The 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 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 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 . 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
With its fusion of gross FX and elegant sets, Alien called to mind the likes of 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
In 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 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.
