Alien (franchise)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The franchise in general:

You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.

  • Contested Sequel:
    • Resurrection also has its fans, thanks primarily to Jeunet's unique visual style, the added humor of Joss Whedon's script, and the presence of cult actors such as Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinion and Michael Wincott. They're still by far outnumbered by fans who think the series ended with Aliens.
    • There are some fans of the first film that feel the second film did away with the mystery of the original. This in turn has led to fans and critics alike disputing if the first or second film is superior or inferior, with some fans and critics championing the original film by director Ridley Scott as a supposedly more intelligent horror film while degrading the James Cameron sequel as nothing more than a big dumb action movie that just happens to feature alien monsters, while other fans and critics champion Cameron's sequel for fleshing out the lead character while offering a more emotionally complex story and scoff at the original film by Scott for its emotionally flat, vapid characters. And then you have the fans who only like the first two films who just watch this insanity from afar....
  • Designated Hero: Just about every protagonist in Alien Resurrection. The crew of the Betty are willing to trade human life for a profit. Even whenever they learn of the horrible fate that the people whose lives they sold they express no remorse of any sort for their actions. Even Ripley herself gets this to an extent. Due to her cloning she now is part Xenomorph which makes her much more violent and sympathetic to the titular monsters, but at least she develops past that. The only exception is Call, who was probably only on the Betty so she could get close to Ripley.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: In Resurrection, Johner - an action-oriented Deadpan Snarker played by Ron Perlman.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans prefer to believe that the third and fourth films never existed, and that Hicks and Newt never died.
    • Some fans feel the same way about prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
  • Genre Turning Point: In American futuristic SF, the role of women was changed forever because of this film. Afterward, there was no room for any Neutral Female or Damsel in Distress in the future for any major female character; now they are expected to grab a weapon and join the fighting as much as any man.
  • Hell Is That Noise: The first movie is fond of those, from background low-pitched wavy electronic whistling sounds (iconic enough that they were re-used in Blade Runner, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) to the faint, barely audible sound of heartbeat in several key scene (such as the dinner and Bret looking for the cat).
  • I Am Not Shazam: "Xenomorph" was a placeholder term used briefly in Aliens to describe the aliens. The term means "foreign form" and is not intended to be the name of the species. However, the name has proved easier for fans to use than "the aliens from Alien."

