What's So Hard About This?: Revisiting the Bad Alien Movies

One of the most iconic horror franchises has more misses than hits, but why should this be?

The Alien series has a very strong brand, deceptively so for a film franchise with, by most people’s reckoning, two hits. After 1986’s Aliens, the series has been limping along on the excess energy generated by those first two phenomenal movies. Only the Terminator series has gone to such desperate lengths to recapture the energy of its first two powerful entries.

That’s just shy of four decades without another really good Alien movie despite the fact that they keep hammering them out every few years. But the mystery is how the hell do they keep failing? This should be the easiest template in the world to just keep cranking out banger after banger. The monster itself is absolutely one of the best horror creatures ever invented in the genre. It’s a universe in which both space marines and space pirates exist. This is one of those ideas you get the impression even ChatGPT could do an okay job working with.

The latest entry, Alien: Romulus has landed this week, and I’ve just seen it today. My spoiler-free review is at the end of this article.

I saw Aliens, the second film, when I was a young teenager (or maybe not yet in my teens, I can’t say for sure) and I think it was one of the first adult horror movies I ever saw, and I mean horror. I’d seen schlock, I’d seen some of the Friday the 13ths, but never something that took itself dead seriously. I still remember covering my eyes and refusing to watch when the first chestburster scene arrived because this was already the 90s and this movie had existed for long enough that I knew the lore from cultural osmosis.

Since then I’ve watched the first two Alien movies a hell of a lot of times. The other half dozen? Not so much. So I wanted to watch these movies again and try to figure out why they’ve done so poorly when the first two did so well. Why does the Alien franchise keep tripping over its own prehensile toothed mouth-dick?

First, though, I think we need to talk about why the first two were so fucking good.

One of the things that makes these movies stand out as iconic films larger than the genre they inhabit is that they are very, very well done feminist horror movies. I mean on levels far more complex than your average beard-and-alcohol themed anti-SJW YouTube reviewers with names like “The Critical Drinker” will be able to understand. It’s much more than the fact that they have women protagonists—a lot of horror movies do.

All of the best horror movies are metaphors for something because effective horror drills into your psyche and attacks something you’re actually genuinely afraid of. It’s never just about a man with knives on his hands. You’re not actually afraid of aliens, but the Alien movies are about sexual violence, which you are afraid of.

The xenomorphs, as pop culture has come to call them, are rape. That’s all they are—rape itself, given form. It’s one of the most effective examples in pop culture of representing a concept as a monster, all penises and teeth. It’s not only women whose psyches are rattled, as men have our own primal fears about violation and penetration, but women get an extra layer of subtext. Even in scenes that don’t involve a xenomorph, there’s a strong underlying theme of suspicion of men.

The filmmakers avoid the temptation of taking the sub out of subtext. They don’t make every man in these movies evil, malicious, or duplicitous. Some are…

…but most aren’t.

But they are all treated with suspicion.

These films are enjoyable as horror because you’re never conscious of the secret fear buttons they’re trying to press in your brain. You think you’re watching a movie about a scary fuckin’ monster, and that’s enough, but it’s about what’s happening in the background of your mind.

The first two movies, Alien and Aliens (the one where there’s more than one), are brilliant for all that, but I’m not here to write an absurdly long essay about the two movies everyone loves the shit out of and talk about all the time. I’m here for the rubbish, and to talk about the runts of the franchise that we’ve memory holed, and see if I can figure out what keeps going wrong.

Alien 3

This is probably the franchise entry I’ve seen the fewest number of times. I’m not sure I’ve seen it more than once before writing this, and that one time was like 20 years ago, so this was pretty fresh to me, and my first impression is how made-for-TV it looks.

I haven’t looked much into the making of this film (beyond a lot of trivia I picked up from my time with Cracked) but I know this came during that early 90s era when monster movies were getting way too prematurely excited about what they could do with CGI and so they were swapping out amazing practical effects for early CGI that makes it look like the xenomorph is a toon that escaped from the Roger Rabbit universe.

Given the type of monster movie that these are, it’s always best practice to do a lot more implying than showing, but it’s clear to me that’s not the reason you don’t actually see much of the alien in this. They either didn’t have the budget to render it into the frame too many times or else they realised it looks like something you’d see on screen at a bowling alley, so there’s a lot of people awkwardly framed, screaming at something off screen, while a tentacle flops around.

