Alternative Character Interpretation: The original Expanded Universe novels (and the comic adaptations thereof) actually justify the propensity for humans to grab the Idiot Ball in the films by declaring that the Xenomorph Queens produce a telepathic broadcast which subtly enthralls humans, literally compelling them to subconsciously want to help the aliens breed and multiply.
Catharsis Factor: Weyland-Yutani is eventually bought out by Walmart. The MegaCorp behind so much evil is brought low enough by its own screw ups that it can be owned by a convenience store chain.
Creepy Awesome: The Xenomorphs are among the most iconic aliens in science fiction thanks to their Body Horror life cycle and nightmarishly cool, even thought-provoking design by H.R. Giger, which is rounded out by their ability to stalk and kill prey.
Delusion Conclusion: A section of the fanbase is so dissatisfied with the later sequels they prefer to think they're nightmares Ripley is having in hypersleep, which stems from an unused draft of the fourth film as a way to retcon Ripley's death.
Evil Is Cool: The Xenomorphs, whose biomechanical appearance, disturbing life cycle and physical abilities lend to them being highly efficient and memorable antagonists that are among the most beloved evil(-doing) aliens in science fiction.
Alien: Covenant didn't help things with the suggestion that David, an android, created the Xenomorphs. This has been criticized for similar reasons to aformentioned Prometheus.
Xenomorph - Used once or twice in the films, among many other words, to describe the aliens in the franchise, this word stuck as the standard term used by fans. It became used to specifically refer to the films' creatures in merchandise like the comics and video-game spinoffs, and was eventually canonized when Xenomorph XX121 became the official name for the creatures in the Out of the Shadows trilogy, the Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report, and the Alien: Covenant promotional website (though this "name" is still more of a loose categorization than anything, with "xenomorph" being the zoological version of "UFO" in-universe).
Other names for the species used in spinoff media are "Internecivus Raptus" (Murderous Thief) and "Linguafoeda Acheronsis" (Foul-tongue from Hell, Acheron being also the name of the planet on which the creatures were first encountered in Alien).
None of the life cycle stages (i.e. Facehugger, Chestburster, Drone) were ever officially named on-film. They were given Fan Nicknames which simply stuck and wound up being used in some of the expanded universe material and even eventually by the production staff themselves.
Some fans prefer to believe that the third and fourth films never existed, and that Hicks and Newt never died (Ripley's nightmare in cryo-sleep, her last words in Aliens telling Newt they can both dream all the way home).
Some fans feel the same way about the retcons and revelations found in prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
While it may be due to the crossover between the two, both the Alien and Predator series have overlap thanks to both being '80s sci-fi horror series revolving around monsters, in addition to sharing numerous creators and actors between the two such as special effects by Stan Winston, James Cameron having input and actors such as Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen.
Terminator has an overlap in interest with the series, owing to also being a violent '80s sci-fi series sharing numerous creators and actors with the Alien films, particularly several actors from Aliens and James Cameron. And the fact that both the Xenomorph and Terminator are guest characters in Mortal Kombat games. This also ends up extending to RoboCop, which essentially shares the same community as Terminator, so one could consider the foursome of Alien, Predator, Terminator, and RoboCop to all have the same general fanbase.
Genius Bonus: The primary location for the first two movies is stated to be located around the Zeta Reticuli star system. This little background detail becomes greatly more ominous when you know it is considered to be a potential place of origin of The Greys in UFO lore.
I Am Not Shazam: The term "xenomorph" was originally just intended as a throwaway and deliberately cumbersome term for a generic alien life form, like the taxonomic equivalent of "UFO" (it literally means "foreign or alien form" in Greek). It was never intended as the name of the species itself; only to show up Gorman for being an officious twat. However, the name has proved easier for fans to use than "the aliens from Alien," and it's consequently been used in official marketing materials and semi-canon sources.
