Works with their own pages:
- Aliens
- Alien³
- Alien: Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
- Aliens (Steve Perry Trilogy)
- Aliens: Bug Hunt
Alien
- The opening title sequence has one of the most creative presentations ever: five small white lines with the first and the last one tilted towards each other appear from the void of outer space, making first time viewers who know that the movie's title is Alien feel a bit lost and wonder if they're looking at some sort of abstract extraterrestrial hieroglyph, before each letter component slowly fades in one at a time revealing "ALIEN". Brilliant.
- Sci-Fi media such as Star Wars (and even Aliens, which still made it into a fun bumpy ride) have spoiled us with space travelers simply driving their ship towards an alien world and then softly descending on its surface with no issues. This movie instead opts to show the Nostromo crew having to carefully calculate and follow the landing trajectory in order to safely arrive on LV-426, and even that's not enough as it reveals to be a hostile planet with an uneven surface that ends up causing some damage the crew must fix. It may not be as quick as most spaceship landings, but it does help the immersion and make the Nostromo feel like a real, tangible and complex craft that in turn makes Ripley's crew look awesome for manning like real plane pilots and astronauts at work. The wondrous Jerry Goldsmith score
that goes along with the landing scene also helps selling its epic scale. - The derelict Space Jockey ship. Sure, it's not the Lovecraftian alien pyramid the makers originally considered for the place where the Nostromo crew finds the eggs, but one could argue that it manages to be an even more utterly otherworldly, immense Creepy Awesome setting thanks to H. R. Giger's biomechanical aesthetics, excellent miniatures and huge set design for the Space Jockey's chamber and fossilized corpse.
- The Chestburster's first appearance. It's a testament to its nastiness that it caused moviegoers to charge out of the theater looking for someplace to vomit.
- The way the movie toys with the viewer's expectations: we initially assume Kane must be the main character since he's the first to get a lot of focus when he wakes up from the stasis chamber, but the only thing he continues to be the first at is dying, giving birth to the alien in front of his horrified crewmates. Then we assume Dallas will be the hero since he's the captain who takes responsibility and decides to go head-on to face the alien to push it into the airlock with the flamethrower... only to fall victim as well. By the time it's only Ripley, Parker and Lambert left, we've learned that the monster doesn't care about the character introductions or in-universe military ranking, ANYONE is potential dead meat and the Anyone Can Die suspense rises.
- The Xenomorph itself epitomizes Creepy Awesome. Stone-cold super-killer, full to the brim with creepy designs and gruesome powers.
- Even with all the Badass Decay the Xenomorphs suffered in following Alien media, Kane's Son (or "The Big Chap") remains one of the most formidable specimen in the series for its efficiency when hunting down the Nostromo crew, peaking when it effortlessly holds down Parker, The Big Guy who can decapitate androids with a strong enough strike, before killing him. One wouldn't be too erroneous for assuming that Kane's Son would be able to do the same to Vasquez and maybe even Dutch with its sheer strength and mercilessly quick way it likes to claim its prey. Then there's the Extended Cut where we learn that Kane's Son made a nest in which new Xenomorph eggs were being formed out of Brett and Dallas' bodies, proving to be even more dangerous for being able to spawn more horrors way before the Xenomorph Queen was even conceived.
- Ripley throwing the fully-grown Alien out of the airlock into space, shooting at it with the harpoon gun to make it lose its grip when it tries to hold on, and then punching down the activation of the ship's propellers to blow it away while incinerating it. It becomes almost dreamy and surreal with the way the engines seem to be casting strong floodlights through the dark mist of space, while once again Goldsmith's score beautifully complements the moment as the thrill of the catharsis slowly becomes a bittersweet peace.
- In 2019, North Bergen High School in New Jersey put on Alien: The Play, a stage production of the film, which despite its low budget went viral for its amazing costumes and props. It soon received Approval of God from Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver themselves, with the latter also saying James Cameron likes it too. Scott even shelled out $5,000 for an encore performance on Alien Day, which was introduced by Weaver and filmed so everyone could see it after hearing so much about it. All of the students involved in making it got scholarships to the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts for their effort.
Franchise
- Alien:Echo has Olivia Shipp, a girl stranded on a planet being rapidly overtaken by Xenomorphs. Unlike the other protagonists, she has no weapons that can significantly harm a Xenomorph (no pulse rifle, no flamethrower, not even the vacuum of space), just a rudimentary knowledge of xenobiology and sheer determination to survive. She not only escapes the Xenomorphs, she manages to rescue her sister from their hive, save her girlfriend, and even kill one by luring it onto a catwalk, shooting it out, and dropping it onto spikes. If Ripley had been there, she'd be beaming in pride.
- Aliens:Rogue has Project Chimera, which many reader would understandably guess was yet another failed attempt to capture and contain Xenomorphs for bio-weapons research…but they’d be wrong. On both counts. First, the measures used to capture and contain Xenomorphs worked completely flawlessly, with the staff using a sound cannon to stun individual drones for retrieval and study. Second, the aim of the project was to splice DNA from domesticated animals into their genes in order to make them more docile. And it worked . Chimera managed to succeed where literally everyone else in the setting failed miserably, something that would be worth enormous praise if not for the scientists’ use of human test subjects and the project lead dooming it by getting too ambitious in his attempts to make a tame royal Xenomorph.
