8. Ripley Plays Basketball - Alien: Resurrection
There are some who believe that David Fincher's flawed third entry in the
Alien canon derailed the franchise at large, but I'm not entirely convinced. Aside from Ripley's unwarranted death at the end of the movie, I don't think her dark and gloomy prison adventure does too much or too little for the series on the whole - although
Alien 3 is an incredibly different picture, it's also an incredibly safe and samey one. At its core, it's another "Ripley trapped in an enclosed space facing off against a Xenomorph." Shame about Hicks and Newt, though. It wasn't until the fourth installment, subtitled
Ressurrection, where I really felt like the franchise had gone too far. The fact that we had Ripley rebirthing in the first place was ludicrous, but I was far more distraught at the sight of the movie's basketball scene - a sport which Clone Ripley uses to showcase her badass new skills. I'm not saying that basketball doesn't fit in with the
Alien universe (though it really doesn't), but this was such an annoyingly conscious '90s touch that it just caused me to shake my head and mutter: "That's it. I'm done."