Iron Woobie: Ellen Ripley. In the first film, she's the sole survivor against a creature which killed her shipmates. In the second film, she gets demoted for destroying her ship in her attempt to destroy the creature, and in the extended cut, we learn her daughter grew up and died during her overextended time in cryo-sleep. When she's called back by her company to investigate the colony on the planet from the first film, she finds another Iron Woobie in Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, the sole child survivor of the colony's infestation. Ripley, Newt, Marine Cpl. Hicks, and the android Bishop are the only ones to survive and escape the Alien-infested colony, only for Ripley to be once again the sole survivor after they crash-land onto a prison planet in the third film; and having been impregnated with a Queen chestburster in that grim setting, her only option left is suicide.
Love to Hate: The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is so over the top in their ambitions and the unethical lengths they'll go to realize them, that it almost comes across as a parody. The overconfidence of the higher-ups in their ability to harness the traits of the Xenomorphs and them being oblivious to how out of their depth they are with this species adds to their ridiculous hubris.
The Alien series has a number of famous quotes that are frequently used outside of the film's context. They can be found on the films' YMMV pages.
On the receiving end of a number of memes making light of the fact that the franchise is now owned by Disney, such as showing the alien at Animal Kingdom or the Alien Queen as a Disney Princess.note ahem, Disney QUEEN. Or that, with the Alien Queen being, well, a Queen, all the rank-and-file Aliens are Disney Princesses.
Misaimed Merchandising: The Alien is one of the creepiest, most disturbing and most sexual monsters ever invented and most of the films of the series contain enough gore and horror to scar some kids for life. Yet, it hasn't stopped them from being merchandised, both as toys AND plush aliens and chestburster aliens. The Kenner toyline had such variations as Bull, Mantis, Crab and Jaguar aliens, making it one of the few toylines based distinctly around Bizarre Alien Biology.
Narm Charm: There were plans, believe it or not, to make a kid's cartoon about Aliens vs Predator. While it never went through, parts of it did make it into a comic book series made for the Kenner action figures, which had Ripley and most of the marines from the second film surviving Acheron, and subsequently going on GI-Joe style missions to battle Aliens throughout the galaxy, wearing brightly colored uniforms, sprouting endless one-liners note "HUG THIS!" and wielding goofy, cartoonish weapons (Ripley wields up a flamethrower that's bigger than she is). One Predator even appears to be wearing nipple cannons. When compared to the dark and gritty terror of the film, the whole series is hilarious.
Only the Creator Does It Right: Subverted. When it was announced Ridley Scott was returning to the franchise, fans rejoiced. After a string of bad sequels, they thought he would finally do the series he "created" justice. However, Scott was only brought aboard the first film after the script was written and Dan O'Bannon (who, along with fellow screenwriter Ronald Shusett, actually did create the story) met Giger and the other concept artists on the set of Jodorowsky's failed Dune project. While Scott made the film look great, his creative input was minimal, and the creative input he did fight for (like having the Alien bite Ripley's head off and record the final log in her voice) was just terrible. In his review of Alien: Covenant, Mark Kermode stated Scott "is [only] as good as the script he's working from". While Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have their fans, Scott's creative decision to inject grandiose themes into a formerly grimy, down to Earth, working-class universe and his contentious retcons about the origins of the xenomorphs did not produce the sweeping return-to-form fans hoped for.
Sequelitis: Notably avoided by Aliens, a great sequel which is widely considered to be as good as the first film. The third and fourth installments, and especially the AvP films, however, are considered a major step down. This is largely explained by the reasoning why the films were made. James Cameron was a fan of the original Alien and wrote the script to Aliens on spec. He was told that if The Terminator was successful he'd be allowed to direct the sequel he wanted to create, making it a labor of love. By Alien 3, however, the producers (who had meddled with the script of the first film) were making a sequel for the sake of the franchise. As such they burned through a bunch of different scripts and ended up with an amalgam of different attempts. Things didn't get any better from there. A number of people view that Resurrection might have been a pretty good film (a beloved screenwriter and a notable director with a solid grasp of visual style and atmosphere) if it hadn't been shoehorned into the Alien universe.
