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Alien Movies, Ranked
We revisit the soaring highs and gruesome lows spawned by Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece.
However forcefully David Fincher has renounced his feature debut, early glimpses of his sleek craft remain in the finished film, in which Ripley (a returning Weaver, anguished and newly buzz-cut) crash-lands on a floating penal colony and rallies a repentant block of maximum-security inmates into a weaponless battle against the enemy that hitched a ride with her — a beast that’s come to look like the stalker boyfriend from hell, especially after the script unveils its cruelest twist. In fashioning a sequel to Ridley Scott’s impeccable outer-space thriller, the Terminator director tried something different, moving the genre dial from horror to action, trading mounting suspense for nonstop intensity, and increasing the enemy threat from one relentless monster on the loose to a veritable army of them, swarming from the vents and rafters to tear through a tough-talking platoon of space grunts. Of course, Alien is much more than just a monster movie: Like John Hurt’s unlucky, ghoulishly congested Kane, Ridley Scott’s influential smash is an incubator, its slicked surfaces concealing an allegory of uncaring capitalism, a nightmare of sexual anxiety, and a kind of reverse Psycho, slowly whittling down an ensemble cast until all who remains is Weaver’s nascent action heroine par excellence.
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