[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Alien: Covenant]
Despite a winning performance by Katherine Waterston, Alien: Covenant‘s focus on Michael Fassbender’s dual characters cements what might not be the most obvious — but may perhaps be the most important — difference between the Alien franchise-as-was and the prequel series that began with 2012’s Prometheus: The series has gone from being one about female power to being all about men … or, at least, male-presenting robots.
It might not be the case that the Alien franchise launched with a feminist agenda — Sigourney Weaver is on record as suggesting that Ripley was the focus of the first movie in 1979 more for reasons of a contrarian nature than any attempt to even out the gender imbalance in genre storytelling. She told the New York Daily News in 2010, “I think it was more of a story decision … that no one would ever anticipate that this young woman would end up being the hero of the piece.”
But by the end of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it was unmistakable that the series had become a commentary about female agency. That was, after all, a movie that centered around two warring takes on motherhood, with the ultra-masculine marines falling to the side as Ripley and the Alien Queen neared their final confrontation, which wasn’t just over the stand-in child for both characters, but began with a notably gendered insult:
