Franchise / Alien

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Alien is a multimedia film franchise created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, that codified science fiction Body Horror. The franchise, which spans films, novels, comic books, and video games, helped to launch the careers of creators like Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Sigourney Weaver.

The series revolves around the "Xenomorphs", alien monsters with acid blood that spawn by bursting out of other organisms' chests and try to kill or...bring to the hive just about anything that isn't them. Most works involve humans encountering the creatures, most often with horrific results. The monsters' memorable designs were the work of H. R. Giger.

A wide array of Crossover works with 20th Century Fox's other famous science fiction alien monster, the Predator, also exist. For more information on those, see the Alien vs. Predator page. See also Xenomorph Xerox for similar creatures in other franchises.

Alien franchise media:

General franchise tropes:

• Absent Aliens: Despite the name, the series might count as this:
  • The titular Aliens aren't sapient and are basically intelligent animals and Alien: Covenant reveals (or retcons, depending on your viewpoint) that they were actually created by a human-built android.
    • The novelization and Alien: The Roleplaying Game say that David copied his Xenomorph from earlier Engineer designs.
  • The Engineers are a race of Precursors who created humanity but are wiped out in a flashback in Covenant. Though Ridley Scott said if he got to do a sequel six Engineers who weren't on the planet at the time would have shown up.
  • The Colonial Marines in Aliens mention dealing with "Arcturians" but James Cameron refused to give much information about what they are (the interaction is in the context of sexual hijinks during R&R, which the Marines seemed eager to get back to).
  • While there have been two crossover movies with the Predator franchise, Ridley Scott considers them non-canon and deliberately contradicted them when writing the backstory for Prometheus.
• Action Girl: In the Dark Horse post-Aliens comic series, Newt becomes one hell of an action girl. In general, the series is known for its strong female protagonists, who either start as this or become this over the course of their encounter with the Xenomorph.
• Adaptation Expansion: The comic series branches off from the movies after Aliens, and benefits greatly as a result.
• Agri World: Dan Abnett's "Reaper" shows an industrial version, and one of the Dark Horse comics gave us an aquatic version that was devoted to farming kelp. Both end up dealing with lethal aliens, with the kelp farm even having some kind of aquatic offshoot of the franchise main monsters.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Invoked in the films, but pushed to the extreme in the prequels. In the original Alien, Ash's directive to preserve the lifeform even at the expense of the crew evolves into a strange admiration for the creature as well as a peculiar sadism, particularly toward Ripley. In Alien: Covenant, David goes completely off his programming and begins to develop a god complex. Bishop in Aliens and Alien 3 averts this, explained as having stricter safeguards than the one that went against the crew in the first film. But by Alien: Resurrection, androids have been outlawed with orders to "destroy on sight" because some of them started to make "children".
• Air-Vent Passageway: Both humans and Xenomorphs make good use of air vents to get around without the other side noticing. The Xenomorph in the first film moves around the spaceship using air vents. In the second film, Newt survives by hiding in the air vents, and the Marines make their escape through the same vents. Newt uses them for more aggressive purposes in the Dark Horse adaptation.
• Alien Invasion: A constant fear whenever the Xenomorphs are brought up is the possibility that they will reach Earth or more settled space. In a literal sense, of course, anytime the Aliens turn up on a human colony (or in a human host) they're committing an alien invasion. In the Dark Horse comics, they actually do reach Earth, creating a Bug War.
• Alien Landmass: Planet LV-426 (aka Acheron) has rocky formations which are rounded at the top into smooth nubs. Offhand, the rocks greatly resemble bones.
• All Gravity Is the Same: Going by the movies, LV-426 seems to have standard gravity but the novelization and screenplay say it has a diameter of 1,200 km. If this was the case, it would visibly be a Baby Planet with a ridiculously dense core to generate any kind of gravity. The Colonial Marines Technical Manual says its gravity is 0.86G and gives it a more realistic diameter of 12,201 km.
• Alternate Continuity: Covenant introducing a very different origin to the Xenomorphs than what was seen in the Alien vs. Predator (2004) films, where they are instead they only recently came into existence within the film's timeline comparted to AvP where they have existed for thousands of years. This makes the Alien films a separate continuity to the AvP/Predator continuity. Then along comes 2025's Predator: Badlands, which once again established that they share the same universe.
  • Even absent the Predator franchise, continuity is all over the place. The comic series has their own continuity, having been written before Alien 3 and Resurrection. Covenant creates a Series Continuity Error with the rest of the franchise by implicitly changing the origin of the Xenomorphs, making the earlier films impossible by dramatically bringing forward their creation.
• Alternate History: Andrew Gaska's welded universe takes place in a world in which the Cold War never ended, the UK regained its superpower status and the United States expanded to include the entire western hemisphere.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Actually a set of company protocols, but it sure resembles a cult searching for an Artifact of Doom they think will bring them power. From the 21st Century (possibly before) to the far future. Years, decades, centuries come and go and every time so much as a hint of a sign of a Xenomorph rears its head, they have a team ready to go, with moles, dupes and those they need for the moment all set to go.
• And I Must Scream: This trope can apply to those patched to a wall in the hive with a facehugger soon to latch on. In the comics, a teenaged Newt falls in love with a Colonial Marine, who turns out to be an Artificial Human with more advanced emotions. He makes a Heroic Sacrifice by staying behind on an infested military base to allow her to escape, but this leaves him trapped on a Ghost Ship (the Xenomorphs leave him alone because he's useless to them for breeding) that can never return to civilization because of the risk.
• Appropriated Title: Although the third, fourth, and fifth films all went under the original title, most spin-off merchandise for some time was known under Aliens, which was the second movie. Downplayed in later years, as the franchise’s shift to movies and series set prior to Aliens has set up a dichotomy of sorts — media set closer to the first film in the timeline uses the Alien moniker, while media set closer to the sequel uses Aliens.
• Arch-Enemy: Ellen Ripley has the entire Xenomorph race, which she has vowed to destroy so they can't kill any more people.
