Can You Pass This Alien Franchise Trivia Quiz?

Trivia Quizzes Movies

A creature designer known for nightmarish, biomechanical artwork was hired specifically because his unsettling visual style had never appeared in mainstream cinema before. Alien took a fairly simple premise, a hostile creature loose on an isolated spacecraft, and elevated it through patient, claustrophobic tension.

The Nostromo is hauling a refinery and roughly twenty million tons of ore back toward Earth when the ship’s computer, MU/TH/UR 6000, wakes its seven-person crew out of hypersleep well short of home to investigate a transmission coming from a barren moon designated LV-426. What the landing party finds there is a derelict ship, a fossilized pilot fused to its own chair, and a hold full of leathery eggs, one of which opens. John Hurt’s character, Kane, is carried back aboard with a creature clamped over his face, and the quarantine protocol that would have saved everyone gets overridden by the science officer, Ash, for reasons that only make sense much later.

Ash turns out to be a synthetic operating under Special Order 937, a corporate directive that classifies the organism as a priority and the crew as expendable, which quietly reframes the whole film as a company retrieval mission the workers were never told about. That betrayal, layered over a script by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett in which the characters argue about bonus shares and shift work rather than heroics, gave the horror an unusually grimy, blue-collar texture that almost nothing in science fiction had at the time. Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in only her second feature, ends the film alone with the ship’s cat and a very clear understanding of who she works for.

The design was realized on set by Bolaji Badejo, a Nigerian design student close to seven feet tall whom the production found in a London pub, and the effects work won the Academy Award in its category for 1979. The chestburster sequence was shot with the cast given only limited warning about the volume of blood involved, which is why Veronica Cartwright’s reaction looks the way it does. Animatronics, forced-perspective models and carefully underlit corridors handled work that computer imagery would later do badly, and that is a large part of why the original footage still reads as convincing rather than dated.

James Cameron’s Aliens in 1986 traded dread for ordnance, dropping Colonial Marines onto the same moon, introducing Newt, Bishop and the power loader, and turning one creature into a hive with a queen at its center. David Fincher stripped all of that away again on a prison planet in 1992, Jean-Pierre Jeunet cloned Ripley two centuries later for Alien Resurrection, and Ridley Scott returned with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which moved attention onto the Engineers and onto Michael Fassbender’s android David, whose interest in the creature sits closer to authorship than to fear. Two crossover films pairing the alien with the Predator ran alongside the main series.

The questions here move across all of that: the Nostromo’s crew and their fatal detour, the creature’s life cycle from egg to facehugger to fully grown adult, Ripley’s arc over four films, and the production details that dedicated viewers tend to hoard. A few are straightforward, like what the alien’s blood does to a deck plate or which company keeps sending people after it. Others are narrower, asking for a specific supporting actor, a specific year, or which entry in the series turns the horror into a firefight. The answers appear underneath once the last question is submitted, marked clearly enough that the misses are easy to spot.