Alien: Harvest

I'm loving this film, he horrifying atmosphere of the Alien Franchise is back! Plus, all the effects are great, mostly good practical effects (I'm loving the xeno design). Plus this is the least decent one among the 6 films, which doesn't make me feel sleepy.

Alien: Harvest builds heavily on the legacy of the original 1979 Alien. In this short, a small group of survivors races to reach the escape shuttle before the mothership is destroyed-all while a xenomorph stalks them. The parallels to the original are clear, though there's one notable difference: in these Alien Anthology shorts, the endings are consistently bleak for the humans, whereas the mainline Alien films at least occasionally offered happier resolutions. I'm not sure why this approach was chosen, but I'd love to see more variety. With the franchise now revived through new films and upcoming TV series, perhaps the next anthology-likely to arrive with another anniversary-will experiment with more diverse conclusions.

Ive enjoyed all of the Alien: 40th Annirversary short films, but i feel Harverst was the best it featured the Xenomorph the most of the six shorts and just had that Alien feeling to it the most, i could see it becoming a full feature very easilly.

The unnecessary initial flashing images already had me worried, as it is a lazy way of conveying a tense and scary atmosphere, even being repeated later on. But in the end, the worst is that they choose to cram all the possible references to the original without any interesting connection or sense, just because they had the means to.

And if it had sufficient material to offer the unseen context of this short film, in the great and simple idea of a pregnant woman about to give birth trying to escape the titular alien, where any scream can be fatal (A Quiet Place, anyone?), what I can't even begin to comprehend is how it doesn't even lean on that throughout its ten minutes duration. You recognise all the references, but you don't connect with anything, because they're present just for the sake of it.

The direction here makes it visually arresting and keeps up the pace and suspense. It's not scary but it does it's job, by showing less is more, and not relying on effects or gore, but mere snippets of action and the creature.

The direction is what makes it, in the same way, most of the others were let down. There's no great story here. None of them are particularly fresh or interesting, but they pay homage and that's their intent. Overall a slightly disappointing series but still would rather have them than not.

This and the one set in the mine, Ore are easily the best.