• Artificial Human: Ash, Bishop, and Call (a bit of franchise-wide alphabetical Theme Naming which Prometheus continued with David, though Covenant would break the streak with Walter). Ash from the first movie is a particularly sinister example, since he secretly protects the Alien as part of his assignment and betrays the other crew members. Romulus introduced two further androids, Andy and Rook, while Earth would introduce new types of this trope with cyborg (enhanced human) Morrow and hybrids (androids with a mind downloaded from a human) Wendy and her fellow experiments.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: Deconstructed in several ways. The Nostromo in the first film, for instance, clearly had this look before the wear and tear set in. The colony in the second film, meanwhile, has a facade of this look over a greasy industrial substructure. The contrast between this trope, Used Future, and unsettling organic structures is a recurring theme throughout the franchise.
• Baby Planet: The tiny moon that came to be known as LV-426 was just another dime-a-dozen planetoid barely 1,200 kilometers in diameter, so small that it's gravity is only 0.86 that of Earth's; another insignificant rock with a primordial and unbreathable atmosphere destined to be forgotten in the vastness of space... were it not for the ghost-ship of an unknown Alien civilization broadcasting a mysterious warning to not explore its cavernous innards... a warning unfortunately ignored by both the crew of the Weyland Yutani towing vehicle Nostromo, and the colonists of Hadley's Hope 57 years after the former mysteriously disappeared...
• Better to Die than Be Killed: This is how those knowing what's coming while impregnated feel. Subverted in the Newt's Tale comic series. During the colonist's final stand against the xenomorphs, Newt's mother picks up a gun and looks at her children (intending to put them out of their misery before turning the gun on herself). She gets ready to pull the trigger...and then Newt tells her there's another way, and leads them towards a ventilation grate during the attack. Not that it helps, considering that her mother and brother get killed off in short order, forcing her to flee into the duct.
• BFG: The combination gun Ripley is carrying at the end of Part 2 in the Dark Horse comic of Aliens has to be seen to be believed.
• Biological MacGuffin: From the first film in the series, the Weyland-Yutani corporation has been attempting to obtain a specimen of the Xenomorph for their bioweapons division, either in the form of an adult drone, a Face Hugger, or an embryo still incubating in a living host. This search drives the events of each instalment, but invariably results in a catastrophic waste of money, ships, facilities, and human lives, and always ends with the specimens being jettisoned into space or incinerated, but the corporation just keeps on trying regardless of the losses. In Alien³, this search extends to Ripley herself, since she's carrying the embryo of the Xenomorph Queen, to the point that in Alien Resurrection, clones are made of her in the hopes of cloning the Queen embryo as well; after numerous disastrous mergers of human and alien DNA, the end result is the creation of the Newborn.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The xenomorphs' caustic "blood" is more akin to battery acid than the nutrient distribution matrix other creatures have. It reacts with the metals the xenomorphs absorb from their meals to generate electricity, which they live off of. They also have a "mesoskeleton" of polarized silicon, basically meaning their hides are made of glass. Their nails and teeth are made of a silver-colored metallic material, possibly iron. Their tongues have their own mouth (when it's not adapted into a resin-secreting proboscis in the case of the Worker). Under their cranial shell/frontal lobe area is a remarkably human skull. They absorb traits from the species they parasitize, and their reproductive process is more or less haplodiplontic (a seed produces a number of highly mutable spores that grow into a more adapted offspring, something only seen in certain fungi on Earth).
• Broken Bird: Newt, later renamed to Billie because of canon continuity issues is one in the Dark Horse comic series.
• Bug War: A small scale version. The first and third films center on a group of human noncombatants against a single Alien, while the second and fourth films feature groups of armed people against a horde of Aliens. The Alien vs. Predator series features a full-scale battle between the species in the second movie. The "war" part didn't happened until Aliens versus Predator 2.
• Canon Discontinuity:
  • The Dark Horse comics totally ignore 3 and Resurrection because they were written before Alien 3 came along and killed everyone. In the subsequent novelizations, Newt and Hicks were replaced by Billie and Wilks and Ripley was revealed to be a artificial person with implanted memories.
  • Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were intended to de-canonize Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, with the former completely disregarding the events and characters therein and the latter portraying the Xenomorphs as having only been created 19 years before the events of Alien.
  • The Out of the Shadows trilogy serves as a Continuity Reboot for the expanded universe, disregarding the comics and other novels, aside from a few little nods. The second book very nearly decanonized 3 and Resurrection as well, before Fox changed their mind and asked the author to include references to them.
  • Neil Blompkamp's film was suggested to ignore 3 (and Resurrection by extension) due to early concept art featuring an older version of Newt, who had a bridge dropped upon her in the opening of that film.^note Hicks was revealed to have survived in Aliens: Colonial Marines. Blomkamp clarified that his film would not be retconning them, while Sigourney Weaver indicated it would be set in an Alternate Timeline.
• Canon Foreigner: The comics, games, novels and toys introduce many characters and alien varieties that are ignored by the films.
  • Kenner's Aliens toyline introduces the alien-animal hybrids Arachnid, Boar, Bull, Cougar, Crab, Gorilla, Mantis, Panther, Rhino, Scorpion, Snake, and Swarm. Each includes an Aliens: Space Marines mini-comic giving further details. The Alien King and Queen Face Hugger/Giant Face Hugger may be related to alien varieties in other media.
  • A Jockey-Xenomorph appears in the comic Aliens: Apocalypse and the game Aliens: Infestation. This form is unlikely now that Prometheus changed the earlier Space Jockey concept into the Engineers.
• Canon Welding: Much like their decision with Star Wars, Disney had to make a call with Alien canon once the films shifted over to them and the comics to Marvel. Their franchise consultant, scifi writer Andrew Gaska, who also sorted out Planet of the Apes canon, has declared that any expanded universe material that did not contradict the six main films can now be considered canon, including Alien: Isolation, the 40th Anniversary shorts, the Alien RPG, Aliens: Bug Hunt, and most of the later Dark Horse comics. Things that contradict the main film series, such Alien vs. Predator (2004), the earlier Dark Horse comics, or Aliens: Colonial Marines, are labelled "barroom canon"; tall tales and rumours told by roughnecks and raconteurs in distant saloons. At least until 2025's Predator Badlands retcons this, again establishing the two as part of the same universe.
• Canis Latinicus: Supplemental material for the franchise states that the titular alien species was given the name Internecivus raptus, or "murderous thief."
