The teaser of Alpha has sparked an interesting debate. Within minutes of its release, social media was flooded with comparisons to the 1990 French classic La Femme Nikita. Some viewers pointed to the restaurant sequence, others highlighted the mentor-protégé relationship, while a section of the audience went a step further and accused the film of borrowing heavily from Luc Besson’s cult thriller.
But the conversation may be missing the bigger picture. The real story is not whether Alpha resembles La Femme Nikita. The more fascinating question is why, more than three decades later, every female-assassin thriller continues to be viewed through the lens of a film released in 1990.
Certain movies become so influential that they stop being judged as individual works and start functioning as blueprints for entire genres. The Godfather became the benchmark for gangster dramas. Jaws became the template for creature thrillers. In much the same way, La Femme Nikita became the foundation on which the modern female-assassin thriller was built.
Before Nikita, female characters who killed existed in cinema, but they were rarely the driving force of the narrative. They were often femme fatales, supporting characters, villains or occasional action heroes. What La Femme Nikita did differently was place a woman at the centre of a story that was both deeply emotional and unapologetically violent. The film followed a troubled young woman who is recruited by a secret government agency, trained to become an assassin and forced to navigate a life torn between human vulnerability and professional brutality.
That premise proved remarkably enduring. The recruit who is given a new identity. The rigorous training. The mentor who shapes a killer. The struggle to reconcile ordinary human desires with extraordinary violence. The question of whether someone transformed into a weapon can ever truly reclaim their humanity. These are themes that continue to appear across the genre even today.
The influence of La Femme Nikita can be seen in everything from its own television adaptations to films such as Salt, Atomic Blonde, Anna, Red Sparrow and Ballerina. Each of these titles has its own personality and ambitions, yet all of them draw from a narrative vocabulary that Nikita helped popularise. The settings may change, the action may become more elaborate and the production values may grow larger, but the emotional framework often remains strikingly familiar.
What makes Nikita’s legacy so powerful is that it was never solely about espionage. The assassinations, the missions and the intrigue were only one part of the story. At its heart, the film was about identity. It explored what happens when a person is stripped of one life and forced into another. It examined the cost of survival, the longing for normalcy and the emotional damage caused by turning a human being into an instrument of violence.
That is precisely why audiences instinctively connected Alpha to La Femme Nikita. Based on everything officially revealed so far, the two films do not appear to share the same plot. Alpha seems to revolve around a character who has been groomed for espionage from a young age, whereas Nikita centred on a delinquent who is forcibly transformed into an assassin after being given a second chance at life. Yet viewers immediately saw a connection because the imagery, themes and character dynamics belong to a cinematic language that Nikita helped define.
In many ways, the reaction to Alpha says less about the film itself and more about the extraordinary cultural footprint of La Femme Nikita. Some films influence a generation. Others influence an entire genre. Nikita belongs firmly in the latter category. Its fingerprints are visible across decades of storytelling, often in ways that filmmakers themselves may not even consciously recognise.
This creates a unique challenge for contemporary filmmakers. Any attempt to tell a story about a female assassin risks inviting comparisons to Nikita, regardless of how original the actual narrative may be. The film’s influence is so deeply embedded within the genre that separating inspiration from coincidence becomes increasingly difficult.
Perhaps that is the true measure of a classic. More than thirty-five years after its release, La Femme Nikita continues to shape the way audiences perceive female-assassin stories. Every new entrant is compared against it, consciously or otherwise. The genre has evolved, expanded and reinvented itself countless times, but it is still speaking a language that Nikita helped create.
That is why the debate surrounding Alpha ultimately leads back to the same conclusion. The question is not whether the film resembles La Femme Nikita. The question is whether any female-assassin thriller can ever completely escape its shadow.
