least, gets to explore some strange territory with this iteration, and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is more than happy to make things bizarre and sexual. The visuals are striking, the practical effects, again by Amalgamated Dynamics, are impressive and Alien: Resurrection is straight up one of the oddest blockbusters ever made.
In the film, Ripley has somehow been cloned in the even more distant future, along with a xenomorph embryo inside her. After some mad space scientists do their thing, the aliens escape and all hell breaks loose. Ripley has to team up with a motley crew of space pirates who were a clear progenitor for writer Joss Whedon’s later work on Firefly. The Whedon banter is discordant with Jeunet’s directorial style and the performances, which adds to the overall strange tone of this grotesque movie. Alien: Resurrection was the final nail in the space coffin for the franchise’s original continuity, but it’s got a weird charm for those in the right mood for it.
7
‘Alien vs. Predator’ (2004)
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There is nothing artistic or narratively interesting about Alien vs. Predator. It’s a movie made purely for financial reasons and fan service. It doesn’t attempt to elevate the genre in any way and is more than happy to just be a B movie. There’s nothing wrong with that and there are a few moments in the movie that are enjoyable on a brainless blockbuster level. Unfortunately, those moments are spread thin across an overwritten story with underwritten characters and a PG-13 rating that doesn’t provide enough of the carnage that fans would expect from the first meeting of these two sci-fi monster titans.
Paul W.S. Anderson makes sense on paper for a film like this. He’s a steady hand at making slick genre movies that turn a tidy profit, but AVP shares more in common with his braindead Resident Evil movies than his more visceral Event Horizon. It follows a group of interchangeable experts and mercenaries who venture into an underground pyramid in Antarctica that was used by the Predators for ceremonial hunts using alien prey. The plot threads itself into knots and leaves holes big enough to fit an oblong xenomorph head through, but it occasionally can get exciting when the movie stops to let its monsters mash each other into pulp. As fan service cash grabs go, AVP could be a lot worse, but it could have been so much better too.
6
‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017)
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Ridley Scott is the only director to have made more than one film in the Alien franchise. It’s fitting, since he started everything with the original classic, but each subsequent film has been a diminished return. The nadir is Alien: Covenant, a tonally confused mess caught between being the movie Scott wanted to make and the movie he thought Alien fans wanted. It tries to serve too many masters and ends up satisfying none. All that said, it is still an Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott, so it has some incredible visuals and violence, and Michael Fassbender giving a dual performance worthy of a much better movie.
After the lukewarm response to Prometheus, this sequel was reconfigured to lean more heavily into the horror elements of the earlier Alien films while still attempting to keep the philosophical themes of its predecessor. The biggest casualty of that change was Noomi Rapace’s character Elizabeth Shaw, who is killed off-screen, while Fassbender’s android David is upgraded to an evil villain. Fassbender also plays the more user-friendly Walter, who’s part of the wholly new cast of colonists who land on the alien planet that was once home to the Engineers and proceed to make a series of increasingly stupid decisions. Every moment of Covenant that does something new or interesting is immediately followed by something inane. The entire third act is a hollow retread of the first film and a painful reminder of how far Scott and the franchise have drifted astray.
- The Wachowskis’ 1999 film won four Academy Awards, including Visual Effects and Film
Editing. - Bullet time was shot with a rig of roughly 120 still cameras firing in sequence around the
actors. - Keanu Reeves trained in martial arts for about four months before a frame was shot,
recovering from neck surgery the whole time. - It opened the same year as Fight Club and eXistenZ, in a run of films about not trusting the
world in front of you.
- Mad Max: Fury Road won six Academy Awards in 2016, more than any other film that year.
- George Miller storyboarded the entire film as roughly 3,500 panels before there was a
script. - The chase was shot almost entirely practical in the Namib Desert, with real vehicles and
real stunt performers. - Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth carried the prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in 2024.
- Blade Runner 2049 won Roger Deakins his first Oscar for cinematography, on his fourteenth
nomination. - The film also took Best Visual Effects, 35 years after Ridley Scott’s 1982 original.
- Villeneuve shot it on large-format film and kept the fog and rain practical on set wherever
he could. - Three short films by Luke Scott and Shinichiro Watanabe bridge the 30-year gap between the
two movies.
- Denis Villeneuve’s Dune won six Academy Awards in 2022, including Cinematography and
Original Score. - Hans Zimmer turned down Christopher Nolan’s Tenet so he could score Dune instead.
- Dune: Part Two arrived in 2024 and brought in Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and Christopher
Walken. - David Lynch’s 1984 version and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade one are both their
own legends by now.
- The 1977 original won six Academy Awards plus a special achievement award for sound effects.
- John Williams’ score was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and became the
best-selling symphonic film soundtrack ever. - Andor took the galaxy somewhere colder and earned Emmy nominations for drama series in both
seasons. - The saga now runs across eleven feature films and a growing shelf of series on Disney+.
5
‘Alien: Romulus’ (2024)
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Speaking of retreads, Alien: Romulus was designed to be a back-to-basics reinvigoration of the franchise, though it does still have connective tissue to Scott’s divisive prequels. Fede Álvarez was brought in to inject fresh acid blood, and while the director does craft some suitably suspenseful sequences, the film as a whole plays like the greatest hits of the franchise rather than its own unique experience. It’s also awkwardly inserted into the continuity between Alien and Aliens, and far too often relies on fan service instead of trying to create its own iconic moments. It’s still a solid reminder of why the Alien franchise is so beloved, but it doesn’t do anything to truly justify its existence.
