Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points
An entire multimedia franchise was spawned by Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien, encompassing movie sequels, comic books, novels, roleplaying and video games, crossover stories with the Predator series, and even theme-park attractions. The quality has varied as much as the competing claims of canonicity, but while most cinemagoers only know of the high-profile films released in 1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2024, dedicated Alien fans have rarely been without new material to enjoy.
One such diversion was a digitally animated drama that dropped onto YouTube in 2019. Alien: Isolation is an adaptation of a successful 2014 computer game of the same name – and like the game, it focuses on a character with a special connection to the film series…
In the original Alien of 1979, there was never any mention that spaceship warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) had a daughter waiting for her back home. The first sequel, Aliens, was similarly mute on Ripley’s family life. But when the latter movie was rereleased in expanded form on laserdisc in 1991, bonus scenes revealed that she was a mother.
We learn that her daughter, Amanda, had been a child when Ripley left Earth. However, after an attack by a murderous alien creature aboard her ship the Nostromo, Ripley then spent an unusually long time in a process called hypersleep. Fifty-seven years passed while she was in suspended animation, and company suit Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) now has to break the news that 66-year-old Amanda Ripley-McClaren (‘Married name, I guess’) recently died of cancer. It’s a devastating blow for Ripley, of course – after all, she’d promised to be back for Amanda’s 11th birthday. It was also, we may assume, an unnervingly meta moment for Sigourney Weaver, because the photograph used to illustrate the grown-up Amanda (below) is actually of Weaver’s actor mother Elizabeth Inglis.
Cutting this subplot out of the original version of Aliens in 1986 reportedly upset Weaver greatly – understandably so, as it robs Ripley’s subsequent relationship with a young girl called Newt of an added maternal subtext. But even though she only appears in a photograph, Amanda was later to have a life away from James Cameron’s action masterpiece – in what’s known as the ‘Alien expanded universe’. In 2014, she appeared as a playable character in the video game Alien: Isolation and also cropped up in novels and comic strips. Then, due to the critical success of Isolation, plans were made for an animated adaptation – seven 10-minute episodes, comprised of scripted scenes from the game plus newly created sequences to plug the narrative gaps.
The story begin 15 years after the events of the 1979 movie. With no word of the long-missing Ellen Ripley, her now-adult daughter Amanda (voiced by Andrea Deck) has lots of questions and plenty of abandonment issues (‘You can’t count on anyone’). So when the Nostromo’s flight recorder is salvaged from deep space, Amanda can’t resist the chance to find out what happened to her mother. Accompanied by an android called Samuels (Anthony Howell) and lawyer Nina Taylor (Emerald O’Hanrahan), who both work for the conglomerate Weyland-Yutani, Amanda travels to Sevastopol space station to retrieve the recording. However, they arrive to find the station damaged, its crew either dead or on the point of mania, its android workers murderous, and the decks overrun by a deadly alien creature. After barely escaping several dangerous encounters, Amanda then meets the station’s marshal, Waits (William Hope, who’d played the not-dissimilar Lieutenant Gorman in Aliens). He reveals that the ship that saved the flight recorder also found a crashed alien ship… and unknowingly brought a savage creature to Sevastopol…
The project’s origins as a video-game adap are obvious throughout, for good and bad. Echoing the most dynamic first-person games, sequences encompass both grand scale and sweaty claustrophobia, and some scenes – especially those that use Amanda’s point of view – are genuinely suspenseful. There’s also a cute fidelity to the design work of the movies, whether it be the recreation of some sets from the first film or the general vibe of an entropic industrial future. The whole series is admirably violent and bloodthirsty; action sequences have punch; the sound design is very good.
But the simplistic plot is a series of mini-quests, meaning a stop/start momentum, and the quality of the animation depends on whether footage has been grandfathered in from the game or created anew. Despite a decent voice cast, the characters’ dead-eyed expressions undercut any emotional connection and, perhaps inevitably, it soon feels like you’re watching someone else’s Playstation session rather than following a story. A novelisation of the game, by tie-in master Keith RA DeCandido, was published soon after this digital drama and made a much better stab at fleshing out the gameplay and making us care about what’s happening.
Six proprietorial materials out of 10
Ian Farrington 