Every Alien movie ranked from worst to best
55 Best Alien Movies Of All Time Ranked
The result, a frantic, uneven, yet wildly good time best enjoyed with zero expectations. Joss Whedon's script yanks together a patchwork of odd ideas which finds a clone of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley onboard a military ship experimenting on a batch of freshly-imported human hosts by impregnating them with aliens. The plot covers little new ground — surprise, the xenomorphs kill everyone! Her weary leader now fused with the focus of the creature creates genuine nuance when she's forced to confront yet another iteration of the xenomorph. Prometheus started life as a full-blown Alien prequel stacked with xenomorphs and chest-bursters galore called Alien: Engineer, but Ridley Scott nixed this take, remoulding the script with Lost's Damon Lindelof into a soft reboot following scientists in search of answers about mankind's beginnings. This space adventure drips not with xenomorph spittle and bloody entrails but with creationist themes and jaw-dropping production design, a far cry from the franchise's signature snarl.
Say what you will about the plot and the characters' baffling decision-making, this is Scott's finest visual achievement in the franchise. Alien 3's notoriously hellish production is often discussed more than the film itself. The film went through endless writers in development and actually began production without a finished script. As well as that, Weaver had shaved her head for the film, and, having wrapped production, began to grow it back. But, in the 30 years since its debut, Alien 3 has undergone a critical reappraisal of sorts. Studio interference preventing David Fincher from crafting the first-time feature he wanted is now less of an issue with the film's legion of staunch defenders eager to celebrate it, warts and all. Following the events of Aliens, we pick up with Ripley alone again and on a prison planet where fire is the only weapon against a lone alien. Weaver's insistence that no guns be used make for a unique spanner in the storytelling works.
Flashes of Fincher's concepts and later visual prowess hint at what could've been as the creature munches its way through convicts. Interestingly, this is the sequel that launched the franchise's most iconic shot. While the sequel snags the second spot, let's not kid ourselves: Aliens is equally as good a time as the original. James Cameron's sequel took nearly a decade to hit theaters but was worth the wait. The director's confident swagger crossed with Weaver's established star power and an augmented take on H. Giger's titular beast delivers one of the best action movies ever made. Ripley's ordeal with the creature continues as she reluctantly joins forces with a crew of space marines to investigate the same planet from Alien. The movie's a pure adrenaline rush, a mash of horror atmospherics fused with stunning set-pieces, as the marines combat the xenomorphs. The ensemble cast, which includes Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser and Lance Henriksen as well as Weaver, embarked on a gruelling pre-production boot camp, making them feel like genuine comrades whose unshakable camaraderie gives the film true heart.
All the harder to watch, then, as the creatures pick them off one by one. The original remains a masterclass in horror. A nail-biting slice of cinema, Alien scares just as much today as the time of release.
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Ridley Scott calibrates the matrix of terror within the Nostromo's close quarters to perfection. How so? Alien shreds your nerves because of its simplicity: a crew of space truckers grapple with a bloodthirsty alien species and a double-crossing android. Of the entire franchise it's the only entry to exercise the long, slow burn effectively, only showing flashes of the alien's stomach-churning excess well into the runtime. Scott's penchant for wide angles, and long, uninterrupted takes, where the alien could emerge at any moment, drive the dread like a gnawing in your skull. Its stunning production design, star performance from Weaver in her first major role, and the sheer horror of H. Giger's alien creature cements this as not only the best Alien movie but one of the best horror films ever made. Disagree with our ranking? You can watch all the Alien movies on Disney Plus now and make your own assessment. Sign up to receive daily breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis, deals and more from the world of tech.
Librarian by day, scribbler by night, Gem loves minute movies, time travel romance, single-camera comedy shows, all things queer, all things horror, and queer horror. Alien and Scream are tied as her all-time favourite movie. She won't stop raving about Better Things. Scotland vs France live stream — how to watch the rugby Summer International for free today, team news. US Edition. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is not one of those films. Even Freddy vs. Jason operates on an understanding of what fans of either franchise want to see from their favorite horror villains, but Requiem never quite grasps what makes either the Alien or the Predator so special. The follow-up to Alien vs. Anderson went off to helm Death Race The film picks up directly after AvP , where we find the Predator ship has crashed in the forests of Gunnison, Colorado, unleashing the PredAlien hybrid and a legion of Facehuggers on the unsuspecting town. Filmed in a pervasive wash of dull, dreary darkness that prevents the filmmakers from ever showing off the monster action or more likely, masking a lack of said action , Requiem treats its titular foes as little more than back drop, reducing the iconic cinematic creatures to replaceable cogs in a script that feels distinctly second hand, pulled from the beats of better B-movies past.
