The Alien franchise has made an indelible
mark on film history and future, but with prequels and sequels expanding the original
story over a span of several decades, it can be hard to untangle what's really going on
here. What's the Alien movie saga really about? Let's explore. The Alien movie story begins when a protohuman
on Earth drinks a deadly poison that kills him and dissolves his body into strands of
human DNA, which is then dosed into the water supply. Several million years later, Dr. Elizabeth
Shaw believes she has found a map and an invitation to the planet where these protohumans originated. "I think they want us to come and find them." She calls them Engineers, and she wrongly
assumes they want to meet their children. Shaw and a scientific crew are hired by the
Weyland Corporation to find the Engineers on Planet LV-223, and after a great deal of
trouble, they arrive. But the Engineers are all dead. Their spacecraft is filled with jars of toxic
black goo corresponding to egg-like sacs that begin to open once signs of life appear. Yes, Dr. Shaw finds her Engineers, a lifelong
passion bordering on obsession. But what she didn't expect to find was that
the Engineers had set a course to Earth with the intention of wiping out the human race
they had created. The Engineers never had their chance as they
themselves were wiped out by an ever-evolving Neomorph, the predecessor to the Xenomorph
seen later in the series. Megalomaniacal android David decides to take
up the Engineers' mantle and infect the human crew. "Big things have small beginnings." After chaos, destruction, and an encounter
with a revived Engineer who proves his hostility toward humans, David and Dr. Shaw escape to
the Engineers' home. Shaw's new obsession is understanding why
the Engineers planned to kill all the humans. Was greed one of the human foibles that led
the Engineers to want to eliminate us? It's Peter Weyland's greedy obsession for
immortality that drives him to create the android David, who eventually surpasses his
maker and winds up creating the Xenomorph as we know it. Did the Engineers know or come to suspect
that human behavior would be the universe's eventual destruction? All signs point to yes. Dr. Shaw never actually makes it to the Engineers'
home planet, which she and David have been calling Paradise. Instead, David kills her and drops the black
goo on the thriving planet. He cultivates Xenomorph eggs, and sends out
a welcoming signal to try and attract new lifeforms to what is now his planet. The Covenant is a colonizer craft set out
for one of the few remaining known habitable planets in the universe, Origae-6, along with
an entire ecosystem on board. The Covenant crew is awakened from hypersleep
years early, and, on a hunch, they divert from their course to check out the signal
coming from the unnamed planet. "A human being out there where there can't
be any humans. A hidden planet that turns up out of nowhere
and just happens to be perfect for us? It's too good to be true." So much of the Alien story is based on humans
terraforming faraway planets because the Earth was either becoming or already was uninhabitable. Thanks to climate change and war, the privileged
few humans who could escape our planet did, and with apparent gusto. It didn't seem to bother them that they would
spend decades of their lives in hypersleep to get to these planets and start rebuilding. Without these humans looking for new places
to colonize, the Xenomorph would never have found its perfect host to propagate its own
species, with a little help from David. David has been engineering a new form of the
Xenomorph, "a perfect organism", that he can finally test on human subjects. With the crew on board the Covenant is Walter,
the newest model android, who senses his counterpart is up to no good. When David finds out Covenant has an entire
colony of hundreds of humans, it's a battle to stop him before he commandeers the ship
for his own purposes. When he does, we start to realize why the
Engineers wanted to destroy their human creation. Like their ancestors, humans also decided
to play god and created synthetic life in their own image. David's god complex mirrors his creator Weyland's,
and now David has created a monster. In the Alien vision of the future, android
technology mirrors human emotional development. David and Walter are different models of clone
androids in Prometheus and Covenant, designed by Peter Weyland for different means to different
ends. David was a special creation, made to match
Weyland's great intelligence and one day surpass it. "He is the closest thing to a son I will ever
have. Unfortunately, he is, he is not human. He will never grow old, and he will never
die." Walter was created to be a faithful companion
to its human counterpart. A protector and source of support. As Alien begins, it's been 16 years since
we left David and the spaceship Covenant. A salvaging team on the ship Nostromo answers
a distress call on planet LV-426, even though they aren't equipped for a rescue mission. A hair second too late, Ellen Ripley figures
out the distress call is actually a warning, but one of her crew, Kane, has already been
infected by a Xenomorph facehugger. Breaking quarantine protocols, Kane is allowed
back on board, where the alien hatches and wreaks bloody havoc. Ash, a crew member who's secretly an android,
receives a communique from people at the Company, who want him to bring the creature back alive
no matter the human cost. Here, the android Ash is nowhere near as sophisticated
as either David or Walter, presumably because these droids ended up being dangerously advanced. But Ash was also a danger to humans, especially
once he got his marching orders to bring the Xenomorph back alive. Disobeying orders, Ripley and her crew hunt
the monster and eventually kill it. As one of the most memorable survivors put
to screen, Ripley strikes a perfect balance between strength and vulnerability, as well
as professionalism and competence. Even though she is met with disbelief when
she first discusses the reality of the Xenomorph, she refuses to be gaslighted. Ripley and the cat Jones are the only survivors
who end this portion of the Alien saga, tucked safely in hypersleep, waiting to be found
by another ship. Interestingly, Jones was an excellent first
alert system, since he'd tried to warn multiple people about the presence of the alien on
board the Nostromo. And, like Ripley, nobody listened to him at
first. But Jones would go on to survive the series
longer than any other human character outside of our well-known heroine. You'd think that when one of the deadliest
and most virulent creatures to ever exist surfaces, the logical thing to do would be