My only real memory of seeing this movie the first time was how upset I was that they killed off all of the survivors from the previous movie during the opening credits of this one. They basically played out that Simpsons gag about hurriedly disposing of Poochie the Rockin’ Dog.

Overall what disappoints me the most is all of this movie’s wasted potential. As an Alien movie, again, it relies heavily on themes of sexual violence both actual and potential, but it just doesn’t go anywhere with it. Ripley is trapped in a literal men’s prison, but the threat that actually poses to her is barely explored but for a few almost offhand remarks. But for one scene where she’s followed ominously by a group of men through a junkyard, she otherwise doesn’t really have much to fear from these men and the tension that should so obviously play a key role in this plot never materializes. She quickly establishes a casual romantic relationship with the prison doctor and the other men never really get character dimensions of their own.

Maybe the biggest missed opportunity is the fact that this is the one film in which Ripley faces one of the most visceral horrors of sexual assault—the rape pregnancy. That is, after all, one of the key elements of the xenomorph’s psychosexual horror. They put a little horror baby inside you. Ripley spends most of the movie not knowing that she has an alien embryo, and when she finds out, the reaction is about as muted and dull as any other scene in the film. It’s only really utilised as a plot point to explain why the alien refuses to harm her and they can use this to their tactical advantage.

This was David Fincher’s first feature film and he was hired to drag it out of development hell. You can kind of tell it had a lot of writers who kind of knew what they were doing but ultimately when you put that many scripts in a blender you just get a homogeneous brown slurry without any emotion or depth.

Alien Resurrection

I think this movie is popularly regarded the worst of the entire franchise. I actually really like it! Maybe not as an Alien movie, though, if that makes sense. It’s just kind of the franchise misfit. It’s the one I’ve watched the most times apart from the first two. It’s the ragtag gang of space pirates one, which is just really cool to me.

So this was written by Joss Whedon, the famous kinda-problematic turbo-feminist, so he knows the assignment but doesn’t nail the execution. I think a halfway decent analogy here is the time my workplace held a soup cooking competition and I brought in a batch of chili. Everyone enjoyed the chili! I make a pretty good chili. But then… it wasn’t really the type of thing they were looking for, was it? It’s a stretch to call it soup, and if it is a soup, it’s still a little strange next to the pumpkin soup and the borscht.

I know what you’re all picturing

Joss Whedon wrote Ripley in his style, through his lens of feminism, which is the ass-kicking female supersoldier archetype. Whedon fans (those who can separate the art from the artist and enjoy his work since he got MeToo’d) will recognise his version of the empowered woman in his Ripley, who (in a really creative solution, I think, to the she-died-in-the-previous-film problem) was cloned but got her DNA mixed up with the alien embryo inside of her so she now has xenomorph superpowers.

This is Ripley written as Buffy, as River Tam, or as Black Widow. It’s the “fuck yeah, strong woman hero” Ripley who at one point just shoots one of the aliens in the fucking face point blank because she’s sick of its shit. The problem with this movie is that it kind of falls into the same trap that the later Die Hard movies fell into, which was to reinterpret the rugged, clever, resourceful, wrong-place-wrong-time underdog as a sudden invincible action hero who takes out helicopters by ramping speeding cars into them. In her original interpretation until now, Ellen Ripley is kind of just John McClaine in space.

Gone are the psychosexual undertones of the xenomorphs being rapists and sexual predators. In this movie they’re much more woman-coded monsters and the feminist horror subtext seems more associated with the idea of motherhood and, in particular, parental failure. The idea of giving birth to a monster despite your best efforts and intentions, and how you deal with that crisis in yourself.

More than anything I’m just super glad they decided to go back to practical effects. The aliens are back to being wet rubber puppets glistening with Hollywood slime, and the human-xenomorph hybrid end boss deserves a lot more credit than it gets.

This thing was rad

The Prometheus Cycle

The inevitability of a film franchise like this, which carries on over a number of episodes and starts to build up a decent amount of lore and worldbuilding, is that, at some point, someone’s going to decide that we need an origin story for all of this and not enough people in the industry will have the courage to say no.

