Why Each Alien Movie Looks So Different | Screen Rant - Screen Rant

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The Alien franchise may share a lot of plot elements between installments, but why has the franchise never been settled on a specific visual look? Released in 1979, the original Alien was a huge hit for future Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and a career-making vehicle for star Sigourney Weaver. The tale of a doomed spaceship crew who accidentally allow the titular murderous interloper aboard their vessel, it was a lean and brutal horror that eschewed the fun tone of most sci-fi outings in favor of a “haunted house in space” tale.

While the original was critically acclaimed, it took no less than seven years for the movie to receive its first sequel. This sequel was a radical tonal departure, with 1986’s action-heavy Aliens being a very different movie from its predecessor. Bigger, less scary, and more action-packed, the follow-up was an action-horror mashup where the first entry was a straight-up horror, while Aliens focused more on the characters mowing down scores of Xenomorphs with heavy artillery than being picked off one-by-one by the eponymous monster.

As befits two movies with such divergent tones, the first two movies also featured very different visual aesthetics. James Cameron’s sequel left behind the grimy production design and close-quarters camerawork of Scott’s Alien, with Aliens featuring the futuristic sheen of the director’s later hits Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Avatar. In an attempt to revisit the original’s style, the disappointing Alien 3 brought back the slasher movie style, while 1997’s Alien: Resurrection tried out an entirely new—and largely disliked—visual palette. As a result, despite the franchise having a consistent villain and an iconic recurring heroine, each entry looks nothing like the last in aesthetic terms. So, why is this, and has it helped the franchise’s reception historically or hurt the consistency of the series?

Alien Was A Quintessential ‘70s Horror

Alien 1979 Ellen Ripley Xenomorph Fog Ending

With its fusion of gross FX and elegant sets, Alien called to mind the likes of The Exorcist or The Amityville Horror. The production design, courtesy in part of HR Giger, and smooth camerawork fit the dominant visual style of the decade’s horror offerings, and this marked it out as a serious chiller, not a space opera to be mistaken for then-recent blockbuster Star Wars. With the original Ridley Scott Alien being one of the first major sci-fi horrors since the genre’s previous heyday in the ‘50s, visually positing the film as a slasher set in space was an effective way of informing audiences that, despite the interplanetary setting, this was very much a straightforward horror. Later hits like Predator were able to add more action movie flourishes to the mix, but Scott’s movie wisely stuck to the standard combination of dank settings, cramped compositions, and low lighting to remind viewers that in space, no one can hear you scream.

Aliens Was All ‘80s Action

In direct contrast with Alien’s sparse, elegant style, Aliens is loud, brash, and (largely) unsubtle as all the best action (and horror) cinema of the ‘80s. While Alien arrived at the beginning of the slasher craze, Aliens hit cinemas when audiences were bored of familiar killers and wanted more fantastical, genre-bending slashers like A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. A simple “slasher in space” setup was no longer enough, and as such the James Cameron movie ushered in an era of action-horror by giving the scares a far bigger scale. Upping the ante meant Aliens lost Alien's quiet sense of claustrophobia as a result and, just like most ‘80s horror eschewed the creeping paranoia of the ‘70s for gory FX-heavy outings, so too did Aliens seem to mark a brighter and more in-your-face future for the franchise.

Alien 3 Was (Too) Horror Focused

Alien 3 returned to straightforward horror, but the belated sequel was criticized for being too bleak and hopeless after the crowd-pleasing antics of Aliens. If Aliens added the visual invention and ambitious set pieces of a slasher sequel, then Alien 3 brought the drab, flat aesthetic of a disappointing slasher remake. The criticism of the movie’s tone was even reflected in the visual language of David Fincher’s sequel, which strips away all the color of Aliens and even the darkness of Alien in favor of largely grey interiors and occasional flashes of garish orange and sickly green. The critiques of both Alien 3’s plot and intentionally grungy visual style were fair, particularly when it abandoned any of the triumphant action elements of Cameron's sequel. However, these same critiques may have led to the uneven tone of the next outing.

Alien: Resurrection’s Style Was All Over The Place

Alien Resurrection 1997 Ripley and Newborn

In terms of story and plotting, 1997’s Alien: Resurrection is both too self-serious and too playfully camp at once, with some scenes being blatantly over the top while others are seemingly pasted in from a more serious script. Alien: Resurrection’s tragic Newborn, a grotesque monstrosity born from Ripley’s clone, belongs in an entirely different movie from the slam-dunking cybernetic reinvention of Ripley, and the movie’s visual look is similarly inconsistent. As if to reflect the tonal imbalance, the movie had the sickly green-tinged aesthetic of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s earlier outings Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children but toned down the wild camerawork and wonky, off-kilter humor of those earlier efforts too. This resulted in Alien: Resurrection being both too colorful and not colorful enough—a problem reflected in the uneven tone.

Later outings would attempt to revisit the visual language of the first two, more successful movies, but never recaptured the success of the first entries in the series. Scott’s own Prometheus was all cool blues and neutral tones, a more washed-out version of the slick blue-tinted futurism of Aliens. The superior prequel Alien: Covenant looked a lot like Alien, with its dank settings and darker lighting, but failed to recapture the intensity of the original thanks to its convoluted plot and the disappointing depiction of the title creature itself. As a result, the visual look of the Alien movies never coalesced into anything recognizable or consistent, which if nothing else, has helped give each entry its own identity.

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Cathal Gunning (923 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.