Viewer Gender Confusion: The Aliens themselves, especially the Queen who is often called a "she" in the films. Technically, all members of the species are or can be considered hermaphrodites (i.e. having both male and female sex organs) from a visual viewpoint, because H.R. Giger's design is neither male nor female but a disturbing combination of both sexes. From a reproductive viewpoint, the series tends to flip-flop between the Aliens being actual hermaphrodites (Giger's own original portrayal of the creature included human-like sexual organs, a scene deleted from the first movie had the alien being able to "convert" two humans into huge eggs with fully-grown aliens developing inside, the original design for the Newborn from Resurrection was that it was, like Giger's original model, possessed of a human-like vagina and penis) and the Aliens being asexual "drones" where selected individuals can mutate into/be hatched as parthenogenetically fertile female "queens".
Ash is a strong android with medical knowledge, so he likely could have killed a more inexperienced Ripley in three seconds if he really wanted to. Instead, when he moves against her, he starts flipping his shit and acting all deranged. Many viewers take this as indication that he's suffering from a programming conflict: he's supposed to help humans but his orders are to sacrifice the crew if necessary. His later comment on the alien being free from "delusions of morality" takes on a new light, then: he wishes he didn't have any sort of morality chip at all. And his distaste for humans can seem understandable when you consider that he is a slave, like other androids in the Alien universe. Why should he be expected to care for them? He isn't given much of a choice, either, and is just as much a victim of the Company as the other characters.
The other idea is that Ash actually is malevolent, beyond that which he is programmed for. The idea being that, in part, he is fascinated by the alien and wants to emulate it (that being the reason behind his method of killing Ripley), and actually has motives of his own, beyond simply studying the beast, indicating a degree of A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
Ash and his admiration of the Alien. There's enough ambiguity in the lines and their delivery to raise the question: was Ash Three Laws-Compliant or not? If he was, then his amoral mission was given to him by the same people who programmed that morality into him, and he failed his mission in part because his morals wouldn't allow him to most effectively manipulate the crew into keeping the Alien safe. If he, like the Alien, was "unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality," he might have succeeded in his mission, and wouldn't have cared that he was betraying his crew. Instead, he failed both his mission and the humans he was meant to serve and protect. Thus, his breakdown occurs for a similar reason to HAL's, being given conflicting instructions that finally built into a fatal error.
Was the Alien in the Narcissus ship sleeping or dying? Seems the Alien is looks sleepy on the ship, while Ripley puts on her spacesuit and straps herself into the ship's chair. Could it be that the Alien was dying from spending its energies turning Dallas and Brett into eggs through the Eggmorphing process? The Alien after using the Eggmorphing process just hurt its life expectancy, and it was looking for a safe and nice hiding place in the Narcissus to die alone.
Applicability: Ridley Scott said that there is no allegory, Freudian, feminist, Marxist, or otherwise to be found in this film. That has done nothing to stop decades of endless analysis of this film's use of H. R. Giger's excessively Freudian imagery and the role of Ripley as a feminist icon, among other things.
Ass Pull: Ash being an android. While it's become so ingrained in pop cultural consciousness that nobody questions it nowadays, the existence of androids in the film's universe has zero foreshadowing, and his Robotic Reveal has zero bearing on the plot. He could've been swapped out with a creepy human and the story would've been functionally identical. Not to mention the jarring incongruity of having completely lifelike robots with flawless speech recognition, logical processing, and voice synthesis in a setting where the rest of the technology is clunky Cassette Futurism, although that falls more under Zeerust and Technology Marches On.
Best Known for the Fanservice: Ripley stripping down to some especially tiny underwear in preparation for hypersleep in the final scene. This has actually been used as a knock against the film's feminist bona fides, especially since the camera drops to crotch level throughout the whole scene. Scott seems to have been going for "vulnerable", having her stripped down to just her underwear before she realizes the alien is still alive and on the shuttle and then suiting up in the armor-like spacesuit for the final confrontation, but he ended up with fanservice.