    In an article in a Traveller RPG magazine - written in 1980 or so, and based on the novelization of the first film - the "Aliens" are described in detail, and called "Reticulan Parasites". In that description, each Reticulan Parasite gives birth to an egg on its own, with no "Mama Alien" present.
  • Idiot Plot
    • The scientists and military personnel of Alien Resurrection keep multiple Xenomorphs in a single holding cell despite knowing that the creatures have problem solving intelligence and extremely potent acidic blood. Of course this leads to the Xenomorphs' escape; two gang up on one and kill it in order to use the acid blood to break free.
  • Inferred Holocaust: At the end of Resurrection.
  • Iron Woobie: Newt works through her trauma amazingly well throughout Aliens. Ripley herself also manages to conquer her PTSD fairly quickly and become the one of the two leaders of the party.
  • It Was His Sled: Everybody knows about the Chestburster nowadays.
  • Les Yay: Ripley and Call in Resurrection. Word of God says it was intentional.
  • Memetic Mutation: The Alien series has a number of famous quotes that are frequently used outside of the film's context:
    • Vasquez's "Let's rock!"
    • Almost everything Hudson says.
  • Misaimed Marketing: The Alien is one of the creepiest, most disturbing and most sexual monsters ever invented and most of the films of the series contain enough gore and Nightmare Fuel to scare kids for life. Yet, it hasn't stopped the film from being merchandised, both as toys AND plush aliens and chestburster aliens. The Kenner toyline had such variations as Bull, Mantis, Crab and Jaguar aliens, making it one of the few toylines based distinctly around Bizarre Alien Biology.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • In the fourth film the scientists keep one of the failed Ripley clones alive despite her being so deformed she's not even able to move and in a state of constant pain, an even worse case of And I Must Scream than those who have embryos implanted inside them.
      • From the same movie the crew of the Betty captures some people in hypersleep and sells them for profit so the scientists can use them for God-knows-what. They don't even express any regrets over dooming these people's lives just so they could make a quick buck.
  • Narm: The series in general averts this, but the fourth movie has an example. Larry's chestburster hatches at the end of the film, and it apparently allows him to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and kill the head scientist, and even hold the scientist's head right in front of where the chestburster explodes from his chest. As if that weren't enough the other characters immediately start shooting and the scene then cuts out. Even if it was an intentional case of Black Comedy it's so bizarrely out of place that it's stupidly hilarious.
  • The Scrappy: Call from Resurrection.
    • Of course, that's because she's Newt, only older and a robot.
    • Some find Newt herself to be one.
  • Sequelitis: Notably averted by Aliens, a great sequel which is widely considered to be as good as the first film. The third and fourth installments, and especially the Alien vs. Predator films, however, are considered a major step down. This is largely explained by the reasoning the films were made. James Cameron was a fan of the original Alien and wrote the script to Aliens on spec. He was told that if The Terminator was successful, he'd be allowed to direct the sequel he wanted to create, making it a labor of love. By Alien 3, however, the producers (who had meddled with the script of the first film) were making a sequel for the sake of the franchise. As such, they burned through a bunch of different scripts and ended up with an amalgam of different attempts. Things didn't get any better from there. A number of people view that Resurrection might have been a pretty good film (a beloved screenwriter and a notable director with a solid grasp of visual style and atmosphere) if it hadn't been shoehorned into the Alien universe. Sigourney Weaver herself actually wanted the series to end with the second movie, likely because of the third film undoing everything the characters worked so hard to achieve in the preceding film, which she has stated made her furious.
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • The "Grand Failure of Effects" award has to go to Resurrection, which features CGI that somehow manages to be vastly worse than what the likes of Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Voyager were doing on television at the same time (done by the guys who would work on Ice Age years later). The actual Xenomorph effects are at least pretty decent for the most part... until the Newborn shows up (granted, most of the problems with that thing were with its very concept, but the execution didn't really help at all).
      • The kicker is the Conspicuous CGI hand grenade that rolls down into an escape pod. Dodgy CGI on complex extraterrestrials is one thing; having a close-up on a poorly-rendered rolling grenade is quite another.
  • Too Cool to Live: Captain Elgyn, and all of the Colonial Marines.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: The Aliens themselves, especially the Queen who is often called a "she" in the films. Technically, all members of the species are Hermaphrodites (i.e. having both male AND female sex organs) from a visual viewpoint because HR Giger's design is neither male nor female but a disturbing combination of both sexes. From a reproductive viewpoint, the series tends to flip-flop between the Aliens being actual hermaphrodites (Giger's own original portrayal of the creature included human-like sexual organs, a scene deleted from the first movie had the alien being able to "convert" two humans into huge eggs with fully-grown aliens developing inside, the original design for the Newborn from Resurrection was that it was, like Giger's original model, possessed of a human-like vagina and penis) and the Aliens being asexual "drones" where selected individuals can mutate into/be hatched as parthenogenetically fertile female "queens".
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: In a cross with Misaimed Marketing: Kenner had huge profits with Star Wars, so they got the rights for licensed toys on the next Fox sci-fi movie. Ooh boy.
  • Wheelchair Woobie: The fourth film has one. Complete with a scene where Johner throws a knife into one of his numb legs, just to be an ass!
  • The Woobie:
    • Ripley herself goes through loads and loads of heartbreak, especially in the third film.

The first film:

