How the Alien saga went from tril­o­gy to franchise

The arrival of the sixth Alien movie brings with it the ques­tion of just how the Xenomorph saga has come so far, if still seem­ing­ly chug­ging along still due to good­will from the first two instal­ments. In anoth­er world, the series end­ed with its third entry, a con­tro­ver­sial, if appro­pri­ate send-off to its hero­ine, Ellen Rip­ley. Instead, grad­u­al­ly divorc­ing itself from that char­ac­ter, the series began to mud­dle, pos­si­bly even find­ing itself again.

Need­ing a shot in the arm fol­low­ing the grim, much-derid­ed Alien 3, 1997’s Alien: Res­ur­rec­tion came at a point where star pow­er was still of equal impor­tance to brand recog­ni­tion, thus the film had to find a way to fig­ure Sigour­ney Weaver into the equa­tion. The solu­tion was to intro­duce the con­ceit of cloning, an appro­pri­ate sci­ence-fic­tion trope to employ giv­en the med­dling of the series’ true vil­lain, the Weyland/​Yutani corporation.

The result­ing nü-Rip­ley, boast­ing super strength, salty lan­guage, leather attire, a psy­chic-link to the Xenomorph and yes, mad skills on the bas­ket­ball court, may seem like a Poochie-esque mark of des­per­a­tion, but a game Weaver most­ly sells it. She’s cer­tain­ly assist­ed by the unlike­ly pair­ing of direc­tor Jean-Pierre Jeunet and writer Joss Whe­don, max­i­mal­ists of dif­fer­ent medi­ums, who cre­ate a tone so thor­ough­ly ridicu­lous it becomes infectious.

Yet at the same time, the ges­ture of hav­ing to some­how merge the icon­ic human char­ac­ter with the crea­ture comes off as rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al of a kind of fran­chise iden­ti­ty cri­sis. Feel­ing like the reboot that was sup­posed to jump­start a new Rip­ley tril­o­gy, Resurrection’s finan­cial under­per­for­mance seemed to put the kibosh on any chance of that. With the IP lan­guish­ing for sev­en years, there came no choice but to ful­fil two long-held promis­es teased well before the fourth film. These being the Xenomorph skull first glimpsed at the end of Preda­tor 2 as well as in a 1991 teas­er for Alien 3 which boast­ed the tagline ​“On Earth… every­one can hear you scream”, a promise that went unful­filled due to the project’s hell­ish devel­op­ment stage.

Orig­i­nal­ly the mate­r­i­al of an end­less num­ber of com­ic books and video games, the con­cept of pair­ing the two fran­chis­es (which came only a year after the sim­i­lar­ly long-promised mon­ster mash, Fred­dy vs Jason) seemed like the death knell for any mod­icum of respectabil­i­ty for the series. Yet it should be said that despite the gen­er­al antipa­thy sur­round­ing it, AVP: Alien vs Preda­tor has aged sur­pris­ing­ly well, if maybe sim­ply for its lack of pre­ten­sion. Essen­tial­ly an excuse for writer/​director Paul WS Anderson’s chief inter­ests – pyra­mids, holo­grams and sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions – at its best the film resem­bles the geo­met­ric B‑movies of Edgar G Ulmer.

The addi­tions to the mythol­o­gy come off as some­thing akin to the Ancient Aliens tele­vi­sion show, and lend to some of its most deliri­ous pulp images – say, a com­put­er gen­er­at­ed horde of Xenomorphs crawl­ing up an ancient Aztec pyra­mid. Though with the film ful­ly in fan-fic­tion ter­ri­to­ry, Anderson’s geeky ten­den­cies seemed to stray far from the icky, sex­u­al impli­ca­tions of Scott’s orig­i­nal, nor the moth­er­hood text that seemed to define its sequels.

Though if there’s one instance of Anderson’s juve­nile enthu­si­asm not pay­ing off, the cliffhang­er end­ing of the birth of the hybrid crea­ture sim­ply referred to as the Predalien, some­thing that had cer­tain­ly been on the lips of every Amer­i­can for three years, wasn’t realised until the undoubtable series nadir, 2007’s Alien vs Preda­tor: Requiem. For if anoth­er instal­ment were to hap­pen, it had to jus­ti­fy itself as the sup­posed R‑rated cor­rec­tive to the pre­vi­ous film’s watered down vio­lence for the sum­mer block­buster crowd.

Helmed by visu­al effects gurus The Broth­ers Strause – the only direc­tors to make an Alien film that nev­er received any kind of auteurist appraisal of any kind – the film is agree­ably mean-spir­it­ed if utter­ly joy­less. It is one of the murki­est look­ing films this writer has ever seen, with almost every set-piece indis­cernible due to almost com­i­cal­ly dark cin­e­matog­ra­phy. It gets to the point where it’s not even able to deliv­er on the gaudi­ness of the Predalien, being that the film’s light­ing often seems as if a delib­er­ate choice to hide poor design work.

There seemed even more of a lack of imag­i­na­tion in locat­ing the film in a small Amer­i­can town, and thus appar­ent­ly becom­ing the truest real­i­sa­tion of the ​“On Earth” promise. The choice seems to odd­ly nor­malise the two mon­sters by putting them in the hor­ror film ter­rain of sub­ur­ban slash­ers Fred­dy Krueger and Michael Myers. It’s as if the series came full cir­cle with the films the orig­i­nal was seen as the antithe­sis of.

If the two AvP films were the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of milk­ing the prop­er­ty, Rid­ley Scott’s return to the series in 2012, Prometheus, came almost like a Christo­pher Nolan Bat­man plea for fran­chise respectabil­i­ty, even going as far as to shun the Alien brand in the title. The self-impor­tance seemed even more defined by posi­tion­ing itself as more than a mon­ster movie by begin­ning on a visu­al ref­er­ence to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film sim­i­lar­ly tread­ing the birth of mankind, and even­tu­al­ly that of the Xenomorph.

Seem­ing like the mak­ers were embar­rassed by the series tra­jec­to­ry, to the point that Prometheus ​“ret­conned” the mythol­o­gy of AVP, this grander scope and more seri­ous tone didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly grant the film a free pass, chiefly in it becom­ing some­what of an easy tar­get due to the involve­ment of infa­mous tele­vi­sion writer Damon Lin­de­lof. All the fans still upset over the finale of Lost from two years pre­vi­ous seemed easy to jump on some of the film’s sto­ry­telling choic­es, be it a delib­er­ate­ly vague cold-open that didn’t quite give the audi­ence details as to why a 12-foot tall albi­no alien seem­ing­ly ter­raformed the plan­et Earth and delib­er­ate­ly killed itself.

While Scott’s fol­ly may have been in attempt­ing to ele­vate a fran­chise pre­dom­i­nant­ly built on scares, it must be said for a direc­tor who was always more a pro­fi­cient crafts­man able to give off the image of legit­i­ma­cy through por­tent and gloss rather than an actu­al thinker, Prometheus is actu­al­ly one of Scott’s strongest films. This derives from that it at least revolves around a pow­er­ful idea that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly left so many audi­ence mem­bers unsat­is­fied; that there’s no con­crete answers to life’s mys­ter­ies yet the search for more makes it worth liv­ing. A not par­tic­u­lar­ly deep yet com­pelling­ly bit­ter­sweet notion smug­gled into a sci­ence-fic­tion hor­ror film. That being said, with the inevitabil­i­ty of even more sequels on the way, it will be curi­ous to see whether the fran­chise can main­tain the strength of that idea.