Parker destroying the remains of Ash with a flamethrower after learning of the Company's Evil Plan is very cathartic, seeing Ash's Smug Snake expression peeling and melting away from his head with each blast is also a perfect comeuppance for him given that he suggested solutions for the alien that were purposefully unsuccessful like scaring it away with fire, but used against him are very effective.
Ripley subjecting the Alien to the most satisfying Thrown Out the Airlock ever. After spending the entire movie terrorizing and murdering the Nostromo crew and busting every attempt of being stopped, even causing the whole Nostromo to undergo a Senseless Sacrifice when it's revealed the alien escaped along with Ripley, seeing it finally getting blasted out is so liberating, especially when it still attempts to cling on in the doorway and climb back aboard through one of the engine exhausts, only for Ripley to make it lose its grip by impaling it with the harpoon gun and punching the shuttle's engine to full blast blowing it away into deep space.
"The cast of the original Alien didn't know what was going to happen in the chestburster scene." Well, they knew, because they'd read the script, and it was described in a fair amount of detail there. What they didn't know was what it was going to actually look like, since no one had ever attempted an effect like it before, or the ins and outs of how it was going to be achieved. Everyone was sweating bullets that day. The effects team because they were trying to do something no one had ever done before and only had one take to get it right. The filmmakers because this scene was literally the only reason the movie got made, and if it didn't work or looked silly they were sunk. The cast because it was a big effects scene that would only get one take and they didn't want to be the reason it failed. There were hiccups, a few of which actually made it into the movie. But on the whole, the scene went as it was scripted and expected, the effect was just so radically new it affected the actors on basically the same level it affected the audience when the film was released. Even so, expect this crop up as a common piece of "little-known trivia" about the film, often with little or no elaboration.
Many, even professional film critics, will insist that the Alien kept getting bigger throughout the film, kept changing and was never the same shape twice, or both. It obviously grew from the relatively-tiny Chestburster to the human-sized adult (and the Facehugger could be counted as a different form of the same creature), but only one adult Alien costume was made and, for the most part, only one actor wore it. This most likely comes from the subtle way Ridley Scott filmed the Alien, drawing focus to different bits of it each time it's seen and never really letting you take a good look at it. When the adult first appears to kill Brett, the focus is quite obviously on the Nested Mouths. The second time, when it grabs Dallas, the focus is on the arms and claws. The third, when it attacks Parker and Lambert, pays a lot of attention to the tail, using it to smack Parker across the room and...whatever it was doing to Lambert. It's only when Ripley's finally all alone with it in the shuttle that you see all these elements together, but still only in quick cuts that never linger. But the suit and actor were the same every time the Alien was shot, its size and design is consistent from the first appearance of its adult form to the end of the film. (A stuntman wore the costume rarely, notably for the Alien's final demise of hanging off the back of the shuttle and getting blasted by the engines, but excepting scenes where a stuntman was necessary, Bolaji Badejo was the only one in the Alien costume.)
"Lambert is transgender." This theory is based on a piece of fluff text (which may not have been meant as canon in the first place) from her profile in the sequel stating she had a sex change as a baby, but the only context it gives is that there may be "suppressed trauma related to gender alteration", which makes it sound more like a botched circumcision like David Reimer rather than anything close to the modern conception of gender identity. Furthermore, the notion of Lambert being transgender wasn't intended while making the first film since it conflicts with another set of profiles created by Ridley Scott himself that lists all the crew as either "Male [Natural]" or "Female [Natural]", implying transgender people are common in the future but that Lambert isn't one of them.
The way some fans talk about the scene of Ellen Ripley stripping to her underwear, you would think she was wearing a bikini and thong, and that the scene was purely fanservice. For one, the actual scene is much more modest: Ripley is wearing a tank-top and tighty whities. Secondly, the point of the scene was to make the audience feel Ripley's vulnerability at being alone with the alien (which is a literal rape allegory), so her putting on the spacesuit before confronting the alien is meant to both build tension and act as a metaphor.