  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Ash: he's a strong android with medical knowledge, he could have killed Ripley in three seconds if he really wanted to. Instead, when he moves against her, he starts flipping his shit and acting all deranged. Many viewers take this as indication that he's suffering from a programming conflict: he's supposed to help humans but his orders are to sacrifice the crew if necessary. His later comment on the alien being free from "delusions of morality" takes on a new light, then: he wishes he didn't have any sort of morality chip at all.
  • Applicability: Ridley Scott said that there is no allegory, Freudian, feminist, Marxist or otherwise to be found in this film. That has done nothing to stop decades of endless analysis of this film's use of H.R. Giger's excessively Freudian imagery and the role of Ripley as a feminist icon, among other things.
  • Best Known for the Fanservice: Ripley stripping down to some especially tiny underwear for little reason in the final scene. This has actually been used as a knock against the film's feminist bona fides, especially since the camera drops to crotch level throughout the whole scene.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Jones the cat. In the actual movie, he barely has any screen time, and when he does, all he does is hide, hiss and run away (and constantly get the humans into trouble). However, the trailers and later TV Spots make it look like he's just as important as the Alien and Ripley. Considering how memorable he is, it's hard to blame them.
  • Freud Was Right: Scores of essays have been written over the last three decades on the obvious sexual and maternal overtones. These are all intentional. A good detailed analysis of the sexual symbolism of the film by Rob Ager can be found here.
The alien is put into a human body by the Facehugger, whose reproductive organ looks like a vagina with mandibles and a prehensile penis. Its spawn, the Chestburster, looks like an erection with teeth. And the long, eyeless head of an adult Alien is obviously phallic. The Alien was based on a painting by surrealist artist H. R. Giger, whose nightmarish work is very sexualized. Giger wanted the Alien to be the embodiment of the fear of rape.
A Deleted Scene in the first movie showed Dallas and Brett being "converted" into Chestburster eggs... they're double rapists; a man is disfigured into a feminine construct, and dies "giving birth" to something that does the same thing only quicker. James Cameron took advantage of the deleted scene to add a Hive Queen to the Alien life cycle, leading to the following;
Maternal symbolism: the AI of the spaceship in Alien is called "Mother". The organic alien ship is entered through vagina-shaped doors. The showdown between Ripley and the alien queen has a great deal of Mama Bear implications on both sides. Many critics have compared the alien queen with Grendel's mother.
  • Idiot Plot: Dallas made a few boneheaded decisions. Most notably bringing Kane and the facehugger back on the Nostromo without following the 24-hour quarantine rule, even though Ripley is telling him it's a bad idea, and it means breaking the law. Granted, he did it with the best of intentions (trying to save one of his crew), and he remains a fairly likeable character.
  • It Was His Sled: Kane dies when an alien bursts out of his chest. Also, Ripley is the Final Girl.
  • Memetic Mutation: The tagline "In space, no one can hear you scream" is one of the most famous taglines in film history, and is often parodied on other films' taglines, such as "In space, no one can hear you cha-cha-cha!".
  • Moral Event Horizon: "Special Order 937", the company's plan to bring aliens to Earth, at the expense of the crew's lives. Ash -- who was in on this -- crosses the horizon himself when he gives Ripley a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown after she finds out about this secret.
  • Narm Charm:
    • The Alien's phallic head. For as blatantly Freudian as it looks, it's become an accepted part of the creature that most people have considered scary nonetheless.
    • The chestburster reveal manages to be scary in spite of some shaky effects due to the sheer gross out factor. There is a reason why the scene is so memorable.
  • Nausea Fuel: Besides the obvious Body Horror and gore, there are two disorienting visual cases of this.
    • As Ripley escapes the Nostromo, the emergency lights spin rapidly, which creates a very nauseating strobe effect as she escapes. This isn't helped by the very fast camera movement during the sequence.
    • When Ripley is ambushed by the Alien on the shuttle, the lights flicker very rapidly in a strobe manner.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: When the film was released in 1979, there were reports of viewers running into the theater lobby to throw up. This seems strange in retrospect, because the scenes of Kane getting chestbursted and Ash getting his head knocked off are positively tame compared to the later Slasher Movie and Torture Porn genres, or the Body Horror achieved by Carpenter's The Thing or Cronenberg's The Fly.
  • Signature Scene: The chestburster reveal, which paved the way for future Body Horror in science fiction.
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • The cuts between Ash's separated head and the dummy version are quite jarring. So much so that in the Riff Trax commentary, they say "Seamless!" in between cuts.
    • As Ripley is boarding the shuttle, she does an awkward turn and appears to fire her flamethrower, but the timing and the direction do not match the fireball she supposedly projects, and which continues burning after she turns her back to the corridor. While a viewer could chalk it up to the Nostromo itself exploding, the way it's staged imply Weaver missed her mark and the pyrotechnics people tried (and failed) to compensate for it.
    • At the end when the Alien is hanging outside of the ship and it's set against the white door and wall, it becomes too obvious the Alien is a man in a suit in spite of its high quality details, which is not helped by the fake looking spinning space background.
    • The newborn chestburster scurrying across the table is either Special Effects Failure, Narm or Narm Charm depending on your point of view. If you've seen Spaceballs, it's probably closer to the last.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The alien despite how little we see of it until the very end. The creature is so well designed, at times, you have to remind yourself that it's actually a man in a costume.
  • What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Inverted in the case of H.R. Giger: he takes drugs to forget the nightmares that inspire his artwork.
  • The Woobie: Lambert, especially if you add in the deleted scenes. While she somewhat comes across as a whining bitch, she has a few establishing moments in the deleted scenes that paint her as a notably more sympathetic (if not necessary more likable) character, which makes her tragic demise even more gut-wrenching.

