Aliens: A Blessing and a Curse
When following up a masterpiece with an instant classic creates an existential crisis for a franchise
In 1979, Ridley Scott released Alien, the first of his two science fiction classics, the other being Blade Runner (1982) to be released over a three-year span. These two films would go on to shape the genre and influence generations of filmmakers, production designers, and fans. The two films are often described as dark, moody, dirty, grounded, and slow. All are fair.
While the Star Wars franchise of the same era harkened back to the 1940s adventure serials, Alien and Blade Runner spoke to the malaise of the 1970s, a growing weariness of corporate over-reach, and a fear of a looming economic giant in the Far East.
Alien, given the greenlight as Fox looked to cash in on the sci-fi wave driven by Star Wars, ended up with something quite different than swashbuckling heroes, beautiful princesses, and cute droids. Scott’s film was more akin to earlier works 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrik, 1968) and Solaris (Tartovsky, 1972). It was moody, introspective, claustrophobic, and oh yes, terrifying. Scott has even referenced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as an inspiration.
And yet the film found an audience and was financially successful, which in Hollywood can mean only one thing: Sequel. But of course, the question becomes, How do you follow up a movie like Alien? Just as importantly, Who follows up a director like Ridley Scott?
In 1982 Scott’s Blade Runner hit theaters. The film would go on to become possibly the most influential science fiction film of the last 50 years. Also hitting theaters that year was Piranha II: The Spawning in what was the feature directorial debut of James Cameron. Two years later Cameron would bring The Terminator to life, and with some newfound Hollywood street cred in hand, he would walk into a meeting with studio execs and producers that would become legend.
Reportedly, and Cameron has confirmed this, he pitched the movie and then turned over his script, wrote ALIEN on the back, and after adding an S to the end, he added two more lines and showed the executives this: ALIEN$.
They gave him the greenlight.
James Cameron knows how to make movies. He really knows how to make movies people want to see. His films occupy three of the top four box office successes of all time. James Cameron is also supremely confident. You’d have to be to follow up Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Made in the mid-80s, Cameron understood the times and made a film that fit the cultural zeitgeist. He made everything bigger. More Aliens! More action! More characters! More firefights! More explosions!
Now to be fair, the drive toward a more bombastic approach is not specific to the ’80s. Check out this quote from cameraman Karl Brown:
“Bigger and better became the constantly chanted watchword of the year. Soon the two words became one. Bigger meant better, and a sort of giganticism overwhelmed the world, especially the world of motion pictures.”
Brown was the cameraman on Birth of a Nation and the quote is from 1915. Hollywood is addicted to the ‘Bigger is Better’ ethos. In some cases, say the Fast and Furious or Mission: Impossible franchises, that works. But in those cases ‘Bigger is Better’ works because it aligns with the DNA of the original. For the purposes of this essay I’m not going to argue which of the two films, Alien or Aliens is better (it’s Alien), I simply want to point out that the films are different not merely by an order of magnitude, but fundamentally at their core.
If Alien was mostly the part of the rollercoaster where you slowly go up and up, the fear increasing as the inevitable drop draws near, Aliens is all drop.
The result is a masterpiece in and of itself. It’s completely different from Alien (bar the presence of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley), which was a smart move. Alien is a one of one and to try and make a better version of it would be a fool’s errand.
Cameron is a master storyteller in his own right and did wonderful things with Aliens, expanding the universe and, quite subversively, making an anti-war film. That’s probably best left for another essay, but the 1980s were full of films that were critiques of America’s jingoistic, pro-capitalist, increasingly militarised nation. The Rambo series (the first two films came out in ’82 and ‘85), Wall Street, and RoboCop (both 1987) are other examples.
If the Alien franchise were to have stopped there, this duology would go down as likely the best in film history. But alas, we were to get an additional four films, along with countless books, comics, and video games. Not to mention the separate but adjacent Alien v. Predator universe. While this expanded IP has some high points — novels such as The Cold Forge, the Alien RPG by Free League, and some of the early Dark Horse comics — and other entries have their staunch advocates (Alien³), the work that follows, by and large, follows Aliens far more than it follows Alien.
By the early-80s America wasn’t really that interested in a slow-boil psychological genre picture. The relative box office failures in 1982 of Blade Runner and The Thing compared to that summer’s runaway hit, E.T., made that quite clear. Cameron’s Aliens delivered exactly what audiences wanted (again, this is perhaps Cameron’s greatest skill). The decade to follow took the go-go ’80s and added an extreme(!) infusion of over-the-top to the demand for action.
So future creators working on the Alien franchise had a choice: Return to the franchise roots of claustrophobic terror, or crank everything up to 11! For the most part, the latter has been consistently chosen. To the point where much of the comics, books, and games to follow would be marketed under the Aliens banner.
If nothing else, this seems like an odd occurrence to me. There are certainly good genre sequels — The Empire Strikes Back being the obvious example. There are even examples of the sequel overwhelming the original — The Dark Knight and Batman Begins coming to mind.
But for the franchise to carry on, or at least splinter, with the sequel getting equal or higher billing is remarkable and a testament to what Cameron created.
But is the franchise better for it?
The science fiction genre has no shortage of films about military personnel fighting aliens/monsters, from War of the Worlds to Godzilla to Independence Day to Battle Los Angeles. I’ll acknowledge these films are set on Earth while Aliens is set on a distant planet, but at the end of the day, it’s still soldiers vs. aliens.
Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant (the latter two directed by Ridley Scott in a return to the franchise) all chose, in different ways to expand the franchise. More aliens, different aliens, Engineers, Black Goo, identical androids despite being different models, more and different planets. These replaced the key elements that initially made the Alien franchise so different, and compelling. The tension of the first film builds for almost the entire first hour. The cast is so small you have time to understand who they are and what motivates them. The in-fighting between the crew seems real and earned. The xenomorph is an unknowable terror. In Ash’s words:
The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
That was lost in subsequent films. The xenomorphs became something closer to the raptors in the Jurassic Park films — simply CGI monsters to be chased by, and then subdued in some fashion.
In many of the books, games, and comics the feeling is more, “Yeah, here come two dozen xenos, let’s rock!”
Would it have been possible to make a sequel to Alien that was another “slasher”-style film, where the cast gets picked off one by one? Probably not, at least not as the direct sequel. But that’s not to say it can’t be done at all. Regardless of the film’s flaws, I think David Fincher, the director of Alien³, tried to get back to that feeling of dread a bit. That film is moody and atmospheric, the setting suitably contained and he brought back real stakes by controversially killing off Hicks, Newt, and Ripley. I think the most recent addition to the Predator franchise, Prey, also did a fine job returning that franchise to something closer to its roots some 35 years later, so it certainly can be done.
Dark, moody space horror is not necessarily in and of itself always the right choice. While it has its advocates, I don’t find Event Horizon to be nearly as successful as Alien. But we have seen in recent years that directors like Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, and Alex Garland can make intelligent, terrifying, and moody science fiction onto the screen.
Currently, there are two Alien franchise projects in various states of development (as of this writing, both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike, which could affect production). What will they consider their true source material? The feature film — Alien: Romulus set for an August 2024 release — is being directed by Fede Alvarez, whose bone fides come from the world of horror films. Perhaps that provides us with a clue to the tone of the film, details of which have been sparse.
Ultimately of course it’s a matter of preference. Acknowledging that both Alien and Aliens are great films, the question becomes what do you want more of? It would seem the answer has been Aliens but the somewhat subdued response to the last three films leads me to believe that perhaps a correction is in order.