• Captain Ersatz: The two main characters in the first two arcs of the comic series were Newt and Hicks. When Alien 3 killed the characters off, future printings of the comic changed their names to Billie and Wilks, though this seems an odd choice in retrospect, as their backstories remained identical and the comics had diverged so sharply from the movies by that point that keeping them in step with one another seems irrelevant.
• Child Supplants Parent: This is a running theme in the last two Ridley Scott-helmed films. Androids were created by humans to serve them. Humans were apparently created by the Engineers, an alien race with even more advanced technology. They are all hostile or resentful towards the next and previous generation.
• Class Struggle: This is one of the primary themes of the films. Throughout the series, Weyland-Yutani and its wealthy executives seek to use the Xenomorphs as bio-weapons for even further profit, and consistently sacrifice lower-class people to do so. The first film has them willingly send a working-class crew to die just to capture a Xenomorph, and in the second do the same with a group of soldiers. And while they don't set up the events of the third film, they're perfectly willing to let the working-class prison guards and prisoners die if it serves them.
• Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: Weyland-Yutani is a combination of rival motoring conglomerates British Leyland and Toyota.
• Cold Sleep, Cold Future: The world seems to get a little bit grimmer each time Ripley wakes up. In the first film, the Company is willing to risk the lives of a ship's crew to get its hands on an Alien. In the second film, the Company (or at least Burke) is willing to sacrifice a whole colony to breed Aliens. In the third film, Ripley wakes up on a planet that is inhabited solely by a prison. In the fourth film, the megacorporations have given way to an even more irresponsible military that actually goes through with Alien genetic testing. The comic book canon is far worse than even this.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Occasionally (some deleted scenes in Aliens, the flashback in Alien vs. Predator (2004) and many times in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), the Xenomorphs abandon their stealth kill tactics for a Zerg Rush that goes about as well for them as one might expect, and it actually works out pretty well during the first AVP film right on up until the Predator Self-Destruct Mechanism kicks in.
• Continuous Decompression: Used in Part 1 and 2 during the Thrown Out the Airlock scenes. Part 4 has an incredibly big Newborn Xenomorph specimen blown out of an incredibly small hole found within a viewport window aboard the Betty.
• Continuity Reboot: The Fire and Stone comic series and the Out of the Shadows trilogy of novels serve as a reboot to the Alien and AVP franchises' expanded universes, while containing Continuity Nods to earlier entries.
• Continuity Snarl: Whether chestbusters can be removed without killing the host. It's implied in Alien 3, shown in Alien Resurrection, confirmed in the comic book Labyrinth, and rejected in Colonial Marines. Other supplementary materials state that even if the chestburster were successfully removed, the host would eventually die of complications arising from the infection process. Alien: The Roleplaying Game took the position that infection is almost guaranteed terminal, as the incubating chestburster's placental sac grows cancer-like tendrils throughout the body to shunt nutrients from the host back to it as quickly as possible, and a host isn't likely to survive their removal.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: Alien was confined entirely to a spaceship, Aliens took place on a colony, Alien³ took place on a prison planet and Alien Resurrection took place on a space station.
• Corpse-Strewn Lair: The walls of a xenomorph hive are usually covered with the remains of people who have served as previous xenomorph hosts.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: This is evidently humanity's hat in the Alien universe.
  Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
• Crapsack World: The Dark Horse comic series is one hellish place to live. The MegaCorp controls the world, all civil rights are essentially gone, the military kills civilians with impunity, and that's before the two killer alien species come knocking. The Aliens overrun Earth and more than one character wonders if we deserved it.
• Crossover: Famously so with the Predators in Alien vs. Predator.
  • Other comics have the alien forms in conflict with, for starters, Batman, and Superman.
  • A Xenomorph appears as a Guest Fighter in Mortal Kombat X, born out of the MK-specific Tarkata race. Coincidentally, a Predator also appears as a playable character, tying in with the above.
• Cult: They spring up in a few places, sometimes worshipping the Aliens. They end up becoming quite a nuisance in the Dark Horse canon.
• Degraded Boss: Literally every single officially created Xenomorph caste has suffered from this trope to a certain extent at one point or another for shall we say a rather large plethora of obvious in-universe reasons.
• Deliberately Non-Lethal Attack: The expanded universe (and it was present in the script and novelization of Aliens gives the Xenomorph tail stingers a coma-inducing venom for use in non-lethally subduing hosts to take back to the hive to serve as incubators for more Xenomorphs.
• Disproportionate Retribution: How does Weyland-Yutani react to Criminal Trespass in the "Harvest" comic? Lethal force. To be fair, given that the corporate property in question is the Xenomorph homeworld and by that point in the comics continuity said Xenos have managed to nearly wipe out all life on Earth, it may fall into Properly Paranoid.
• Distant Sequel: Both Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem take place in 2004, Alien is set 118 years later, both Aliens and Alien³ are set 57 years after the events of Alien, and Alien Resurrection takes place another 200 years after that. Prometheus is set 30 years before the events of Alien, while Alien: Covenant is set 11 years later.
• *Drool* Hello: The movies are pretty fond of this one. Whenever dripping saliva onto the victim won't signal a Xenomorph's presence, the warm air exhaled onto the victim's neck from behind will. And if that happens, it's bound to be too late to run.
• Dwindling Party: Across all of the films and other related media out there, if you see a group of main characters, expect there to only ever be one or two survivors at the end of it all.
• EgoCorp: The infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation is a hybrid megacorporation formed from both the Weyland and Yutani corporations, the former of which was founded by Charles Bishop Weyland in Alien vs. Predator (2004)—which takes place in the Present Day—and Sir Peter Weyland in Prometheus; while the latter was founded by Cullen Yutani from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Both corporations are meant to be a Call-Forward to the infamous MegaCorp of the far future.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Ellen Ripley was a normal human who Took a Level in Badass by the end of Aliens by destroying an entire Xenomorph hive by herself, fighting against acid-bleeding parasitic Xenomorphs. Then by Alien Resurrection her clone Ripley 8, who shares most of her memories, receives some Xenomorph DNA as a result of a flaw in the cloning process, resulting in Ripley's very own blood becoming slightly acidic as she gets a psychic connection with the Xenomorphs, has reduced empathy and predatory instincts, shows an increase in strength, and is able to shrug off being hit in the face with a loaded barbell.