Aliens

  • Award Snub: Subverted in that Sigourney Weaver did get nominated for Best Actress, in an industry that even by 2016 doesn't reward science fiction movies outside of the technical categories like Visual Effects.
  • Better on DVD: The extended cut restores Newt's backstory, where her father was the first colonist who was infected, and Ripley's subplot of her heartbreak over losing her daughter during hypersleep, thereby adding a much deeper dimension to her relationship with Newt. These additions do interfere with the film's pacing, however; it's up to the individual viewer's opinion as to whether or not the trade-off is worth it.
  • Broken Base: This movie is either considered to be a worthy followup to the original or the inferior to the original, but critically it is considered better than anything after it. This is especially prominent on IMDB, where the user reviews range from the majority of very positive to the Vocal Minority of outright hate.
  • Discredited Meme: Carrie Henn, who played Newt, has said that she hates the line "It'll be dark soon, and they mostly come out at night. Mostly."
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Hudson, having so many memorable lines.
  • Even Better Sequel: While the original Alien is a great movie (interesting characters, creepy and horrifying designs for the alien, it introduced the xenomorph life cycle to an unsuspecting populace, and so on), the second movie is widely (though not universally) regarded as a better film. It also benefited from a Genre Shift from straight up Horror to Action Horror, which meant that instead of suffering from Sequelitis, Aliens was able to do things its own way. In general, which film any individual viewer considers the better one usually comes down to which genre they prefer.
  • Fanon: It's left open what kind of relationship Vasquez and Drake have. Word of God is that they're childhood friends, but some fans like to interpret them as being lovers in some fashion.
  • Idiot Plot: Invoked Trope, as Cameron was making a Vietnam war allegory, and 'Nam was known for its lax, confusing and downright chaotic approach to military protocol. The Marines are bored, overconfident jocks led by an incompetent commander who think they're on a routine mission but find themselves wildly out of their depth.
    • They were overconfident and failed to set up appropriate backup plans before being stranded on LV-426. Justified in that Burke was pulling strings to place an inexperienced lieutenant in command that he could boss around and wanted someone to get infected so he could sneak Alien embryos back to Earth.
    • Why a massive spaceship is sent out with two dropships and for some reason nobody stays behind (is there no Navy in charge of running the ship?), not even a second platoon in case of emergency, is never explained. Maybe that's Burke manipulations again?
    • The survivors plan their escape once they learn the facility will self-destruct in about four hours. The plan is to send Bishop to the relay transmitter to remote-pilot the remaining dropship to the top of the facility, with only a little bit of time to spare. However, their planning stops there, as there appear to be no discussions about how to reach the dropship once it's down and being prepared to leave to reach it in time. As a result, the survivors separate themselves all around the complex and Ripley and Newt take naps, allowing for Burke's scheme to infect the two with alien embryos. When the aliens attack, the survivors actually weld the doors shut, trapping them inside the facility that is about to explode. If it wasn't for Newt pointing out a surprise route to the relay transmitter using the ventilation shafts, the survivors would have all been blown to pieces even had they managed to hold off the Xenomorphs.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • The phrase "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure" is often used. A minor alteration is to simply tag "It's the only way to be sure" to any drastic suggestion.
    • Imitating Hudson's line "Game over, man! Game over!". Or just about anything Hudson says really.
    • "Queen takes Bishop", an obvious chess pun.
    • Keeping something handy "for close encounters".
    • "Stay Frosty".
    • "They mostly come at night. Mostly." That one was even in an episode of South Park.
    • "Get away from her, you bitch!" along with the concept of the Power Loader/Alien Queen fight.
  • Moe: Newt for those who like her. Her most adorable moment comes when she puts on a helmet, imitates the soldiers saying "affirmative" and responds to one of Hudson's snarky comments with a deadpan salute.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Burke locking Ripley and Newt in a soundproof room with two facehuggers so he can smuggle the alien embryos back to Earth.
  • Most Annoying Sound: Fans who dislike Newt usually point to her extremely, almost inhumanly high-pitched squeal, which sounds more like a tailpipe whistle than a screaming child.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • Fans love the high pitched shrieks and squeals the aliens make so much that there was outrage that it wasn't included in Aliens: Colonial Marines, even though they have been the preferred vocalisations used in all previous Aliens videogames. The same goes with the sounds the Pulse Rifles and Smartguns make when they fire.
    • Vasquez shouting "let's rock!" before firing her weapons on the aliens. Sure, it just makes things worse, but it's still pretty badass.
    • The beeping of the motion trackers, which help add to the sense of paranoia in some of the most intense scenes in the film.
  • Narm: Being operated by multiple puppeteers, the Alien Queen's movements look very awkward and unnatural, with her different appendages seemingly moving in an uncoordinated manner...
  • Narm Charm: ...which actually works in the movie's favor, as her uncanny movements manage to make her appear unnatural and creepy, and thus more effectively frightening when seen in action.
  • Sci Fi Ghetto: Averted. Sigourney Weaver received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress as Ripley.
  • Sequelitis: The film avoided this by using a completely different genre. While Alien was more horror/suspense, Aliens was a pretty straightforward sci-fi action film with a few moments of suspense/horror. Everything after the first two movies tries to copy one of those two formulas.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • Towards the end of the movie, when "torn-in-half" Bishop stretches to stop Newt from being sucked out an airlock, the hole in the floor he's actually standing in and his lower body are clearly visible. The guys doing the technical commentary actually point it out on the DVD (one says he'd seen the film several times before he ever noticed it). This was fixed in the Blu-Ray release of the film.
    • More of an editing failure, but prior to the Blu-ray release, there's a scene where Ripley takes a Pulse Rifle and Flamethrower off the rack and tapes them together over 4 shots. The failure is in the weapons swapping when she places them down (she grabs a flamethrower and puts down a rifle, then vice versa). There's another small goof when she's putting together the weapon. When she first slaps in a magazine, the count on the rifle reads 95, but when she's on the elevator a moment later, it reads 42 (like the rifle she was training with earlier).
    • The dropship suffers from some very obvious green screen matting at some points.
    • When Ripley and Newt are standing on the landing platform at the end, just before the Alien Queen exits the elevator, the rear-projection backdrop of the atmosphere processor is just awful, and the pieces of debris clearly being thrown by stagehands just off-screen make it look even worse.
    • When Ripley and Newt are trapped with the facehuggers and Newt tells Ripley to break the glass of the window, the "glass" rebounds from the chair just like plastic (though this could easily be explainable by it being a futuristic material that people just call "glass" for short).
    • When Bishop does his knife trick, Apone nodding his head in the background makes it very obvious that the footage was sped up.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: Because of the incredible time pressure that James Horner was under when he composed the Aliens score, he borrows from his own Klingon theme from Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, as well as Khachaturian's Gayane Adagio. Horner could get away with using Khatchaturian's work (originally published in 1942) since at that time, Western nations only recognized copyrights in the Soviet Union dating from 1973.
  • Values Dissonance: A deleted scene of pre-infestation Hadley's Hope has Newt's mother get her to settle down by threatening to spank her, something that would raise eyebrows today. More bizarrely enough, the novel claims smoking is okay due to lacking nicotine, whereas smoking in general has become frowned upon regardless of content.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The Alien Queen designed by Stan Winston helped him win his first Special Effects Oscar.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Inverted. The film has some intentional parallels to the Vietnam War according to James Cameron.
  • The Woobie: Newt. The deleted scenes make it even worse, as her father was the first to be infested.

