The Alien movies are home to the xenomorphs, one of cinema’s most terrifying creatures. Several films have fleshed out the origins and lore surrounding these killing machines, but they lay waste to scores of people throughout the Alien franchise.
It’s a fair assumption that any human in an Alien movie is going to have a horrendous time. They could end up as fodder for a xenomorph, and sometimes much worse.
That said, some characters in the movies aren’t just human-shaped snacks for the aliens. Some survive overwhelming odds in a franchise with an unusually high body count. With this in mind, the most strategically smart characters in the Alien franchise show why there is more to them than meets the eye.
Carter Burke – Aliens (1986)
Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from Aliens may seem like an odd inclusion, but he did have a plan and was just manipulative enough that it almost worked. His scheme backfired spectacularly, but the movie would have ended quite differently if it had not.
Burke is very different from the rest of the group traveling to LV-426. He’s a company man who is willing to put profit and his loyalty to the Weyland Yutani Corporation first. Burke floats the idea of protecting the xenomorphs to the team for a tidy sum, but Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the team disagree.
He hatches a plan on the fly to use Newt and Ripley as hosts and return home with live alien embryos. Burke comes very close to succeeding, but our heroes foil his plan.
He gets his comeuppance shortly after, but makes the list because he hid his intentions well and had a backup plan, even if it ultimately failed.
Bishop – Aliens (1986)
Bishop is a unique case and survives an encounter with the alien queen in a roundabout way. He’s also an android, and while he willingly puts himself in an extremely dangerous situation in Aliens, his actions ensure his own survival alongside Newt, Ripley, and Hicks.
Toward the end of Aliens, Ripley, Newt, and the surviving marines are desperately trying to leave LV-426. They must pilot a remote dropship to escape, but the only way to access the controls is via an ominous, narrow tunnel.
Bishop is the only one qualified to control the ship and begrudgingly takes on the task alone, saying, “Believe me, I’d prefer not to. I may be synthetic, but I’m not stupid.” The alien queen intercepts Bishop after he calls in the ship and horrifically tears him apart.
As Bishop is an android, he survives, and we briefly see him alive at the beginning of David Fincher’s Alien 3.
Hicks – Aliens (1986)
Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) is a charismatic grunt sent to LV-426 after communication with the colony abruptly stops. He’s a brave soldier who relies on his training and experience when the going gets tough.
It’s unclear how well trained he is compared to his comrades, but Hicks knows his way around military weaponry and even teaches Ripley how to shoot. He isn’t as gung-ho as others in the squad, preferring to pick his battles.
His experience makes him strategically smart, and the group survives much longer under his instruction. Hicks is the only soldier in the squad to survive the events of Aliens. He tragically dies offscreen between the events of Aliens and Alien 3, but without him, nobody would have survived on LV-426.
Elizabeth Shaw – Prometheus (2012)
Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is an archaeologist in Prometheus, in search of the creators of humanity. She’s not a trained soldier like Hicks, for example, but she’s resourceful and refuses to buckle under pressure. The latter is a good thing because Shaw has a particularly rough time in the 2012 movie.
The archaeologist is resilient and remarkably calm, given the circumstances. She also performs surgery on herself in the MedPod to remove a growing alien. It’s a sustained, graphic scene, and one of the most unforgettable in the film.
Shaw is an unlikely survivor, though she doesn’t rank any higher on the list, as she ends up trusting the wrong person. Her misguided trust leads to her death offscreen sometime between the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which ties in nicely to the next person on this list.
David – Alien: Covenant (2017)
David looks at an embryo in Alien: Covenant.
David (Michael Fassbender) is easily one of the most complex and deeply layered characters in the entire Alien franchise. He’s an android, and acutely aware of the fact, and goes through an existential crisis of sorts during the events of Prometheus.
It would be fair to say that several characters in the movie go out of their way to remind David that he isn’t human. Rather than lashing out, he plays the long game, and his greatest strength is that he is soft-spoken and unthreatening.
Under that guise, David becomes fascinated by the Engineers and is able to operate free of suspicion. We see him willingly infect Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), and it’s clear he sees humans as subjects, not allies. David appears to understand concepts like morality, but also chooses to ignore them.
We learn that he killed and experimented on Shaw between the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. This revelation is a bitter pill to swallow because Shaw clearly feels unthreatened by David during Prometheus while he quietly kept his thoughts and true intentions to himself.
David is a cold, calculating, master manipulator. He is responsible for numerous deaths in Alien: Covenant and will likely still be alive if we get a sequel.
Rebecca Jordan – Aliens (1986)
Rebecca, aka Newt (Carrie Henn), isn’t strategically smart in a traditional sense but is unwaveringly resilient in a situation that claimed the lives of dozens of people much older than her.
Newt is the lone survivor on LV-426 when Ripley and the soldiers arrive. She managed to survive and stay out of sight for at least two weeks, surrounded by dozens of alien killing machines.
During that time, she didn’t just cower in a makeshift shelter. Newt observed the aliens’ movement patterns, including the fact that they mostly come out at night.
Our unlikely survivor managed to scavenge food and water. She also dealt with the trauma of losing her parents and brother. Her story is among the most tragic in the Alien franchise, as she dies offscreen between Aliens and Aliens 3. Regardless, she outlives trained soldiers and an encounter with the xenomorph queen.
Ellen Ripley
Ripley and Newt in Aliens
Everyone knew who would take the number one spot, as Ellen Ripley survived more encounters with the xenomorphs than the entire cast of the Alien movies combined.
Ripley isn’t a warrior or a soldier, but she’s brave, smart, and resourceful. She doesn’t survive the events in the movies through luck alone and refuses to cave when even trained individuals around her start to crumble.
In fact, the events of the first movie may not have even occurred if her crew had listened to her in the first place. She is the Warrant Officer on the Nostromo in Alien, and the only member of the crew who adheres to the ship’s safety protocols.
Ripley makes the ultimate sacrifice during the climax of Alien 3. She goes out on her own terms when there is no other choice, even if her fate is no longer final thanks to the events in Alien Resurrection.