• Enemy Civil War: The Aliens go into one in the "Genocide" comic. The military-industrial complex takes the opportunity to try to harvest the Fantastic Drug that is royal jelly.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: The motion trackers from Aliens, which often appeared in video game adaptations of the franchise.
• Ethnicity Monarch: In the Expanded Universe, the Xenomorph species is ruled by a Queen Mother, which even outranks the more commonly-known Queens. The Queen Mother telepathically controls every Xenomorph in the known universe and can even control humans and other species whether living or dead.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: In the comic series Aliens: Newt's Tale, Newt is the only one to survive the colonists' last stand at LV-426, and is forced to go into hiding and foraging by herself after watching her mother and brother get massacred by the xenomorphs right in front of her.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: In the comics, a group of Marines is forced to go to the Aliens' homeworld to act as bait for facehuggers. One character sagely notes that, on other worlds, the Alien is a foreign creature which the locals are not used to dealing with. On its own planet it would have struck an ecological balance with other species, and it might not even be the dominant predator. The bait plan is completely misguided because unbeknownst even to themselves, all the Marines are androids.
• Evil Is Visceral: In addition to creating many of the subtropes, the Alien eggs and the visual design of the Space Jockey are also this.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: Numerous examples across the entire main series and Crossover films. This includes the Nostromo, the Sulaco (in the third film as the alarms are triggered), the Auriga, the Betty and even the downed Predator ship from Requiem.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The facehugger, of course. The sight of one attached onto a victim's face is a sure enough sign of said character's impending, shocking fate to come.
• Fantastic Drug: The Dark Horse comics and their novelizations revealed that Alien royal jelly (or "Xeno Zip" as it's marketed) is the performance enhancer to end all performance enhancers. Against their better judgment, the military gets convinced to send an expedition to retrieve the stuff both for its commercial applications and a Super-Soldier program. Weirdly, this was derided as unrealistic despite it having some basis in reality. Marines later end up abusing it, leading to all sorts of less-than-ideal behavior.
• Fate Worse than Death: Giving "birth" to a Chestburster. This is highlighted by the iconic plea, "Kill... me!" spoken by impregnated Alien victims.
• Fetus Terrible: Chestbursters are endoparasites intended to evoke this.
• Flanderization: The first three movies have WY's efforts to recover a Xenomorph still in basically sane (if unethical) corporate territory. They're willing to to write off—respectively—some deep-space crewmen, low-level Space Marine grunts and colonists (and we don't even know if they ordered that or if it was just Burke's plan), and convicts to retrieve a potentially valuable bioweapon. By Aliens: Colonial Marines, they're outright starting a war with the government over the Xenomorphs, and you have to wonder how they're possibly even going to turn a profit on the damn things. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome sinks in with Alien Resurrection, where the company's obsession with Aliens has left them bankrupt and bought out by Walmart. Both Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Prometheus try to explain this as part of a personal obsession on the part of the company's founder, while the Dark Horse comics ran with the idea of the whole company having basically become a Cult based around procuring Xenomorphs due to their psychic influence.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The films themselves are an odd non-character example in terms of their respective tones and atmospheres (and even in light of the personalities and resumes of their respective directors): Alien is phlegmatic, Aliens is choleric, Alien³ is melancholic and Alien Resurrection is sanguine.
• Gaia's Lament: Earth in the series has become an overpolluted slum.
• Genre Blindness: Of all people, the CEO of Weyland-Yutani themselves. In their mad obsession to acquire the Xenomorph, they seem to keep forgetting that sending a bunch of "expendables" who are out of the loop to inadvertently bring the Alien back to Earth and planting a mole in the team always backfires on them when the protagonists inevitably figure out they were set up and then kill the Aliens themselves.
  • Though, it looks to have finally succeeded in Aliens: Colonial Marines.
• Genre Shift: The "quadrilogy" all share a narrative, yet are all wildly different from each other.
  • The first film is a cinema verite-style look at space truckers who find themselves in a sci-fi Slasher Film. The script is sparse and eschews exposition in favor of suggestion and lets the visionary visuals carry the story.
  • The second film is a muscular '80s action film with a tight script and flawless pacing that sets up and knocks down plot points with mechanical precision. It also delves into the trauma the Retired Badass heroine of the first film has to deal with, as part of its "Vietnam in space" allegory.
  • The third film attempted to return to the style of the first film, but its director, who cut his teeth on music videos, lends it a sumptuous stylized industrial atmosphere and tried his damnedest to make the eight different scripts he was handed work as a cohesive whole. The oppressively apocalyptic air punctuated by hopeful Christian spirituality (aided by Eliot Goldenthal's ecclestically-tinged score) also helps it stand out from its two predecessors, for better or for worse.
  • The fourth film is American postmodern wittiness meets French postmodern weirdness. The direction shifts from operatic to self-depreciating with no rhyme or reason and the script was allegedly written as camp but is played with straight-laced seriousness. Trying to reconcile the sheer oddness on display with the grimy industrial aesthetic of the first three films is liable to make your head blow apart.
  • The fourth film also has more of a Space Opera feel to its worldbuilding, with the United Systems Military feeling right at home in Blake's Seven, in contrast to the more grounded corporate villainy and impersonal bureaucracy in the first three films. It also added a Badass Crew of Space Pirates, who felt far campier than the previous depictions of space travel as more analogous to long-distance trucking or merchant shipping. This is unsurprising given the series the scriptwriter later became famous for. The first three movies were so far into Mundane Dogmatic that Outland could credibly be in the same setting.
  • The later films keep up the trend. For example, the fifth film, befitting its nature as a Stealth Prequel is a more cerebral, philosophical affair, spending most if its runtime as a sci-fi drama with themes of exploration, humanity's place in the universe, and its relationship with its creator, only revealing itself as part of this franchise near the very end as the situation spirals into abject chaos.
  • The sixth film plays itself as more of a Gothic Horror story, with the protagonists main enemy being not the titular aliens, but rather the Evilutionary Biologist seeking to create a perfect race through his obsessive experimentation.