Prometheus built up a lot of hype because it was Ridley Scott’s triumphant return to the universe he gave original life to, and everyone was excited about the prospect of another good Alien movie.

But Ridley Scott… man, he’s just not the same Ridley Scott anymore who gave us Blade Runner and Gladiator and a dozen other timeless classics. These days you’re sort of flipping a coin that might just as easily get you Robin Hood or, I guess, Gladiator 2.

Google “Nick Cave Gladiator 2” to find out what this could have been, though.

Prometheus is nothing if not a baffling movie. It doesn’t suck ass, but it kind of trails off like an old man telling a story who keeps on telling it after he’s forgotten the point he was making. And watching it kind of feels like listening to that old man.

Right off the bat, there’s no xenomorphs in Prometheus and they only make their appearance late in its sequel, Covenant, in case you’re thinking of watching these for the first time in preparation for the upcoming Romulus. These are the Star Wars prequels of the Alien universe, in which Scott looked back on his own creation and somehow gets the impression that we want to learn more about the giant dead alien pilot that appeared in the background briefly of the first movie.

More curious, though, is that Scott has departed from most of the themes that the Alien movies up to this point have been about. It’s not the primal psychological fear of sexual violence and physical violation anymore. Now it’s about… God, I think? The search for life’s purpose and the deep restless fear of discovering that there might not be one. Departing from the feminist themes of the series to this point, these movies actually seem more masculine-coded. There’s a fatherhood theme.

There’s ten pounds of silicon rubber glued to Guy Pearce’s head

The horror, where these can be considered horror movies at all (much more true for Covenant than Prometheus) is much less immediate and violent and much more existential: What if God actually hates us?

That’s a fine theme for a horror movie, especially a science fiction horror movie. It’s a baffling as fuck theme for an Alien movie.

As much as Alien has established itself as a unique universe it still doesn’t match the breadth of something like Star Wars, with enough lore to branch out into exploring entire separate themes and subtexts. To be blunt, people get confused when the prequels to your claustrophobic horror series about penis monsters stabbing holed through your skull with their penis tongues are instead deep ponderous explorations of humanity’s long search for meaning in a universe deaf to our prayers.

The Versus Predator Experiments

Honestly I don’t know if the Alien vs Predator movies are considered canon. For some reason the Hollywood machine had been demanding a collaboration between these two franchises ever since Predator 2 made a throwaway reference back in 1990. If we’re taking the Prometheus series as canon then these films set in the present day don’t make any sense (the species shouldn’t exist yet).

I’m happy to throw Alien vs Predator and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem in the dustbin entirely for the same reason that I still want to talk about them: This is what happens when you take the subtext all the way out of an Alien movie and just use violence to carry the horror. These movies aren’t about jack shit. Because of that they’re barely watchable, let alone entertaining.

Still, the rights holders to these franchises desperately think there’s something here, that these two creatures absolutely must belong in the same universe somehow. The crossovers actually began back in the 90s in a series of video games, and I guess they work as video games. A video game is a completely different medium and the entertainment comes from a different place, it strikes different areas of your cortex to get to the pleasure centres. Still, they tried this for two feature length cinematic films in an effort to make it work.

AVP feels like a video game, and that’s probably why they hired a video game movies director for it (Paul W.S. Anderson of the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil movies, not to be confused with Paul T. Anderson and definitely not Wes Anderson). It’s the most forgettable of any movie I’m talking about here—it’s the kind of thing you’d put on at a house party for background entertainment. I’d skip mentioning it entirely for this piece if not for its sequel.

I don’t know why Anderson keeps adapting video games when his foray into original stories was a masterpiece

I hate Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. When I say I hate it I mean I wish it didn’t exist, and I think it’s bad that it does exist, in a way that I think it may be even harmful to society. Forcing myself to watch Requiem again in order to write about it was a chore I had to break into parts to try to avoid copping the psychic damage I remember experiencing from when I saw it in the cinema. It’s just a reprehensible length of celluloid. It’s deeply mean-spirited. It’s a movie that misunderstands what makes a horror movie scary instead of simply upsetting. It’s misery porn.

