Alien fans rejoice! After seven years stuck in cryosleep, one of the longest running movie franchises of all time has come back in vogue with another heavy dose of slimy facehuggers and edge-of-your-seat thrills with Fede Álvarez’s hotly anticipated legacy sequel “Alien: Romulus” making its splashy theatrical debut earlier this summer on August 2024.
Already one of the buzziest blockbuster releases of the year, the 9th entry in the ongoing saga (or 7th, if you prefer not to count those dreadful Alien vs. Predator crossover cash-grabs) stars Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, and Archie Renaux and concerns an ill-fated group of young space colonizers on the Weyland-Yutani Corporation payroll who get more than what they bargained while scavenging a desolate deep-space station.
After it opened to rave reviews and dominated the global box office, we decided to weigh “Romulus” against the other Alien movies over the last 45 years to see how it stacks up. Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 classic may have changed the entire cinematic landscape and is definitely a hard film to follow up on, but many talented directors from James Cameron to David Fincher each brought a new perspective and expanded the series’ rich legacy in different ways. Buckle up, ready the torches and pitchforks, and don’t forget: In space nobody can hear you scream.
9. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
On paper, the prospect of watching two of cinema’s deadliest extraterrestrial killers square off in R-rated splatterfest extravaganzas was intriguing enough to give the greedy studio execs at 20th Century Fox the benefit of the doubt at the time. But as the old adage goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Alas, shortly after “Resident Evil” journeyman Paul W. S. Anderson tried to jolt new life into the series in 2004 to no avail came this equally underwhelming and low-rate “AVP” spin-off directed by VFX gurus Colin and Greg Strause.
Picking up right where its predecessor left off with a new batch of Xenomorph eggs wreaking havoc in a small Colorado town, it’s safe to say that “Alien vs. Predator: Requiem” has less bang to offer for your buck than about any entry in either movie series. It’s not so much that the film is brimming with eye-rolling clichés, lazy plot contrivances, and stiff acting throughout — its worse undoing might be the fact that the whole thing is so bizarrely under-lit you can even barely see what is going on at any given time including the climactic showdown. Talk about a bummer.
8. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
There isn’t much suspense regarding the identity of either choice for the bottom two spots here, so best to go ahead and get it out of the way. The best you can say about the uninspired AVP crossover duology is that, warts and all, at least both entries had the decency to get the job done at a tight, crisp 100 minutes or less each — a rare occurrence in today’s bloated franchise-filmmaking landscape — but otherwise it’s clear why these much derided spin-offs effectively burnt all the remaining goodwill for the saga and put “Alien” into cryosleep for a decade-plus.
Sometimes you just want to sit down, relax, and turn your brain off while two deadly, extraterrestrial predators hunt down a bunch of unassuming dork scientists in a remote ice pyramid near Antarctica. Sounds just like the kind of dumb fun that never harmed nobody, right? The problem about Paul W. S. Anderson’s “Alien vs. Predator” being that, well, the former applies more than the latter for the most part with a few inventive action set pieces, some decent scares, and Sanaa Lathan’s committed lead performance as a Ripley-esque female explorer being the only real standouts in an otherwise painfully dull affair.
7. Alien Resurrection (1997)
Ask any purist Alien fan who doesn’t consider either of the AVP tangential spin-offs bona fide entries in the mainline saga to name their least favorite film of the lot, and chances are they will point to this 1998 follow-up helmed by “Amélie” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Set two hundred years after the events of Alien³, “Resurrection” is a case study of how to make a perfunctory studio cash-grab that retroactively cheapens its predecessor by negating the fitting conclusion given to Ripley’s arc and callously bringing the series’ marquee heroine back to the fold via lazy narrative hijinks (turns out we cloned her and mutated her DNA with that of the Xenomorph, how about that?).
Time has not been kind to what regrettably turned out to be Sigourney Weaver’s final outing in the series (provided that Fede Álvarez doesn’t get any more ghoulish AI-deepfake ideas in the near future), a cheap sequel quickly thrown together without any of the rich subtext or palpable sense of urgency that fuel the best of Alien movies and, worse, lacking a fundamental understanding of what her blue-collar heroine originally stood for. Instead, “Resurrection” mostly coasts on cheap jump-scares, snappy dialogue, and an all-around starry cast including newcomers Winona Ryder and Ron Pearlman as two smugglers trying to keep the Xenomorphs from reaching Earth.
6. Alien: Romulus (2024)
Diehard fans recently burnt out by Ridley Scott’s divisive prequels who’d been clamoring for ages for a swift back-to-basics revamp that’d get the franchise back on track and open it up to an entire new generation of young moviegoers have seen their collective prayers answered this past summer in the form of Fede Álvarez’s solid crowd-pleaser.
If stealing ideas is indeed the sign of a great artist, then Álvarez has quite a prosperous career ahead of him: No Alien director before has managed to replicate the brooding atmosphere, top-level craftsmanship, and palpable tension that defined Ridley Scott’s sci-fi landmark as faithfully or succinctly as “Romulus”. At its best, the film’s stunning opening act, which readily introduces viewers to a new crew of disgruntled Weyland employees forced to fend off a batch of Xenomorphs in a remote space station, reminds you why the ‘trapped-in-outer-space-with-alien’ slasher scenario continues to be fertile ground for grade-A jump-scares almost 50 years on.
Though evidently well-crafted and engaging from start to finish, the movie’s unyielding committal to fan service and overindulgent referential nods to pre-existing entries — most blatantly delivered through the distasteful CGI necromancy of the late Ian Holms — makes its (occasionally brilliant) parts better than the sum.