  • The seventh film goes back to being a horror story, but rather than emphasizing the suspense and slasher elements, instead focuses on the Body Horror and dystopian, capitalistic hellscape of the setting as the protagonists desperation for a better life subjects them to Cruel and Unusual Deaths galore.
• Gut Buster: The third stage of the xenomorph's life cycle is the trope-naming/codifying Chest Burster, so named because its embryo takes root in the host's chest. Its emergence shatters the host's ribcage and tears their chest open in a spray of blood and bone fragments.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The comics and some of the games (see Aliens: Dark Descent) played with this concept, usually with strong Genestealer Cult vibes.
• Heel–Face Turn: Daniel Grant in the "Genocide" comic goes from a Corrupt Corporate Executive to an Honest Corporate Executive after seeing the human cost of doing business. This might make him the only Honest Corporate Executive anywhere in this franchise.
• The Hero Dies: Seems to be a trend in the series, starting with Alien³ and continuing from there since all of the survivors of Aliens, even including Ripley herself, all die in Alien³, Shaw is killed by David at some point after the events of Prometheus, and the ending of Alien: Covenant heavily implies that the same fate awaits Daniels.
• Hero Killer: As under "The Hero Dies", a lot of heroic characters die because of the Xenomorphs, including the crews of the USCSS Nostromo and USS Sulaco. While this doesn't usually extend to heroes in their non-Predator franchise crossovers (though Superman, Orion, and Judge Dredd had close calls), the creatures being this trope was the case in the WildC.A.T.s crossover — only not for the WildCATs themselves, as Warren Ellis, who wrote the story as well as Stormwatch, decided to use the story to kill off the Stormwatch characters who weren't going to be part of The Authority.
• Humans Advance Swiftly: If you count the film Prometheus in, you may notice how the robots' personalities are becoming more human as the in-universe timeline moves on.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In all the films except for Alien³, the Xenomorphs are set loose due to human greed mixed with incompetence. Even in the third movie however the only reason the Company sends a rescue mission to Fiorina "Fury" 161 is because they suspect Ripley to be currently carrying a Xenomorph embryo. Otherwise they'd basically abandoned their Hellhole Prison planet because it was unprofitable.
  Ripley 8 (regarding Annalee Call revealing herself as an android in Resurrection): I should have known. No human being is that humane.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Any given character with a Alien fetus inside them: "Kill me... kill me..." Justified as usually the victim is cocooned and immobile, otherwise they'd surely do the job themselves.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Happens a few times, what with the Aliens having bladed tails. That said, Ripley turns the tables on the Alien in the first movie by impaling it with a harpoon in their final confrontation.
• Just Following Orders: Ash in the first movie, and possibly Burke in the second movie (it's never clear whether he's operating on orders from the Company or he's in it for himself). David in Prometheus may count as well, although he may have let his feelings get in the way just a little.
• Juvenile All Along: The Xenomorph that massacres the crew of the Nostromo in Alien is revealed in Aliens and the Expanded Universe to be the middle stage of a species of Metamorphosis Monster capable of undergoing further transformations—up to and including the Tyrannosaurus rex-sized Queen.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Future technology has improved on weapons we have today, not made them obsolete. These improved weapons like the pulse rifles and smart guns are practical and offer plenty of firepower without the drawbacks in range and size (which is why there are so few energy weapons in most Alien settings ) and the same applies to vehicles and even starships - which use kinetic kill vehicles and anti-ship missiles in deep space. Additionally humans have a lot of methods and technologies to counter energy weapons, such as deploying dispersal aerosols or spinning the surface of a ship to reduce concentrated heating.
• Last-Name Basis: Most of the humans in the films are addressed by last name. In fact, the original draft of the first Alien was even written such that everyone had no assigned gender.
• Machine Blood: The androids in the Alien films "bleed" a milky fluid when injured. Since these are also Ridiculously Human Robots, it works as a Robotic Reveal in the first film, when Ash bleeds white from a cut.
• Mad Scientist: Quite a few in the comics, perhaps most notably Church from Labyrinth.
• MegaCorp: Weyland-Yutani is the very epitome of this trope. They control every Earth government and have colonized many star systems. Not only that, but they have a private army with a bioweapons division. They have prison planets as well, such as the one in the third movie. The fourth movie changes this up by referring to megacorps like Weyland-Yutani as a thing of the past, though the government that replaces them is just as bad, if not worse. Seegson from Alien: Isolation are essentially their low-cost knockoff.
• Mercy Kill: Often requested by victims of the Xenomorph's parasitic life cycle and usually granted in fact if the opportunity is actually there at the moment.
• Mirroring Factions: The Engineers and humanity serve as eerie reflections of one another in movies, beside sharing same DNA. Both are species driven by curiosity, ambition, and arrogance, and both end up suffering because of it. The Engineers created humanity only to later decide to destroy us, yet they are just as violent, if not more so. They create bioweapons of mass destruction to erase humanity for its violent tendencies by using methods that are utterly ruthless and inhumane themselves. Symbolically, the Engineers even built their culture around religious imagery. Their architecture looks like temples, and the famous mural shows a Deacon-like creature in a crucified pose, echoing Christian iconography. They look down on their creations, but humans aren't much better as seen in how Weyland treats David. In Romulus, is discovered that Weyland-Yutani is trying to synthetize the black goo and use it as either as bioweapons or to evolve the humans species, much like Engineers did it eons ago. And despite all this death and deity angst, both species are interested in art, science and music just as much. In the end, humanity and the Engineers are the same: creators playing at being gods, worshipping their own knowledge, building the instruments of their downfall, and passing the curse of ambition down to their children.
• Monster Delay: The franchise as a whole regularly plays with this trope depending the exact related work of its.
• Mundane Dogmatic: Downplayed when compared to say Outland, but a big part of the Used Future aesthetic of the first three movies. Space travel takes an incredibly long time and necessitates cryogenic freezing, human technology doesn't have anything exotic as a warp engine or hyperdrives (the high-tech Space Marines in the second film still use automatic projectile weapons), and the style and architecture is heavily-reminiscent of whatever decades produced the film in question. There is no alien life to be found aside from the feral, hostile, and truly incomprehensible Xenomorphs.