Yaphet Kotto as Parker, the flamethrower-wielding and wise-cracking mechanic has his fans.
Ian Holm's eerie performance as the cold, manipulative Ash put him on the map as one of the UK's best classically-trained character actors, particularly to audiences in the US where he wasn't as well-known.
Jones the cat. In the actual movie he barely has any screen time and when he does, all he does is hide, hiss and run away. (And constantly get the humans into trouble.) However the trailers and later TV spots make it look like he's just as important as the Alien and Ripley. Considering how memorable he is, it's hard to blame them. The fact that he's the only character from the first two films to survive to the end of the initial trilogy has made him a badass by default.
Space Jockey—the alien pilot aboard the derelict ship—extended to the rest of his race, as well. Derived from a name used by the film crew; in the canon, it's never named. In Prometheus they're called the "Engineers".
The terms "facehugger" and "chestburster" were also coined by the film crew.
The adult creature is sometimes dubbed "Kane's Son", after a line used by Ash.
In earlier drafts of the script, the crew were going to be revealed to largely have open sex with one-anotherregardless of gender, which some fans bemoan the loss of, because it would have been LGBTQIA representation well ahead of its time.
The biggest example is Eggmorphing, a method by which Xenomorphs transform living or dead victims into new eggs. Revealed shortly after the film's release, fans have debated for decades whether or not eggmorphing would have been a far scarier explanation for Xenomorph reproduction than Queens. Some works (such as the novelization for Alien³) even try to work in the idea that the two methods coexist.
In the novelisation, Ash says the aliens who left the distress signal to warn others from landing on the planet were a noble people, and that hopefully humanity will meet them under better circumstances. Come Prometheusthe Engineers are shown to have created the Xenomorphs as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, that at one point they attempted to use to destroy humanity.
The order the characters die in the film note (strictly speaking, in the director's cut, which removes the ambiguity about Dallas's fate) eerily mirrors the current order the actors passed away in real life.
The tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream," is one of the most famous taglines in film history, and is often parodied on other films' taglines.
A tweet from a critic about his wife's review sums up the movie as "Alien is a movie where no one listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat. Four stars."
Mis-blamed: Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett's original script had an all-male crew, with a caveat that almost all roles could be cast unisex note As explained above, according to O'Bannon, the one sole exception was Kane. . It also has—despite Giler and Hill's claims they did a page one rewrite—largely the same plot as the finished film. So all of the gender politics it's been lauded for (killing off Dallas so Ripley can become the Final Girl) and mocked for (Stephen King's allegation that Ripley rescuing Jonesy is sexist) don't actually exist, as the role was written as a man named "Martin Roby".
Moral Event Horizon: "Special Order 937," the company's plan to bring aliens to Earth, at the expense of the crew's lives. Given the events in Alien: Covenant, who actually wrote the order (David or an actual higher-up at W-Y) is open to interpretation.
The baby Alien just zooming away after the chestburster scene. It's so fast and goes at such a straight line that it's comical.
At the end of the film, the unstoppable killing machine and perfect specimen just...hangs out in the shuttle, not doing anything. It opens and closes its jaws a few times, yawning, content to chill while Ripley panics. Mike Stoklasa likens it to a bug sitting on a windshield. In earlier drafts of the script, Ash states the alien lives for a brief time, creates a new cache of eggs, and then looks for a place to die. But the final cut and the sequels changed all that, so the big bad movie monster just looks apathetic and listless.
Ash trying use a rolled-up magazine to suffocate Ripley seems like a case of the director leaning so hard into Freud Was Right that he went with the least effective means imaginable of choking somebody just for the sake of "Does This Remind You of Anything?" imagery, when Ash's hand would've made more sense and been just as suggestive.
Narm Charm: The Alien's phallic head. For as blatantly Freudian as it looks (even including a knobby "glans" on the back end), it's become an accepted part of the creature that most people have considered scary nonetheless.
Nausea Fuel: Besides the obvious Body Horror and gore, there are two disorienting visual cases of this.
