Alien (1979)

Alien: **** out of **** Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Starring Tom Skeritt, Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, and Bolaji Badejo.

by Andy Keast 

When I returned to "Alien" in the December of 2003, I was reminded that it seems the director, Ridley Scott, was born in the wrong era. His glory days, as they were, were made up of essentially the work of a silent filmmaker. Scott was known for "painting" movies of (if nothing else) bold visual power, and though it inhabits the popular sci-fi/horror genre, the terror in his 1979 film comes not from the shocks, but from the quiet.

Working from a script by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett (argued by some as the only decent script Scott directed) that was somewhat derived from such pulp sci-fi horror from the 1950s and 60s as "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" (1958), Scott delivered what has become a genre formula: half a dozen victims are picked off one at a time by a seemingly unstoppable killer/monster. A deep space mining crew receives an S.O.S. from the lifeless planet LV 426, stops to investigate and encounters a large derelict freighter, carrying an extra-terrestrial arsenal of sorts. What makes "Alien" superior is that it establishes the mining crew as actual human beings (Scott often instructed actors to speak over each other and most of the dialogue was improvised), which allows for a genuine contrast with the lifeform(s).

To describe the alien's physiology is bizarre, though welcomed as some of the most original writing in any major science fiction film. This is due in part to the genius of Swiss-born surrealist Hans Rudi Giger, whose creature and environment designs for the film have become some of the most imitated in the history of the genre. The alien is neither just an actor in a monster suit nor a cumbersome thing controlled by wires, but made physical and organic in the rather anomalous "biomech" style. It's a beast comprised of exoskeleton, exhaust pipes, elephant skin and teeth, that moves and behaves in insect-like ways, and whose blood can eat through steel. Everything about Giger's creature and derelict ship is indeed alien, from the cockpit's architecture (who would know anyway what an extra-terrestrial craft looks like?) to the beast's gestation process (O'Bannon apparently got the idea from the spider wasp, which lays its eggs in the abdomens of spiders).

Other staples of Scott's best films are their cheerful strangeness and subdued acting. His restorations in a new director's cut for 2003 are what I've described as "a little more juice": a movie that is stranger and more subdued in its performances (the restored scenes could previously be seen separately on the 20th Anniversary Edition DVD [1999]). The tension between Ripley (Weaver) and Lambert (Cartwright) makes a little more sense, the relationship between Brett (Stanton) and Parker (Kotto) is given more depth than just "quirky supporting characters," and the talked-about "cocoon" sequence is back.

Perhaps the most exciting thing to come from the "Alien" films is its massive appeal to women, who arguably admire the movie more than men. A lot has been made of the (not so) subtle Freudian imagery the film contains, and the movie's mergence of flesh and technology: from the way the alien sheds its skin as a snake does, to the slime droppings that are not dissimilar to semen, to the phallic shape of the alien's head. Oysters and clams were used as the facehuggers' internal organs, and when the mining ship's computer (called "Mother," coincidentally or not) fails, Weaver gets the movie's best line: "You bitch." Mark Kermode's retrospective in Sight & Sound also puts forth a buried "appeal" to men: "…the oral invasion and subsequent chest-bursting of John Hurt's character speaks to the timeless male fear of pregnancy..." When Ash (Holm) attempts to smother Ripley's mouth with a rolled magazine, Scott commented: "This is as close as you'll get to seeing a robot have sex." With that in mind, I'll say that another theme the script contains is that it's because of an organism's (human or otherwise) propensity to violence that it is failed by technology.

Despite its raw carnal energy, again I was taken by how "Alien'"s terror was drawn from its subtlety. Like all effective horror, the movie implies rather than shows -one of Scott's "rules" on the set was that no single shot could show the alien in its entirety. Fantastic designs and the weird Jerry Goldsmith score are employed, though it is still surprising how restrained the direction is.

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X-RT-RatingText: 4/4