First things first, before we set off on ranking the films of the Alien franchise—or any franchise, for that matter—we need to define “worst.”
Do you mean “worst” like “bad” worst? Like Nikki Hayley’s take on the Civil War? That kind of worst? Or are we talking “this is so disturbing that I’ll never sleep again” kind of worst? Like having to reconcile with the fact that our lives are threatened by Tesla robots? Because the Alien franchise has both. A lot of both. The franchise is constantly swinging between these two opposite polarities of “worst.”
Some of these films are just laughably bad, while others are so good at showing things that are the worst that it’s laughable to think you’ll walk away from watching without some sort of mental trauma. Did I need to see a tentacled vagina attach itself to someone’s face? Did I need to watch a slippery little penis with eyes burst out of someone’s chest? Did I need to watch a terrified woman get chased around the spaceship by a floppy phallic monster? No, I didn’t need any of that. And now my nightmares are eternally haunted.
So in order to protect my fragile psyche, we’re gonna start this list with the “bad” kind of worst and save the “best at being the worst” kind of worst for last.
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem saved us from seeing the very worst that the Alien franchise has to offer thanks to its mercifully bad lighting. Seriously, you can’t see ANYTHING at all in this film. Darker than the inside of a predalien’s ass.
Speaking of predaliens, that’s another thing that makes this film the literal worst. The predalien is an alien that implanted itself inside of a Predator. This predalien manages to find itself in a small town on Earth and a Predator is sent to kill it. It would be cool if we cared about the townsfolk but they each have about as much character development as a rock.
Alien vs. Predator (2004)
Before Alien vs. Predator: Requiem could melt away the franchise’s reputation like the alien’s acid blood, the original Alien vs. Predator was there to soften it up first. The film’s title alone tells you all you need to know. It’s a “hey what if these aliens fought” monster mash-up studio cash grab not unlike the Freddy vs. Jason series. Apparently, the studio heads thought it would be a good idea to drum up ticket sales with a PG-13 rating, allowing teenagers in on the fun. The result is a film that is light on scares and gore in a franchise made famous by its ability to terrify.
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Sigourney Weaver’s final performance as Ripley ends not with a spaceship exploding bang, but a whimper. Technically, Sigourney Weaver doesn’t play Ripley, but rather a clone of Ripley that is created after the hero’s untimely demise at the end of Aliens 3 (another shoddy screenwriting decision). With Ripley died the franchise’s credibility, and this film is nothing but a studio’s attempt to resurrect it. Sadly, Resurrection‘s quippy and convoluted Joss Whedon plot proves that the franchise should have stayed down.
Aliens 3 (1992)
Aliens 3 isn’t necessarily a bad film, but having to follow up two of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time is enough to make even a solid B movie look terrible in comparison. It’s like if a pretty good Led Zeppelin cover band had to play after a concert from the real thing. It just ain’t gonna work. After senselessly killing off two characters the prequel worked so hard to save in the beginning of the film, Ridley is forced to survive in a desolate wasteland that once served as a planetary penal colony. The plot sounds perfect on paper, but the film fails to live up to its predecessors in execution.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Alien: Covenant is a film that eschews the “jump the xenoshark” risk-taking that caused its mid-franchise predecessors to flop and serves as a return to form to the original Alien experience. What experience is that? Terror! In space!
In Alien: Covenant, a group of spacefaring colonists land on a remote planet on the distant edge of the Milky Way, and after meeting up with the (seemingly) nice android David from the Prometheus mission, decide to set up camp. The crewmembers are hunted by neomorphs, the precursor species to the even deadlier xenomorph from the original film. While the neomorphs are essentially just the original aliens with different production design, they are more than capable of providing all the bloodcurdling scares as their predecessors.
Prometheus (2012)
Prometheus is the Alien: Resurrection that Alien: Resurrection wished it could be. Seating Ridley Scott back in the directorial driver’s seat, Prometheus serves as an ambitious prequel to the original Alien franchise. After a group of intrepid space explorers seeking the origin of life land on a distant moon, they find a world of unimaginable beauty and horror! They uncover a mysterious black goo that appears to have been engineered by a race of long dead aliens. What does the goo do? Horribly mutate anything it touches and turn it into a killing machine.
Attempting to provide an origin story for the xenomorph threat makes Prometheus is a divisive film, but the Alien franchise has always been about taking risks. Often those risks don’t play out, but in this case, they do.
Aliens (1986)
There is an apocryphal story about James Cameron’s pitch of Aliens to Hollywood film executives. It’s said that he walked into the room and wrote the word “Alien” on a whiteboard. Then he paused, and drew a “$” at the end of the word. “ALIEN$” was born. The film delivered exactly what Cameron promised, a sequel with all the horror of the original film that raked in boatloads of cash with added spectacle. Aliens pits Ripley and a group of space marines against not one but a whole HIVE of xenomorphs. By adding action packed thrills to the chilling horror of the original, the film made a critical and commercial killing. Game over man, game over.
Alien (1979)
Surprise, surprise. Arguably the greatest horror movie (and one of the greatest films) of all time, Alien is a cinematic masterpiece. After a group of astronauts land on a mysterious planet, they unwittingly bring a parasitic alien stowaway onboard with them—and pay for it with their lives. The top notch script is brought to life by some of the best onscreen performances in horror movie history, and further bolstered by the appearance psychosexual nightmare beast from the depraved mind of artist H.R. Giger. Like the slippery little facehugger for which it’s named, the film latched onto pop culture consciousness and has refused to let go.
(Featured image: 20th Century Fox)
