What's So Hard About This?: Revisiting the Bad Alien Movies

The Alien series has a very strong brand, deceptively so for a film franchise with, by most people’s reckoning, two hits. After 1986’s Aliens, the series has been limping along on the excess energy generated by those first two phenomenal movies. Only the Terminator series has gone to such desperate lengths to recapture the energy of its first two powerful entries.

That’s just shy of four decades without another really good Alien movie despite the fact that they keep hammering them out every few years. But the mystery is how the hell do they keep failing? This should be the easiest template in the world to just keep cranking out banger after banger. The monster itself is absolutely one of the best horror creatures ever invented in the genre. It’s a universe in which both space marines and space pirates exist. This is one of those ideas you get the impression even ChatGPT could do an okay job working with.

The latest entry, Alien: Romulus has landed this week, and I’ve just seen it today. My spoiler-free review is at the end of this article.

I saw Aliens, the second film, when I was a young teenager (or maybe not yet in my teens, I can’t say for sure) and I think it was one of the first adult horror movies I ever saw, and I mean horror. I’d seen schlock, I’d seen some of the Friday the 13ths, but never something that took itself dead seriously. I still remember covering my eyes and refusing to watch when the first chestburster scene arrived because this was already the 90s and this movie had existed for long enough that I knew the lore from cultural osmosis.

Since then I’ve watched the first two Alien movies a hell of a lot of times. The other half dozen? Not so much. So I wanted to watch these movies again and try to figure out why they’ve done so poorly when the first two did so well. Why does the Alien franchise keep tripping over its own prehensile toothed mouth-dick?

First, though, I think we need to talk about why the first two were so fucking good.

One of the things that makes these movies stand out as iconic films larger than the genre they inhabit is that they are very, very well done feminist horror movies. I mean on levels far more complex than your average beard-and-alcohol themed anti-SJW YouTube reviewers with names like “The Critical Drinker” will be able to understand. It’s much more than the fact that they have women protagonists—a lot of horror movies do.

All of the best horror movies are metaphors for something because effective horror drills into your psyche and attacks something you’re actually genuinely afraid of. It’s never just about a man with knives on his hands. You’re not actually afraid of aliens, but the Alien movies are about sexual violence, which you are afraid of.

The xenomorphs, as pop culture has come to call them, are rape. That’s all they are—rape itself, given form. It’s one of the most effective examples in pop culture of representing a concept as a monster, all penises and teeth. It’s not only women whose psyches are rattled, as men have our own primal fears about violation and penetration, but women get an extra layer of subtext. Even in scenes that don’t involve a xenomorph, there’s a strong underlying theme of suspicion of men.

The filmmakers avoid the temptation of taking the sub out of subtext. They don’t make every man in these movies evil, malicious, or duplicitous. Some are…

…but most aren’t.

But they are all treated with suspicion.

These films are enjoyable as horror because you’re never conscious of the secret fear buttons they’re trying to press in your brain. You think you’re watching a movie about a scary fuckin’ monster, and that’s enough, but it’s about what’s happening in the background of your mind.

The first two movies, Alien and Aliens (the one where there’s more than one), are brilliant for all that, but I’m not here to write an absurdly long essay about the two movies everyone loves the shit out of and talk about all the time. I’m here for the rubbish, and to talk about the runts of the franchise that we’ve memory holed, and see if I can figure out what keeps going wrong.

Alien 3

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