If youre already familiar with the Alien tales, and dont need to see them in chronological order to know whats going on, take this piece of advice: watch these four movies in reverse order. Get the sub-standard Alien: Resurrection and disappointing Alien3 out of the way early, so you can settle down on a comfy sofa, pull the curtains closed to make sure its dark, and watch the good ones.
Alien and Aliens are a couple of crackers. The first one kicks off with John Hurt strolling around a strange planet and ending up with a big spidery thing clamped to his phizog. Once back aboard his own spacecraft the Nostromo the beastie detaches itself and it looks like everythings going to be okay. That is, until a hissing monster bursts out of his belly and embarks upon a massive killing spree among the crew. And so an unlikely hero is born, in the shape of Sigourney Weaver as the deceptively hard Lieutenant Ellen Ripley.
The sequel replaces Ridley Scott with Terminator bigwig James Cameron in the directors chair, and moves from horror to action as Ripley accompanies a gang of marines on a gun-totin romp around the planet where the original alien was first discovered.
Unfortunately, this DVD set takes a swift nosedive in entertainment level from then on, first with the seedy prison-set Alien3 and then the near-ridiculous tale of DNA-cloning that is Alien: Resurrection. Somewhere along the way, the series loses its original meaning, stops asking serious questions and degenerates into standardised action fare. But try not to let that detract from the first two.