• Must Have Caffeine: The singular common vice shared by every adult-character with spoken lines of dialogue in this franchise, to accentuate how this is a story about "Blue Collar Working Nine To Five Joes and Janes." In Alien, Parker snarks that his coffee is the only good food on the Nostromo.
• Myth Arc:
  • Humanity's attempts to weaponize the Xenomorphs and Ripley's centuries-long war with them are the two primary arcs of the series. With Romulus in hindsight, Peter Weyland's quest to achieve immortality and humanity's attempts to follow are ultimately another major underlying arc of the series.
  • The Prometheus films have another arc about humanity finding out their place in the universe and trying to discover the secrets of their origins.
• N.G.O. Superpower: See MegaCorp. Exactly where Weyland-Yutani falls between the two depends on the media. The first film and its immediate sequels show that they're a huge company, but one still dependent on the Colonial Marines for enforcement, which is also what Alien: Isolation runs with. The fourth movie takes this even further by having them bought out by Walmart and rendered totally irrelevant. Aliens: Colonial Marines, on the other hand, shows them having a private army that far outnumbers the Badass Crew Marine unit, has no problem outright starting a war with the US government (even though those are presumably their customers), and operates more like an independent state that just happens to have a stock value. When your MegaCorp is bringing out an infantry fighting vehicle and fighting conventional battles against government soldiers, it's probably escalated to some kind of rebellion.
• Nightmare Fuel: In-universe. Encounters with Xenomorphs are known to leave people with horrible nightmares and PTSD, such as Ellen Ripley for example. Facehuggers are themselves Nightmare Fuel Station Attendants in that Alan Meeks, a Facehugger victim from the Alien: Isolation tie-in comic, experienced several vivid and distressing nightmares while being implanted, and Kane from the first film noted experiencing a dream about himself being smothered.
• Obsessed with Deadly Item: The Weyland-Yutani Corporation and other organizations who learn of the Xenomorphs' existence are determined to obtain either a live Xenomorph or a sample of the black biological agent responsible for their creation.
  • Alien: While investigating a derelict alien ship, the crew of the Nostromo come under attack from a predatory endoparasitic alien later called the Xenomorph. Their employers, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, inform the ship's android Ash that the rest of the crew is expendable to ensure the creature arrives on Earth. The crew, save for Ellen Ripley, is wiped out by the creature, but she manages to jettison it out of the airlock and escape.
  • Aliens: While fifty-seven years have passed since the Nostromo incident and the original company heads who were obsessed with the creature are long gone, Carter Burke learns of the Xenomorph from Ripley's accounts and decides to have the colonists on LV-426 investigate the derelict ship. Within a few days, almost all of the colonists are dead and a hive has been established, with Burke seeking to obtain specimens to take back to Earth.
  • Alien³: Upon learning that a Xenomorph specimen is rampaging through the prison on Fury-161, Weyland-Yutani dispatches a team to capture it and the Queen embryo that Ripley is incubating, forcing her to commit suicide by leaping into a vat of molten lead to stop them.
  • Alien Resurrection: Set centuries after the first three films, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation has long-since gone out of business but the military fills the same role—seeking to breed a hive of Xenomorphs for use as bioweapons, and producing a human-Xenomorph hybrid clone of Ripley in the process.
  • Prometheus: Set several decades before the events of Alien, terminally-ill industrialist Peter Weyland seeks out the Engineers—a species of advanced aliens who created humankind—in order to attain immortality, while the android David-8 begins experimenting with Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15—a mutagenic bioweapon the Engineers had created—on his orders.
  • Alien: Covenant: Set a few decades before Alien, David-8 arrives on the Engineer homeworld Paradise and spends the next ten years experimenting with Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15 to create prototype versions of the Xenomorphs. Infiltrating the Weyland-Yutani colony ship The Covenant, he plans on using the crew and passengers to continue his experiments and perfect them; challenging the Weyland-Yutani Corporation to try to tame the "wolf" he has created. The Company sends a team to investigate his lab on Paradise and seize his research, only to run afoul of the remaining "Praetomorph" specimens.
  • Alien: Romulus: Set between Alien and Aliens, it's revealed that Weyland-Yutani Corporation obtained the Xenomorph specimen that attacked the Nostromo, cloning Facehuggers from it and extracting Plagiarus praepotens from them in an attempt to create a controlled version of Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15. Key word—attempt, as the experiments backfire horrifically, the Xenomorph escapes and slaughters most of the crew before being killed, and the Facehuggers infect the survivors to spawn the beginnings of a hive.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: You can see there's no consistency on the naming (which is why it's one of The Angry Video Game Nerd's targets here).
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted. The first two films are silent about religion, but
  • In Alien³ the inmates of the prison colony have got religion.
  • In Alien Resurrection the space station has a chapel, and one character makes the Sign of the Cross upon entering, which is a typically Catholic observance and a somewhat old-fashioned one at that. This character is later revealed to be an android, and there is a mention of androids investigating religion for a morality which is chosen, rather than imposed through programming.
  • In Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw is a Christian. Not much is made of this, but she clearly keeps her faith; her last act is to give the date, in the style "year of Our Lord."
• Post-Climax Confrontation: Literally every single main film along with some of the expanded universe materials uses this trope in one way or another with lone surviving Xenomorph specimens and other enemies all of a sudden inexplicably rearing their ugly heads and likewise subsequently having to be truly disposed of in one way or another following the actual climax of said film or expanded universe work.
• Powered Armor: Surprisingly absent for a series which codified so many of the Space Marine tropes, but there in a few places. Ripley uses the Power Loader as a Poor Man's Substitute in Aliens and the early Aliens vs. Predator games showed that the Marines have combat exoskeletons as specialized units. The "Genocide" comic ran with a downplayed version—Xenomorph claws are diamond-hard, so no amount of armor is going to help. On the other hand, bulkier armor with built-in chemical countermeasures can help against that whole acid blood thing.
• Private Military Contractors: After showing up briefly at the end of Alien³, subsequent writers seem to have decided that Weyland-Yutani has these in roughly British East India Company numbers. Aliens: Colonial Marines had them as major enemies, as did the various AVP games. Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Prometheus also feature them to fill the Redshirt role, since the military isn't available for the job.
