“It’s not fair. I’ve accepted it, and you should too.”

Justin’s rating: YouTube videos mostly come out at night. Mostly.

Justin’s review: When you’re a huge fan of the Alien franchise like I am, it can sometimes feel like the eight movies we’ve gotten so far aren’t enough by far. It’s not just the scares and the nightmarish xenomorph that captures the imagination but the whole feel of this industrial universe set in the future. So while we wait on more movies and even the rumored TV series, I’ll fish around for any Alien content where I can get it.

Hey, look at that. It’s more Alien content! In this case, it’s an anthology of six short films created as part of a contest for the franchise’s 40th anniversary. While these weren’t released in theater or even on physical media, they did have the official backing of Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox when they were sent into the wilds of the internet in 2019. So I wanted to dip into these six 10-minute flicks to see what they have to offer for this dark world.

Harvest: With seven minutes to go before an unscheduled crash landing into a comet, the four surviving crew members of a deep-space harvester are trying to get to their escape shuttles. If a horribly malfunctioning ship isn’t enough, there’s a full-blown xenomorph on board that’s hunting them all down — and one of their party can’t be fully trusted.

If you liked the last part of the first Alien movie where Ripley was stumbling through a soon-to-destruct Nostromo while the lights were all flashing like crazy, then this short was created for you. There’s some great set design with the harvester’s hallways, but they do that thing where the budget didn’t afford too much of a hallway, so the four people have to move as slowly as possible to make that set last. But the last minute is where this is at, with a few crazy surprises waiting the viewer. It’s pretty good, if kind of shallow.

Alone: A single crew member has spent over a year on a degrading spaceship trying to keep it all together until she can be rescued. What’s driving her a little crazy is the fact that MOTHER has since denied her access to the science lab — a situation which changes after a small fire on board. There she finds something she probably shouldn’t mess with — a face-hugger — but she does anyway.

But seeing as how she’s an android, the face-hugger can’t impregnate her. So the two sort of become friends, which is as understandable as it is incredibly weird. Seeing as how the androids were always the wild cards of the Alien franchise, this is a twist that keeps it in line with our distrust of these creations. I wasn’t a fan of the voice-over narration or the acting, but it’s overall decent with the subtle theme of an android trying to help create life before she herself dies.

There’s a really special note to this, as the salvager who shows up is played by Bill Paxton’s (Aliens) son James.

Ore: A group of blue-collar miners racing to find a new ore vein before the company shuts down the operation discovers a lot of alien eggs down in the dark instead. As a young xenomorph starts feeding on them, the miners try to escape for their lives. But a local company representative isn’t going to make it that easy on them, and the miners realize that if they come up without killing it, the entire colony — and their families — could be in mortal jeopardy.

So they dive back into the dark, using their mining equipment as improvised weapons against this terrifying unknown beast. It’s a great short that packs a full plot into a short time frame… but it fails to give us any sort of definitive resolution. The let down of the ending was my only complaint in an otherwise promising entry.

Night Shift: A hungover trucker is abandoned at a supply depot, where the night shift workers have to deal with the aftermath. Spoiler alert, he’s got an alien ready to pop out of him. We get a full chest bursting scene followed by a bug hunt in this storage room.

This was one of my least favorite shorts of the bunch. The setting is really dull — I hope you like metal shelves — and there’s nothing new that this short tale adds to the franchise.

Specimen: In an underground botany lab at a colony, a sealed “specimen” breaks out of a barrel and sends the lone botanist — and her guard dog — scrambling to combat this threat. While the set is clearly some basement that someone dressed up with a lot of ferns, I actually ended up loving this short. It’s got a fun main character (who rocks out!) and a twist at the end I didn’t see coming.

Of course, at this point I have to ask how widespread are the xenomorphs in colonized space, because if they keep popping up this frequently, you just know humanity is completely doomed.

Containment: The shorts end on a high note as Containment begins with the breaking up of a colony transport vessel. Four survivors blast away on an escape pod, freaked out by the widespread xenomorph contagion on the ship and worried that they might be bringing one of them along for the ride. The question is, what are they prepared to sacrifice to make sure that the alien stays contained?

From start to finish, this one shines with quality and economic storytelling. The escape pod interior may be small, but it fits well within this universe, and the closing shot is quite haunting indeed.

So should you see the 40th Alien Anniversary Shorts? If you’re a fan of the franchise, I definitely think these are worth your while. They do often have to work around obvious budget limitations, but still we got plenty of face-huggers, chest bursters, and full-grown xenomorphs in these 60-odd minutes.