Alien currently dominates Alien Resurrection 84–16

The Verdict Franchise Civil War

Alien's first forty minutes of silence — the Nostromo crew waking, eating, arguing about shares — exists to make the chestburster feel like an invasion of normalcy rather than a genre requirement. Scott understood that the creature's power depends entirely on the ordinariness of the people it kills. Jeunet's Resurrection replaces that ordinariness with European surrealism — the clone Ripley, the underwater sequence, Ron Perlman's comic machismo — and the surrealism is its own kind of achievement but not a substitute for dread. The gap says dread outperforms surrealism when both are operating inside the same franchise. The simpler film's horror is more durable than the stranger film's invention.