With evil robots David, Ash, and Rook, and a central AI called Mother, the Alien franchise’s greatest theme is, perhaps, that in long-game between synthetic lifeforms and bloodthirsty aliens, the loser is always humanity. Beginning in 1979 with Alien, the darkest revelation of the movie wasn’t just that the chest-bursting parasitical xenomorphs existed, but that “the Company” (later defined in the franchise as Weyland-Yutani) actually wanted to obtain a specimen and didn’t care if it murdered a bunch of people in the process.