My problem with this movie reminds me of a death scene from Jurassic World that a lot of people thought was out of place, unnecessary, and upsetting in a way that wasn’t entertaining even though they were willingly watching a movie in which a bunch of people, even innocent people, get torn up and eaten by dinosaurs. It was the scene where Zara, the children’s caretaker, gets killed by pterodactyls.

There is just something different about this scene that makes you wish you just hadn’t seen that. Your brain just doesn’t release the entertainment chemicals, the dopamine or whatever. It released the feel bad chemicals. I dunno, hateorade.

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is 90 minutes of that scene. It’s hateorade from start to finish. Here’s a basic summary of what happens:

-          A Predator spaceship full of facehuggers crashes in the woods where a cool dad is out teaching his little boy how to hunt. The cool dad and the little boy immediately get facehugged after the cool dad’s arm gets melted off by alien blood.

-          There’s some scenes introducing the main characters and the small folksy town they live in where most people are just nice. A dorky teen and the hot chick love interest share sexual tension. Cut back to cool dad and little boy who both have aliens explode out of them.

-          Aliens and facehuggers swarm into the sewers where the town’s homeless people live. Couple of frail down on their luck old homeless guys get facehugged while a homeless lady gets her head ripped off.

-          Folksy kind hearted small town cop is out looking for cool hunting dad and the little boy. He catches a Predator in the act of melting their corpses with some kind of corpse melting liquid. Predator immediately impales the shit out of the nice cop.

-          Now the town is overrun with the aliens that burst out of the homeless people, and we see a lot of folksy small town yokels getting ripped up and eaten.

-          Little girl sees a monster outside her window. Nice dad walks over to the window to show her that there’s nothing there. Haha, I bet you can guess what’s going to happen! Yeah an alien shreds him to pieces while the little girl watches.

-          The aliens break into a hospital and get into the maternity ward. There’s a row of cots with newborn babies. There’s a scene that strongly implies the alien eats the babies.

-          An alien attacks a bunch of pregnant women in their beds and pumps alien embryos down their throats, which eat and replace the unborn babies.

It just goes on like this. It’s a relentless tour de force of misery until the military ultimately, mercifully, comes in and drops a nuke on the town, in case anyone thought any of these nice people might survive this.

I’m trying to imagine actually pitching any number of these scenes as a writer and actually seeing this misanthropic orgy all the way through production, with a major budget and everything.

But the existence of this atrocity does prove, by comparison, the brilliance of the original movies. It proves their soul. The basic frame of all these films is the same—monster movies, about things that chase you and kill you and eat you for no reason but that they’re animals and they can. You can take that premise and turn it into one of the greatest films ever produced in its genre, or you can rip the soul out of it and get left with whatever this is, with the entertainment value of watching a gang of kids beat up a vagrant. That’s the power of good storytelling.

So … Alien: Romulus?

It’s fine.

Straight off the bat, I think that exhuming the late great Ian Holm for this is one of the most unfortunate corpse desecrations of modern cinema.

It might be a bit paradoxical that I enjoyed this quite a bit. But here’s what you need to know about the Alien franchise as it stands: Go into Alien: Romulus with the full knowledge that this is fully an IP now.

That means they’re Star Warsing it. Yes, expect Weyland-Yutani company lore. Yes, expect in-depth explanations about how the robots work. Yes, expect shoehorned confirmations that the Prometheus movies are canon. Yes, expect visual callbacks and easter eggs. Yes, expect characters to awkwardly repeat famous catchphrases that other characters said in the other films.

Expect a return to horror, and I mean decent horror. It would be great horror if it had any characters that you care about. (You are not going to remember any of the characters in this movie after you leave. You’ll forget who two thirds of them are during the actual film.)

Look, this is a Rogue One style side-quest in what is almost certainly about to become a Cinematic Universe. It is the inevitable destination. This is a solid IP and they are going to milk every drop of blood out of this until the computer generated limited series about Ripley’s cat lands, so all you can do is try to enjoy the good ones, and there will be good ones. For what it’s worth, this one fuckin’ scared me more than a couple of times.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back and watching Alien and Aliens.

And again, to the estate of Ian Holm—my condolences. You’ll…you’ll see what I mean.