This is a series, it seems, all about Old Testament vengeance, and how — Alien (franchise)

"Alien3 took a while to come to the screen, just as James Cameron’s Aliens had taken its time in development after Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. The key difference is that while the sequel took longer because different executives blew hot and cold on the idea of another film, Cameron’s success made the third film inevitable from the off. As well as being a commercial hit, Aliens was praised by critics and audiences alike, and even went on to bag two Oscar wins and several other nominations. That changed Fox’s tune, and Roger Birnbaum, then the studio’s head of worldwide distribution, would reportedly call the series, “The Franchise”, at a point where big viable sci-fi movie franchises didn’t come along nearly as often as they do nowadays."

"At its core, Alien is about corporate power and the disposability of the working class—and more obviously about the vulnerability or our gross human bodies and their ability to bleed, to expel other nasty fluids, to be invaded, to be ripped apart in different ways. Every Alien movie plays with the latter idea, but Alien: Resurrection is the only film that seems to fully acknowledge and embrace the fact that Alien is completely bland space pulp without the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (named for the first time in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens). Known simply as “the company” in Alien, Weyland-Yutani is responsible for everything that goes wrong. Their desire to study the aliens found on a mysterious planet supersedes any safety protocols. Human life is literally secondary to that imperative. The crew of the ship Nostromo doesn’t know that though. They naïvely cling to the idea that doing their jobs will keep them safe and in the company’s good graces. The few grumblings from the union mechanics who want to stay safe and just do what they’re paid for are met with contractual loopholes that effectively fuck them over. Eventually, we learn that “standard operating procedure is to do whatever the fuck they tell you to do.” That means dying in service to a mandate kept secret in a super computer. Aliens doesn’t do much to keep the series fresh, though it offers up a xenomorph queen, bigger and tougher to kill than the first film’s monster. It may be the fan favourite, but Aliens is pretty much a beat-for-beat remake of Alien, replacing the suspenseful tone of the original with gun fights and machismo. If Alien is horror/sci-fi, Aliens is the same movie reframed as action/sci-fi. Then Alien 3 mostly abandons the corporate message of its predecessors altogether in favour of a space prison narrative, in which the xenomorphs wreak havoc on a bunch of criminals."

"No animal has devoted so much time towards voluntarily feeling and promoting the experience of fear as humans. We sky-dive, bungee jump and take risks to feel a rush of adrenaline. We stay up late to read H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, and Richard Matheson. We pack into theaters to see Alien, The Thing, Cloverfield, It Follows, and hide behind the couch cushions for Netflixs brilliant Stranger Things. Second, no other species spends their time philosophizing in the ways humans have-what is the meaning of life? What is beauty? How do you define "art"? How should we treat one another? How do we know any of these things? We philosophize, and many of us love a good scare. The Alien series perfectly combines these two unique traits, inspiring deeper thoughts as much as it scares."

"Giger has said he tried to envisage a world where the ultimate horror would befall humankind: our extinction at the hands of a superior creature. Alien and its sequels are evolutionary parables that drive home some ugly truths weve been hearing for a century from the likes of Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The world Scott and his heirs created is a cold, pitiless, meaningless place where the only purpose of life — including human life — is survival and self-perpetuation. The xenomorph is the ultimate predator and the ultimate survivor. It represents the rapacious movement of life itself without sentiment, morality, love. The horror we feel when faced with this monster is the horrible realization that life itself, the "river of DNA," as Dawkins calls evolution, continues without concern for human values. It has no other purpose than to move forward, and itll consume anything in its way."

"The “Alien” franchise has gone through as many changes as its xenomorphs. Ridley Scott’s 1979 chamber-horror piece became James Cameron’s terrifying 1986 carnival ride (“Aliens”). Then came further-flung and further-out iterations of the monster and initial protagonist Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); then video-game-and-comic-inspired crossover “Aliens vs. Predator” movies; then Scott’s return with the big-question-asking “Prometheus” (2012) and now his new “Alien: Covenant.” “Covenant” writer John Logan, who has been nominated three times for an Oscar, says that the “Alien” franchise is testament to “the muscularity of the central idea; that different filmmakers can go down the hall to the right or to the left. It’s still the same hallway."

"For some, part of the interest of the Alien franchise comes from the underlying elements of maternal malevolence and gender-subversion, from a male giving birth to the penetrative-parent alien."