Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Runtime: 117 mins.
1979
As the quote from Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon goes, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" There is some certain truth to that, insofar as the blistering originality of Alien comes from being at the nexus of a myriad of influences while not being beholden to any single one.
O'Bannon got the germ of his idea after working with John Carpenter on Dark Star. The texture of the story snapped into place while working with several artists on the infamously scrapped Jodorowski's Dune. One of those artists was H. R. Giger, whose psychosexual monstrosities left their mark on O'Bannon long before Giger was himself signed on to design the alien. The script went through incremental development, gaining the alien's reproductive cycle from co-writer Ronald Shusett, and reluctantly picking up the android subplot from studio writers David Giler and Walter Hill. The title of the script was blessedly changed from Star Beast to Alien. Ultimately, the crux of the film fell into place when a wet behind the ears Ridley Scott signed on to direct.
Alien is arguably Scott's crowning achievement. There is a strict purity to its elements, from O'Bannon and co.'s script, to Giger's ruthless creature design, to Derek Vanlint's creeping cinematography, and so on. Yet a director's job is to tie elements together into a greater whole, and Scott does exactly that. Alien is a bereft sexual nightmare full of foreboding, menace, and isolation.
Scott starts the film with a lugubrious tour of the ship's interior. Being a director with a particular eye for setting, he doesn't miss the chance to showcase Michael Seymour's bleak production design. The Nostromo, as the ship is called, is a horror house of infinite machinery, cramped angles, and only exactly enough light for its inhabitants to function. We don't meet said inhabitants until after our crawl through the ship, culminating in a retro-future monitor screen booting up and spitting out unintelligible readings as the reflective visor of an empty helmet stares on impartially.
This is how, even long before the titular alien bursts onto the scene, Scott and co. instill a sense of slow-burning dread. Unlike most sci-fi, Alien does not try to be exciting. It opts instead to be patient and sinister.
Indeed, despite Ripley's reputation as the badass queen of sci-fi heroics, neither she nor anyone else are particularly exciting either. They're not even great characters qua character. But they are supremely functional for this particular narrative. These are exploited blue collar workers after all, and if they don't have much to say of great insight, that's because they're on the job and amongst coworkers. In fact, O'Bannon and Shusett's script, focused on tone above all else, explicitly states that the crew of the Nostromo are functionally unisex, to be cast across race and gender as the casting director sees fit.
Our band of average joes consists of Tom Skerritt as Dallas, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, John Hurt as Kane, Yaphet Kotto as Parker, and Ian Holm as the science officer Ash. Not a one of them isn't terrific, each honing in on particular aspects of psychological breakdown quietly and without much fuss--until the camera gets right up in their faces and demands proper panic. The grubby worldweariness and nearly invisible microtensions between the crew members lends a tremendous amount of grounded realism. This greasy sci-fi realism (descended from Star Wars' infamous production design) is all the more impressive due to the otherworldly setting, and all the more evocative due to the profoundly unnatural element that is to introduce itself into that system.
I speak of the alien. Here I can do no better than to quote film critic Tim Brayton: "It all really comes down to Giger's alien design. A far worse movie in every respect could still have become a beloved classic with that design. Need I even bother reminding you? The shiny carapace, like a beetle; the heavily sexual details like the chomping penis-mouth, or the vagina-spider horror of the embryonic form of the creature; the odd bits pointing where they simply have no cause to; and the conspicuous lack of eyes. There's really nothing even comparable to it in the 90-ish years of cinema preceding Alien, and while the film's success caused God knows how many imitators, none of them work at this level. Simply put, the alien is a nightmare that also seems completely plausible, both as a physical object and as a life-form with a remarkably different biology than our own; but not a fantastic biology, and that matters."
The alien is a near impossible achievement: a movie monster that is just as unsettling in brief flashes as it is standing there in plain sight. Its design is the lynchpin of all the film's themes. Its organic perfection exists in stark contrast to the clumsy human-corporate machine that seeks to capture or destroy it. Its hyperefficiency exists as a foil for the human unit's mental and physical fragility. Most evocatively, the oozing sexuality of the beast generates numerous sub-commentaries on rape, reproduction, and organism--a thread compounded by the Nostromo's cold artificial intelligence interface named Mother. Ash insists that the alien is the perfect organism, a sentiment made creepier by his own artificiality.
It is also the perfect movie effect. Years later the mythology has grown such that we know the creature is called a Xenomorph. We know its corollaries are called facehuggers and chestbursters. We know that Ripley works for Weyland-Yutani, and that she is an unassailable ass-kicker. Yet the franchise was never more potent than when it was uncluttered by these marginalia. It was simply an alien. A woman who works for The Company. Some gross thing that attached to a crewmember's face.
Which brings us to the centerpiece of the film, its most iconic moment, the dinner scene. It is an unparalleled piece of bio-horror featuring what must be one of the most earned jump scares in all of cinema; the audience, and all of the characters, have their full attention focused on the well-lit and clearly-shot location of the jump scare--yet it still startles viscerally. Famously, the cast had an idea of what was to happen in the scene, but their expressions of bewildered terror and disgust are wholly genuine reactions to the grotesquerie of the special effects.
That may be Alien's legacy: moments that work whether you expect them or not, creatures that are as scary obscured as laid bare, a film that knows all the tricks in the book even when it doesn't have to use them, and a sense of dread that is just as palpable whether your eyes are opened or closed.
5 / 5 BLOBS
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