Alien 3

  • Contested Sequel: The movie (especially the Assembly Cut version) does have a growing number of fans, who appreciate it for its return to suspenseful sci-fi horror a la the first movie and/or its bleaker mood.
  • Critical Backlash: A common reaction to the film after all the criticism of it.
  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Hicks, Newt, and Bishop all die early on, Ripley is a dead woman walking thanks to the Queen chestburster inside her, the only other likable characters are killed odd, and everyone else is a self-admitted murderer or rapist.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Clemens, mainly for being one of the film’s few genuinely likable characters and Charles Dance’s performance.
  • Ending Fatigue: There are six or seven "endings" in quick succession, as if David Fincher couldn't decide on what closing shot would be coolest.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In America and most of Europe, this film is often considered to be an inferior sequel to Aliens. However, in some European countries, it's actually considered the best film of the franchise.
  • Narm: Ripley's line about the alien being in her life for so long, she can't remember anything else can become this when you realize that if you take away the 57 years she spent in cryosleep between the first two films, her total time dealing with the aliens amounts to a couple weeks at most.
  • Nausea Fuel: The birth of the canine chestburster is hard to watch. When it emerges, the poor dog's guts spill out all over the floor. The scene is arguably unnecessarily-detailed.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The third film's early promise of bringing the franchise to Earth.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One of the film’s main flaws is to kill off memorable and interesting characters like Clemens and Andrews early on, and focus on dull characters like Aaron.
  • Vindicated by History: In recent years, thanks to the restored Assembly Cut on blu-ray, the film has garnered a larger following of fans who view it as an underrated film that had a lot of things against it, including the Executive Meddling, constant cuts that harmed the overall quality of the film, and many people who loved Aliens were unwilling to give it a chance simply for killing off Hicks and Newt, or were looking for more of a thrill ride like the second film. The new recut version of the film is seen as a vast improvement by the majority of fans, who feel that this version stands on its own as a worthy end to Ripley's story.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)/YMMV?oldid=1803011"