One of the best horror movies ever made, Ridley Scott’s Alien also marked the beginning of one of Hollywood’s most successful sci-fi franchises. Scott and his team have added fresh narratives, characters, and places to the Alien franchise through sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. With prequels like Prometheus and sequels like Alien Resurrection, the Alien franchise has given us timeless classics like Aliens. See them listed below in order of re-watchability.
1. Aliens (1986)
Director- James Cameron
57 years after the alien invasion on the mining ship Nostromo, Ellen Ripley, the only survivor. He awakens after being discovered by a salvage ship. She receives a far from warm greeting from Company executives. He refuse to accept her revelation of alien presence and revoke her licence as a flight officer. To her dismay, Ripley also learns that the Company has colonised the moon LV-426. There, her crew had first seen an alien species. But when all communication with the moon is lost, Ripley is once more called into action as a mentor to a hardy squad of heavily armed space warriors.
2. Alien (1979)
Director- Ridley Scott
The commercial spaceship Nostromo receives a distress signal from a far-off moon during its journey back to Earth in the far future. Following the hypersleep awakening of the seven crew members, the spacecraft falls to the moon. Three crew members come across an abandoned spaceship. A huge room filled with thousands of eggs while exploring the moon. An egg contains a parasite that attacks any team member who approaches it out of curiosity, knocking him out cold. As the spaceship departs, he is hauled back aboard. The parasite eventually dies, and the host eventually appears to be unperturbed when he wakes up. Quickly, although only briefly, everything goes back to normal.
3. Alien: Covenant (2017)
Director- Ridley Scott
The deep-space colonisation vessel USCSS Covenant is on track for the remote planet Origae-6 with more than 2,000 colonists in cryogenic slumber to construct a new world in 2104, nearly eleven years after the disastrous voyage to the distant moon, LV-223, in Prometheus (2012). The group is lured to a nearby habitable planet that looks a lot like Earth instead by a renegade signal. The crew of the Covenant will therefore have to deal with biological enemies that are beyond human comprehension. Now, what began as a tranquil exploration journey will quickly change into a frantic rescue mission in unexplored space.
4. Alien 3 (1992)
Director- David Fincher
In the 1986 film Aliens, Ellen Ripley, who narrowly escapes death on the hostile exomoon Acheron, crashes upon Fiorina “Fury” 161, a maximum-security prison planet with a penal labour colony of hardened male prisoners. However, a sneaky Xenomorph manages to escape and mature in the massive prison’s maze-like ventilation system, and as it begins to pick off vulnerable inmates, mass hysteria begins to spread. Only a few survivors are left, and they must make due with their crude weapons and pray for an early demise.
5. Prometheus (2012)
Director- Ridley Scott
The accomplished archaeologist Doctor Elizabeth Shaw and her colleague Charlie Holloway set out on an ambitious deep-space research mission with a seventeen-man team, following a thin trail of clues. In 2093, a crew of pioneers in space travel, the USCSS Prometheus, land on the barren exomoon LV-223 to explore the possibility of the existence of the superior extraterrestrial species known as the “Engineers.” More mysteries, however, lie there, concealed under an enigmatic, complicated structure made up of vast, dark chambers and a complex network of tunnels. The outcome of the audacious space expedition as well as the entire destiny of humanity are now in danger due to a horrifying revelation.
6. Alien Resurrection (1997)
Director- Jean-Pierre Jeunet
After a long two centuries since Ellen Ripley’s selfless sacrifice in Alien3 (1992), military scientists aboard the top-secret research vessel USM Auriga have created Ripley 8, a clone of the original character. However, Captain Frank Elgyn of the smuggling ship Betty arrives on the Auriga with his motley crew of mercenaries as the dormant embryonic Xenomorph Queen that had been growing inside her gives the human/alien hybrid great strength and fractured inherited memories. Ripley, who has undergone genetic enhancement, must now choose a side as violent Xenomorphs manage to escape.