As Ripley escapes the Nostromo, the emergency lights spin rapidly, which creates a very nauseating strobe effect as she escapes. This isn't helped by the very fast camera movement during the sequence.
When Ripley is ambushed by the Alien on the shuttle, the lights flicker very rapidly in a strobe manner.
When the film was released in 1979, there were reports of viewers running into the theater lobby to throw up. This seems strange in retrospect, because the scenes of Kane getting chestbursted and Ash getting his head knocked off are positively tame compared to the later Slasher Movie and Torture Porn genres, or the Body Horror achieved by Carpenter's The Thing (1982) or Cronenberg's The Fly (1986).
The cast were also killed off in order of how famous they were. John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Skerritt were the bigger names in the cast - and Sigourney Weaver was a complete unknown. Likewise this was before the Slasher Movie had become widespread (Halloween (1978) came out only the previous year, and Black Christmas (1974) only four years previously) - so the Final Girl trope was not in public consciousness. There was genuine fear around who would survive the film - which of course is no longer there because Sigourney Weaver became a Memetic Badass because of it.
Signature Scene: The chestburster reveal, which paved the way for future Body Horror in science fiction. It's literally the only reason the movie got made (well, that and Star Wars had just come out, and Alien was the only sci-fi spaceship script anyone at Fox had laying on their desk). The producers thought the original script was horrible, but the chestburster scene was brilliant, and it was what got the movie greenlit.
Slow-Paced Beginning: A common point brought up about the film by both detractors and fans is the slow-moving first half hour of the film, as much of the runtime is spent showcasing dialogue scenes and characters working onboard the Nostromo. The film picks up after the infamous chestburster scene.
The cuts between Ash's separated head and the dummy version are quite jarring. So much so that in the RiffTrax commentary, they say "Seamless!" in between cuts.
As Ripley is boarding the shuttle, she does an awkward turn and appears to fire her flamethrower, but the timing and the direction do not match the fireball she supposedly projects, and which continues burning after she turns her back to the corridor. While a viewer could chalk it up to the Nostromo itself exploding, the way it's staged imply Weaver missed her mark and the pyrotechnics people tried (and failed) to compensate for it.
At the end when the Alien is hanging outside of the ship and it's set against the white door and wall, it becomes too obvious the Alien is a man in a suit in spite of its high quality details, which is not helped by the fake looking spinning space background. The fact that it's a stuntman (necessary for the wire work involved) rather than the ultra-thin Bolaji Badejo in the alien suit might be a factor here as well.
The newborn chestburster scurrying across the table is either Special Effects Failure, Narm, or Narm Charm depending on your point of view. If you've seen Spaceballs, it's probably closer to the last.
A.E. van Vogt considered the film an uncredited adaption of his Space Beagle stories "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet", and he decided to sue 20th Century Fox. Dan O Bannon denied having been influenced by it — and van Vogt's stories were already technically a "spiritual adaptation" of On the Origin of Species in the first place — but Fox chose to settle out of court, presumably with a rather large check involved.
Alien might also be the closest to a film adaptation of Clark Ashton Smith's "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" we have for now. The same story might have served as an additional inspiration for Half-Life's headcrabs.
Squick: Tons, but the white fluid that leaks out from Ash's body stands out.
Tear Jerker: Parker's reaction to Brett's death, especially in a deleted scene where he and Ripley show up only seconds too late to save him.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The alien, despite how little we see of it until the very end. The creature is so well designed, at times, you have to remind yourself that it's actually a man in a costume.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Someone in the film's merchandising team apparently thought that when they managed to get an action figure of the title character produced and it was advertised on Saturday mornings between the Saturday-Morning Cartoon shows!
The Woobie: Lambert, especially if you add in the Deleted Scenes. While she somewhat comes across as a whining bitch, she has a few establishing moments in the deleted scenes that paint her as a notably more sympathetic (if not necessary more likable) character, which makes her tragic demise even more gut-wrenching.
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