They attack en masse, so utterly interchangeable they could be faceless zombies in a hoard, and the deadly beasties spend the next 90 minutes summarily battling each other and picking off a series of forgettable characters. There are flourishes to the film that tease the promise of a better B-Movie. The PredAlien is a fun concept, though never as delightful as the AvP stinger that introduced it. And the film has a bizarre mean-spiritedness in its selection of victims, targeting those who are usually off limits, from a father-son duo to the pregnant woman that births a litter of Aliens. That giddy savagery could have been played for yucks or genuine terror in a film with more careful control of its tone, but in the end, they're fleeting moments with no lasting impact, which makes it feel more tasteless than irreverent. Requiem comes close to the Hard-R delights of grindhouse creature features, but with a weak script, unsightly cinematography, and nothing new to say about the genre, the thrill quickly tapers out into an onslaught of senseless gore and unfulfilled potential.
Predator is pure product, but at least it's made by a filmmaker who knows what he's selling. As directed by Paul W. Anderson and one would imagine, conceived by the studio , AvP was designed to deliver on the promise of watching cinemas biggest, most badass extraterrestrials go to battle, and that it does. Unfortunately, it does very little else. Lance Henrickson returns to the fold as Michael Bishop Weyland in a move that causes some head-spinning continuity questions if you consider AvP canon, which is almost impossible at this point how could Aliens be on earth in ancient pyramid if they were created by David? Don't you dare say time travel! Weyland assembles a team of experts, headed up by Sanaa Lathan , Raoul Bova , and Ewen Bremner , to explore an ancient pyramid hidden below the ice of the Antarctic. Things quickly go to hell when the pyramid turns out to be a Predator training ground where the intergalactic hunters earn their literal stripes etched into their faces with Alien blood by hunting Xenomorphs.
In his first post- Resident Evil film, Anderson brings a similar mechanical style to the setup, as each new chamber and unlocked door leads to a fresh hell, tinted in the tradition of the Alien and Predator legacies, the team wandering into and triggering new traps along the way. Thanks to the onus of a PG rating, it's all filmed as a flat, blasé action beat, lacking the style and subtext of the best Alien films and the visceral thrills of the Predator heritage. Nearly 15 years since its release, AvP also draws a deeper shade of cynicism during a rewatch. It's an early adopter of the sort of IP-mining that plagues the modern cineplex, and we've seen that too often for too long now not to recognize the signs of a franchise cash-grab that throws nostalgia in the blender and serves up whatever mushy mess comes out. That said, while AvP is unequivocally one of the weakest films in the franchise, it's not without its delights. The money shot battles between the beasts are cleanly shot and well-lit unlike those of their follow-up and the effects are beautifully done by ADI, leaving behind the painted VFX of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection in favor of a healthy dose of practical work and updated hybrid tech that still looks pretty fantastic.
But ultimately the film feels like it was designed for a lowest common denominator test audience and even in the better of AvP 's B-movie moments, it never becomes more than crass product with uninspired packaging. This is a movie that sounds fantastic on paper. What's not to love? Well, the film was troubled from the start. In a well-documented string of creative tumult, the studio had no idea where to take the franchise after Alien 3 starkly redirected the tone and killed off the heroine. They recruited a long, long list of writers and filmmakers to crack the project, before ultimately settling on Whedon and Jeunet as their storytellers. Even after the creative team was brought on board, the film continued to shift and evolve drastically.
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As you might expect, the result is pretty much a big ol' mess of an awkward, unformed film that barely feels at home in the Alien franchise. But there's a weirdness and wildness to Resurrection that keeps it from being a complete disaster. Whedon's script is something of a precursor to Firefly , as he would later admit in interviews, following a rag-tag gang of oddball mercenaries who come up against an unfathomable force -- ie, Aliens. But not just your average Xenomorphs always gotta be bigger and badder in a sequel. Resurrection returns Ripley to the fold after her Alien 3 sacrifice by cloning her at the hands of the company, who of course want dat Alien for experimentation. Experiment they do, and we wind up with a superhuman, genetically altered Ripley, her DNA crossed with the Xenomorph, and series of ever-stranger Alien mutations leading up to the Newborn, a confounding creation and singular looking Alien creature that is too weird, too far removed from the Giger aesthetic, and far too sympathetic to cohesive with the Alien mold.