• Psychosexual Horror: The titular creature is rife with Freudian imagery and was originally created as an explicit rape allegory. The facehugger phase of the creature has a vagina-like opening with a phallic proboscis that orally violates the victim. The chestburster itself is entirely phallic-shaped. The adult phase features a similarly phallic head shape, and the way it kills Lambert is rife with sexual assault undertones.
• Puzzle Boss: Basically every single film and expanded universe work for the franchise has featured an example of this trope at some point or another for obvious reasons such as the ever-present acid for blood problem and also even the occasional absence of any manmade weapons from a given official Alien franchise work's specific setting.
• The Quest: An evil corporate one at that; almost all of the films and most of the related media include references to Weyland-Yutani's attempts to acquire at any cost at least one of the Xenomorphs.
• Recurring Element: Maybe intentional maybe accidental, but every single female lead in the franchise — Ellen Ripley, Elisabeth Shaw, Daniels, Amanda Ripley, and Rain Carradine — are all Action Survivor caucasian dark-haired women with a pale complexion. Even in the upcoming tv show Alien:Earth, the female lead will be played by an actress with a similar physical appearance to the five leads.
• Recursive Creators: In Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the different species in the overall franchise are established to each be engineered by a preceding one. The known order is Engineers creating Humans, then Humans creating Androids, then Androids creating Xenomorphs.
• Redshirt Army: The Colonial Marines, the Colonial Marshals, the United Systems Military, the Colorado National Guard, Private Military Contractors, UPP commandos...carrying a gun in the Alien-verse is the surest possible sign that you'll die horribly to show off the threat.
• Researching the Monster: Weyland-Yutani wants to secure a specimen of the Xenomorph to study and develop as a bio-weapon. It never goes well for them.
• Right Man in the Wrong Place: Ripley, particularly in the second film.
• Robotic Reveal: When someone starts leaking milk-colored Machine Blood, you've essentially got the franchise's officially recurring style of take on one of these.
• Rule of Scary: There are plenty of rationalizations of the Xenomorph's life cycle, the circumstances, and behavior of various characters, but in the end it all comes down to this.
• Schrödinger's Canon: Possibly a messier one than fellow Fox-cum-Disney franchise Star Wars:
  • First, the Dark Horse Comics Aliens comics, which followed older versions of Hicks, Newt, and Ripley on a new Alien-stomping adventure. Once Alien³ came out, and those characters were all off the table, the stories were retconned to follow Suspiciously Similar Substitutes Wilks, Billie, and an android programmed to think she was Ripley.
  • More expanded universe material was released, including the Aliens vs. Predator crossovers, until the Alien: Out of the Shadows trilogy rebooted the EU continuity, relegating all previous EU to Schrodinger's Canon. Interesting, part of the Shadows trilogy would have "observed false" Alien³ and Alien Resurrection, a rare case of an EU work decanonizing a prime media work, until Fox vetoed that.
  • Ridley Scott took pains to decanonize the Aliens vs. Predator portion of the franchise with Prometheus and Covenant, leading to at least two EU continuities, one with Predators and one without.
  • Then, new EU material, such as Alien: The Roleplaying Game and Aliens: Fireteam Elite again attempt to provide a single, cohesive version of the Alien 'Verse, making references to each other, and to some previously-decanonized EU. . . but make no real mention of the Shadows Trilogy or other works based on them. Notably, the Shadows trilogy decanonized the Praetorian caste of Alien, yet Praetorians appear in both the RPG and Fireteam.
  • Neil Blomkamp's Alien film would have split the timeline again, being a direct sequel to Aliens and taking place in an alternate continuity.
  • The end result is that any given piece of EU material can take place in at least one of five separate continuities: pre-Alien 3 (with Predators), post-Alien 3 (with Predators), post-Shadows (with or without Predators), post-Covenant (without Predators), or post-RPG (still without Predators, at least for now).
• Sequel Escalation: Alien (1979) has one Xenomorph Drone preying on seven "space truckers." Aliens has a fully-fledged hive of Xenomorph Warriors and their Queen pitted against a platoon of Space Marines. Alien³ reverts right on back to the original scenario with only one Xenomorph Runner attacking and killing off twenty-two prisoners and their three local overseers in a desperate attempt to ensure the survival of a Royal Chest Burster currently incubating within none other than Ellen Ripley herself in fact. Alien Resurrection escalates it to a whole hive of cloned Xenomorph Drones, their also cloned Queen, and even a hybrid Newborn Xenomorph specimen seen near the end of the film again.
• Sleeper Starship: Faster-than-light travel in this franchise for whatever reason is dramatically slower when compared to the Star Wars franchise's hyperspace travel for example, so they then instead just use cryogenic stasis travel here.
• Smoking Is Cool: Aside from the vice of Must Have Caffeine, every single heroic adult character (well, aside from the Dirty Coward Lambert) with spoken lines in the Alien Franchise is bound to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day like a chimney. The cigarettes in question have just as much filter as smoke, and are noted to be "denicotined" in the novelizations.
• Snowy Screen of Death: This tends to happen all the time whenever there's constantly chest-bursting parasitic extraterrestrial organisms abound:
  • In Alien (1979), the monitor screen shows static when the connection to Dallas breaks off as he is attacked by the monster.
  • In Aliens, each crew member's helmet camera and vital signs are hooked to a screen and any time somebody dies, their screen goes static.
  • Happens repeatedly in one scene in Alien Resurrection, as the Space Marines get picked off one by one.
• Sole Survivor: Newt in the Newt's Tale comic series.
• Space Clothes: Averted. The crew members wear normal clothes. People entering cryogenic sleep strip down to their underwear; otherwise, they usually walk around in civilian/military attire. In the opening scene of Alien, the clothes are distinctly reminiscent of diapers, as the lethargic crew are "born" from closed spaces into the white room controlled by the AI "Mother".
• Space Is Noisy: There are some flight-cruising sounds, and in the fourth one, an explosion.