to exterminate it, especially if it has the power to destroy every planet it touches. But because of corporate greed, opportunistic
humans attempt to capitalize financially off the creature at the expense of other humans
with less powerful positions. "You sent them out there, and you didn't even
warn them. Why didn't you warn them, Burke?" The arrogance of man we see throughout the
entire series is a scathing indictment of an obsession with violence and killing. There are few women in much of the Alien saga,
but it's the women who ultimately fight against these deadly obsessions. At the start of Aliens, Ripley has drifted
in hypersleep for 57 years before she's awakened and ends up on the military vessel Sulaco. Unfortunately, the Sulaco is under instruction
to return to LV-426, where Hadley's Hope, a human colony, has suddenly stopped responding
to all communication. Ripley is in severe post-traumatic stress,
which turns into grief when she finds out her daughter died on Earth while she was in
hypersleep. Worse still, her claims about the alien monster
with acid for blood aren't taken seriously enough to stop the mission. "Because if one of those things gets down
here, then that will be all! Then all this, this bulls---, that you think
is so important, you can just kiss all that goodbye!" On LV-426, the Sulaco crew and Ripley search
the seemingly abandoned colony and find a new Xenomorph nest. The eggs have already hatched and used the
entire colony as incubators, with the exception of one survivor, a young girl named Newt. Newt is the same age Ripley's daughter was
when she first left Earth, so Ripley is immediately protective of her. Once the Sulaco's military crew realize the
Xenomorph threat is as horrific as Ripley insisted, they try to escape. But as in Alien, once again corporate and
military greed leads to sabotage, this time from Burke, who's determined to preserve a
Xenomorph specimen. He and the creature are both defeated, and
Ripley survives, joined by Newt, Jones the cat, Corporal Hicks, and the torso of android
Bishop, who proves to be a portrait of empathy, one in which we can see shades of earlier
Walter. The reveal that Ripley's daughter has died
becomes key to her character. It explains why she's so protective of the
women in her orbit going forward, especially young girls. Even by the time she's Hybrid Ripley in Resurrection,
she has a fierce maternal side, shown in the way she shields the android Call as well as
a continued deep distrust of the "company men." When Hybrid Ripley has an alien baby who imprints
on her, she's horrified and disgusted by the monster, but at the same time feels their
connection and weeps openly when she has to kill it. Shortly after Ripley enters hypersleep on
the Sulaco, a fire breaks out, killing everyone else on board and shooting her pod into space. It lands on penal colony Fiorina 161, where
the Sulaco shuttle also crashes. But Ripley isn't the sole survivor: A Xenomorph
had also made it and had impregnated her before ejecting her onto Fiorina 161. The penal colony has essentially been abandoned
by the people who created it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, until they find out there's a
live Xenomorph on board and that Ripley is carrying an alien fetus in her chest. "The company knows everything that happened
on the ship. It all goes into the computer and gets sent
back to network." Because it is a prison planet run by convicts,
there are no weapons to fight the monster other than a steel forge that hasn't been
used in decades. Ripley and the prisoners still finally manage
to kill the loose Xenomorph, again at huge human cost. When Weyland-Yutani emissaries arrive, they're
headed by Michael Bishop, the human template for the android Bishop. But Ripley knows better than to trust company
men by now, and she throws herself into a pit of molten steel so nobody can try to weaponize
the alien monster within her. Ripley's already sacrificed so much in fighting
this creature. Here, she gives up the last thing she has
left. Because humans can't seem to leave well enough
alone when it comes to universe-destroying acid-blooded creatures, Alien: Resurrection
continues the story 200 years later, when the United Systems Military is still trying
to recreate a functioning Xenomorph aboard the USS Auriga. Using Ripley's melded human and alien DNA
recovered from Fiorina 161, new crops of military scientists tinker with her code to clone the
Xenomorph. They've engineered a hybrid version of Ripley
who has green nails, acid blood, and vague memories from the original Ripley who died
centuries before. The scientists have also finally created a
working Xenomorph, but like Ripley, it's not the same creature it once was. It's worlds smarter and understands English. "So. We're a fast learner." A salvage team from the ship Betty boards
the Auriga with human cargo that will be used to create more monsters for military might. A new android, Call, is on her own mission
to kill the hybrid Ripley before she can give the military the queen that was gestating
in her chest. She fails her mission, but Call's role here
is also to show how android progression in the series has reached near-human status,
with a machine who's more human than inhuman. Ripley attempts to kill the queen before she
gives birth, but is also too late. However, the queen doesn't give birth to eggs
as past queens have. Instead, it gives birth to a fully formed
alien with many of Ripley's features. The huge baby alien kills the queen, thinking
Ripley is its actual mother, and Ripley is forced to kill her "baby," while the Auriga
crashes into Earth. Ripley finally makes it back to her home planet,
sort of. "I'm a stranger here myself." Long before the Alien prequels introduced
the Neomorph, the creature evolved over the course of each original film, both in physicality
and intelligence. While its evolution is confusing at first,
by Alien: Covenant we learn David is the "father" of the Xenomorph as we know it from Alien
and beyond. The black ooze cultivated by the Engineers
was a biological weapon with the ability to mutate its host, hence why we see several
different versions of the monster over the course of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The Xenomorph is a perfect killing machine,
and one of the sad lessons never learned by humans was to leave the thing alone. It cannot be tamed. It can only be killed, and even that proves
an almost impossible feat for hundreds of years. Even though Hybrid Ripley appears to kill
the last of the Xenomorphs, who knows whether they have persisted on another planet out
in the universe, waiting for a meatsack to arrive and play host. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite
movies are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the
bell so you don't miss a single one.