Here's the thing though, I'm a firm believer that all four of the original Alien movies are a joy. Taken on its own, Alien: Resurrection is a flagrantly bizarre and unwieldy film that stamps out a singular place for itself in the realm of sci-fi. That place may not feel particularly at home in the Alien franchise, but it's certainly a compelling, unpredictable and dynamic place to end up. Weaver clearly relishes in her character's newfound power, leaning into her abilities and owning the court like Michael Jordan, and the film is constantly willing to get weird with it, staying true to the concept of genetic engineering, even when it gets downright loopy and uncharacteristic for the franchise. Alien: Resurrection may not be good exactly, but it sure is interesting, and well worth the ride. It definitely could have had a lot less Alien groping though. Alien: Covenant is a real humdinger of a divisive film. Critics are not only split on the simple matter of whether it's a good movie or not, nobody can seem to align on which parts are great and which are disappointing.
Further, the film can't even decide what movie it wants to be. So as you might expect, I have some cognitive dissonance when it comes to Covenant. On one hand, it's the kind of Alien movie I've been waiting decades to see, filmed in the luxuriantly gorgeous stylings of Ridley Scott. On the other, it's a mess; a slapdash hybrid of the philosophical creation myth Scott so clearly wants to explore and the tacked-on return to horror fans demanded after Prometheus. All credit to Scott for listening to his fans especially considering I'm one of the ones who craved more horror , but the result is two halves of different films that don't quite fit each other where the beginnings of a simple, character-driven horror film are ultimately eclipsed by Scott's grandiose pondering. Covenant follows the continued narrative of Michael Fassbender 's David, the dangerously maladjusted android from Prometheus who's obsessed with the perfect creation, and the crew of the Covenant, a mass-scale colonization ship drawn to a seemingly perfect planet by a mysterious beacon.
10. Fight Club, 1999
As is the Alien tradition, they touch down on a planet containing a hellscape of nightmarish extraterrestrial slaughter. That's where they meet David, who only further complicates things and sadly steers the franchise that makes both David and especially the Xenomorphs less interesting through over-explaining. Covenant carries the seeds of two excellent films, though it never converges into one. One delves into a story of madness and loneliness, told through David's megalomanic conviction in destruction and creation. The other, and the one I desperately wish we could have seen, is a much more simple story about a team of intimate colleagues and friends who are torn apart by an ungodly terror. So basically, Alien. And it's understandable that Scott wouldn't want to make the same film twice. But by trying to tape an Alien exterior on a Prometheus sequel, he makes a film that can't quite satisfy either demand. That said, I still really enjoy the film and I suspect my love for it will only grow with time.
The flourishes and technique on display are stunning and the characters aboard the Covenant , led by Katherine Waterson 's Ripley-esque Daniels, are fascinating until their aborted by stupidity. It's not a perfect Alien movie, but it's damn good to see one again. The first time I saw Prometheus , I loathed it. I remember walking back to the car in stunned silence, trying to process how mad I was at the flagrant, disrespectful stupidity of the characters and the seemingly flippant nod to the DNA of Alien. In the years since, I've softened on the film considerably and while I still struggle with the rampant lack of common sense among the human characters, the staggering beauty of Ridley Scott's frame-worthy imagery and the compelling, if underresolved, mythology of the Engineers has taken root and grown into an appreciation that may be on the cusp of turning into love. And there's one thing was never in question, Michael Fassbender 's David is exquisite.
The film follows a team of explorers, scientists and company men aboard the Prometheus, a spaceship that sets out to explore the galaxy in search of Engineers, an alien race that may have created our own. With the resources of the Weyland Co. He's an instant classic sci-fi character, acted with verve, precision, and perverse pleasure by Fassbender, and his arc is the throughline of Prometheus that makes the film worth loving even in spite of its dimwitted human characters. The Prometheus crew follows a series of ancient charts to a far-flung planet where they find, not the answers they seek from their creators, but an Alien ghost town where the Engineers were seemingly destroyed by their own creation. Naturally, things go SNAFU in a hurry, but not before the team makes a series of startlingly dumbass decisions, including taking off their helmets during their first on-the-ground excursion on the basis of jack and shit, and trying to pet a creature that very clearly looks like a deadly and pissed off alien snake monster.
It's hard to root for them but fortunately, David constantly keeps things interesting, forcing the story to veer left in favor of more predictable turns.