The human, and android, characters here are a group of colonists trying to get out from under the corporate thumb of Weyland-Yutani, the villainous conglomerate that has featured heavily in every film. They escape their mining planet and connect with a seemingly abandoned space station that turns out to have been a research vessel studying the original film’s xenomorph that was found floating in space and then revived. From there, Alien: Romulus becomes a remix of fan favorite moments throughout the franchise, some executed better than others. The worst offender is the character of Rook, an android identical to Ash from the first film created using CGI to resurrect deceased actor Ian Holm. He’s a soulless recreation that’s technically impressive, much like a lot of the film itself.
4
‘Prometheus’ (2012)
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Here’s where the true dividing line of intent versus execution comes down for the Alien franchise. For all its faults, Alien: Romulus is an undeniable accomplishment in recreating the mood and atmosphere of the early Alien movies. Prometheus, on the other hand, tries to distinguish itself from the franchise as its own sci-fi story exploring the background of the Engineers instead of rinsing and repeating. It’s an admirable idea, and one that was compelling enough to bring back Ridley Scott, but its execution is far from flawless. It’s hard to rank based on intent, but the ambition of Prometheus ultimately makes it more interesting, even if it does come crashing down by the end.
The fundamental flaw in Prometheus is that it seeks to explain things that were more interesting when they were left unexplained. The Engineer that appeared in Alien, known then as the Space Jockey, suggested an entire backstory to the origin of the xenomorph that was far more fascinating than what Prometheus ultimately offers. Following a scientific expedition to a far off planet that explains the origins of humanity and their creators, the movie is dealing with heavy themes of existential and cosmic horror, but every further plot development lessens the impact. The characters also make irrational decisions for no reason other than to serve the plot, and the tenuous prequel connections to Alien are more confusing than anything else. Much like co-writer Damon Lindelof’s Lost, Prometheus had so much promise but failed to deliver.
3
‘Alien 3’ (1992)
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Much like Prometheus, what makes Alien 3 so interesting isn’t so much the movie that was made, but the movie that could have been made. The tortured production history of the third film in the franchise is too long to recount here, but the fact that David Fincher, in his directorial debut, was able to deliver a semi-coherent movie is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. Fincher has long since disowned the movie due to his disagreements with 20th Century Fox, but it has gained a strong cult following since its original release, partially thanks to the so-called Assembly Cut that attempted to edit the film closer to Fincher’s original vision.
Both versions of the movie are still disjointed and suffer from serious pacing issues and inconsistent characters. They also both begin with the beloved characters of Newt and Hicks from Aliens being killed off, a decision many franchise fans still take major issue with. Setting that all aside, the film, which finds Ripley contending with another xenomorph, this one born from an animal on a prison planet, is a nihilistic and nasty sci-fi horror movie that’s atmospheric as hell. Through all its flaws, Alien 3 still has moments that are individually effective, and that sometimes showcase Fincher’s directorial skills that would become more pronounced in his later films where he had more creative control. Alien 3 is far from perfect, but its imperfections are better than some of the best moments of the later films in the franchise.
2
‘Aliens’ (1986)
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Trying to rank Alien and Aliens is an impossible task. Both films are vastly different from one another yet remain thematically connected, but it’s their differences that make them individually great. What James Cameron accomplished with Aliens is a masterclass in sequel making. It expands on the core plot elements established in the first film without betraying them while also shifting the genre elements closer to what Cameron excels at as a filmmaker. Aliens is bigger, if not necessarily better, than Alien, but that increased size is tied directly to the plot of the film and isn’t an act of arbitrary inflation. Aliens is a different starbeast than Alien, and how it ranks against it is more dependent on personal preference than it is on the individual achievement of either film.
Sigourney Weaver famously received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Aliens, and it’s really in this sequel where the character became a genre icon. Where she was a practical and intelligent protagonist in the first film, she was very much a part of the larger ensemble and defined mostly by Weaver’s performance than character traits. In Aliens, the character is given more dimension through both the trauma she sustained in the first film, and a greater motivation as maternal protector over Carrie Henn’s Newt, the sole survivor of the colony built on the alien planet LV-426 where Riley returns with a group of colorful and overconfident Colonial Marines. Using post-Vietnam disillusionment as a basis, Cameron establishes a militarized plot to drop Ripley into, and crafts a massively entertaining action-sci-fi-horror hybrid blockbuster around her.
1
‘Alien’ (1979)
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The original Alien is still the best. The franchise may have evolved and expanded far beyond its humble beginnings, but there’s a purity in the first film that should be admired. From Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original script that pulled influence from classic sci-fi pulps and B movies and synthesized them into a lean horror movie. From the influence of producers David Giler and Walter Hill, who introduced a working class versus corporate interests conflict to the plot. From the iconic production and creature designs of artists like Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger. From the ensemble cast that eschewed typical horror archetypes. From Ridley Scott’s focused direction and a million other elements that went into the film’s production, a sci-fi horror masterpiece burst forth and it hasn’t been improved upon since.
What began as Starbeast, a simple sci-fi concept destined to be a cheap Roger Corman production about astronauts who discover an alien lifeform on a strange planet and unwittingly bring one on board their ship, became one of the most influential sci-fi films of all time. It launched huge careers, was endlessly imitated and ripped off, including by Corman, and became permanently implanted in pop culture. Thousands of things had to go right, and wrong, for Alien to become the film it is. Thank the stars it did, because it’s hard to imagine what sci-fi, or horror, would like without, and how different both genres might be without the continued work of so many of those involved. It started the franchise that we all love and continue to debate to this day, and it’s still the best part of it, officially.
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