• Space Marine: A platoon of Colonial Marines is dispatched to investigate a human colony that has gone silent. They find a xenomorph hive and are largely wiped out, destroying the hive and killing the Queen in turn. Colonial Marines are frequent characters in expanded universe materials, either actively-serving or retired, and they're frequently pitted against Xenomorphs (more rarely, Yautjas) and suffer high casualties because of it. The ones who survive become (or already were) unspeakably badass.
• Space Navy: Not as a big a part as the above, but someone has to haul the jarheads around. Bishop is mentioned to be a Navy android (he seems to be the only crew onboard the Sulaco) and the Dark Horse comics showed a few more. At least one got the dubious honor of responding to being swarmed by Xenomorphs by shouting "Aaaah. Leave me alone!".
• Tempting Fate: In the "Colonial Marines" comic (no not that one, the one from the 90s) a crewman on a space station *just has* to tell his colleague that "the damn bugs would need a plasma cannon to get through this door!" Literally, the very next panel is the door blowing open and incinerating him, with the Half-Human Hybrid Cult shown recharging their plasma cannon. Of course, he's operating in the fine tradition of Burke from Aliens assuring Ripley that the Colonial Marines are "very tough hombres".
• Theme Naming:
  • The movies' synthetic characters' names are organised alphabetically by appearance:Ash (Alien), Bishop (Aliens and 3), Call (Resurrection) and David (Prometheus). Covenant and Romulus broke the theme with Walter and Andy, respectively.
  • Joseph Conrad – the original movie's Nostromo and Narcissus, both Conrad references, led to practically every ship in Alien's fictional universe being a Conrad reference, including the Sulaco, Patna, Torrens, Corbelan, Otago...
• Took a Level in Badass: Ripley's mutation from being a scientist to a badass Alien killer is a running theme through the franchise.
• Transformation Horror: Of the Slow Transformation subtype. As shown in a scene from the Alien - Director's Cut and novelization, and explained in Alien: The Roleplaying Game, an alien drone in the absence of a queen will instinctively abduct other creatures, bind them in its nest, and inject them via its tail with an invasive bacteria which will cause their body to gradually metamorphize into a new alien egg.^note (This will continue as victims are available until one of the eggs produces a "royal" facehugger, which will in turn implant an embryonic queen into a host. Once a queen is born, she will produce eggs at a faster rate than the ovamorphic conversion and their numbers will rapidly increase as they move into the "hive" stage of their development.) If the creature being transformed is lucky, the alien will have smashed enough of its skull to leave it comatose through this process. If not, the creature may be fully aware of what's happening to it with no ability to move or stop it...
• Trapped-with-Monster Plot: The first film is one of the most famous examples, and almost every entry in the franchise is also an example.
• Trope Codifier:
  • The series as a whole is this for Used Future, along with Star Wars (which Cameron cites as a direct inspiration). Aliens in particular defined the Standard Human Spaceship visual style for humans and their military tech in a Standard Sci-Fi Setting. Babylon 5, FreeSpace, StarCraft, Halo, and Mass Effect (to name a few) all draw on it.
  • In a case of a work codifying tropes for an entirely different medium, the films cemented a number of formulae embraced by First-Person Shooters and Third-Person Shooters several years after the second film. The gun-floating-on-the-bottom-of-the-screen P.O.V. Cam and target-centered Over the Shoulder shots from the Marine gunner's incursion and Ripley's final assault on the hive, for instance, are prototypes for the standard screen layouts of both genres, as well as the cramped hallway sieges that defined the early days of 3D shooters. The gunner's flashy heavy weaponry, the grenade launcher on the assault rifles, and Ripley's kludged-together multi-firearm, meanwhile, together established a precedent that ensured the future prominence of tropes like Gatling Good, Swiss-Army Gun, Secondary Fire, Walking Armory, and the BFG.
• United Space of America: It's all but explicitly stated that the US is still a superpower centuries in the future, complete with its own colonies. Also, the Colonial Marines are clearly shown as American.
• Used Future: The first film in particular is a notable early example: the cold, underlit grungy ship looks like a run-down refinery ship. It's a big break from the sparkly white corridors and spandex jumpsuits seen in many previous Sci-fi franchises.
• Vasquez Always Dies: The trope namer! Vasquez does indeed die, and the comics take it one step further by showing that she had a sister who was also in the Colonial Marines and also is killed by the Aliens. Ironically, this ends up as a Subverted Trope in much of the rest of the franchise. By the time of Alien Resurrection, Ripley has become a far bigger (and more abrasive) Action Girl than the late Vasquez, and she makes it out just fine.
• Villain Ball: In the Dark Horse comic, a Company plant (and a psychopath) kills an officer to prove to his hostages how ruthless he is, while said officer is attempting to flat-out tell him that his plan to infect the marines will not work because they are all androids.
• Villain-Based Franchise: The franchise in general is this, but not the movie series due to centering on Ripley.
• We Will Use Lasers in the Future: With the expansion of the Alien franchise, it turns out that as early as Aliens - energy weapons have been used by humanity albeit in specific roles. Starships use them as their best point defence weapon, while IFV vehicles use them as their main gun and for an colonial marine a PIG is the most devastating anti-tank weapon in their arsenal. In stories or games set further in the future, more energy weapons show up including a laser pistol that is pretty effective against hard targets.
• Womb Horror: The Xenomorphs are meant to invoke this in conjunction with rape horror, in particular their life cycle consisting of forced fertilization from a facehugger leading to a Chest Burster. This intent was confirmed by screenwriter Dan O' Bannon in the Alien Saga documentary.
• Why Isn't It Attacking?: Quoted almost word for word by one of the Android Marines in the Dark Horse comic. This was the first major indicator that the marines were not what they believed themselves to be.
• You Are in Command Now: In the Dark Horse comic series, at least at one point, it's Newt's turn to step up to the plate.
• Zeerust: Spaceship electronics are based on bulky 1970s computers like the Apple II series which were considered cutting-edge at their time.
• Zombie Infectee: Most people who know they're incubated by an Alien Facehugger, and its effects, choose to bite the bullet or die in a Heroic Sacrifice. One memorable scene from Alien Resurrection involved an infectee bear-hugging the scientist responsible for his infection, forcing the Chestburster to go through his chest and the scientist's head, taking his murderer with him to the afterlife. This was actually done in the comic, many years before, but the artists had the creature enter the researcher's chest.