Alien (1979)
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released an atmospheric, sci-fi adventure epic: 2001 - A Space Odyssey. In 1977, George Lucas released a populist space adventure juggernaut: Star Wars. In 1978, John Carpenter released a creepy low budget slasher: Halloween. In 1979, Ridley Scott mixed all three together and produced his very best film: Alien. He took Kubrick’s cosmic horror, his sense of the enormity and mystery of intergalactic travel. He seized on sci-fi’s surge in popularity after the release of Star Wars. He replicated the structure and logic of Carpenter’s horror shocker, swapping out brown-haired final girl Jamie Lee Curtis for brown-haired final girl Sigourney Weaver. The marriage of popular sci-fi with creeping, atmospheric horror is so perfect that it brings tears of joy to my eyes.
In the distant future, a commercial space vessel named the Nostromo floats through deep space. Having loaded its cargo of mineral ore, the Nostromo’s crew lie unconscious in stasis pods. They are awoken when the ship receives a transmission from a barren planet that indicates a source of intelligent life. The crew soon discover an ancient, terrifying alien creature: a 7-foot-tall killing machine with acid for blood and a retractable mouth powerful enough to punch through a human skull. With motion sensors and flamethrowers, the desperate crew have to fight for their lives. On board the Nostromo are Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) and engineers Brett and Parker (Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto).
It’s a minor miracle that Alien was able to unite all of these actors together. Hurt and Holm are British Shakespearean thespians, Weaver was a beautiful rising star and Harry Dean Stanton is a legendary character actor. Sci-fi creature features shouldn’t have casts as strong as this. Imagine a movie released today where Sydney Sweeney, Paul Giamatti, Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi have to fight a sea monster. Only in the distant past were such gloriously strange combinations realised on screen. Each member of Alien’s cast understands Scott’s tone perfectly and enriches the movie’s atmosphere. Cartwright, known for childhood performances in movies like The Birds, is perfect as a likeable terrified neurotic. Skerrit is a highly effective reluctant boss and Weaver’s turn as Ripley is a Star is Born moment. Weaver has an incredible face. She’s utterly beautiful, completely creditable as a sharp survivor and utterly magnetic every time she appears on screen.
Who’s the main character? Given that Alien has since become a franchise, we know full well that Ripley is the lead. She’s the final, the action star, the iconic heroine. Watch the movie as if you’re an average moviegoer wandering into a theatre in 1979. You would have no idea who Sigourney Weaver was and you wouldn’t realise she was the lead actress until everyone else was slaughtered. For much of the running time, Dallas seems like he’ll be the lead. Kris Kristofferson lookalike Tom Skerritt receives top billing and may have been familiar to audiences with roles in multiple Robert Altman movies. Weaver was a complete unknown. This works in the movie’s favour.
Even to those familiar with the franchise, Scott’s film feels unpredictable, each death still feels shocking because they were designed to truly surprise the audience. Scott made Weaver a star and killed a lot of fictional astronauts to do it. For those unfamiliar with the slasher genre, here are the basics. By slasher law, there must be: an unstoppable killer armed with supernatural strength and cunning, a team of rebellious loudmouths lined up for execution and a brown-haired virginal final girl. The final girl must survive and she has to defeat the killer. Her promiscuous, drunken, aggressive friends must always die. This is the logic of Halloween and a thousand other slasher films, from Friday the 13th to A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ridley Scott takes this logic and puts it in his vision of outer space.
The overwhelming popularity of Star Wars helped to get Alien made, but Scott doesn’t share George Lucas’s image of space travel. Drawing from the creeping eeriness of Kubrick’s 2001, Scott sees space as an infinite silent void filled with horrors beyond the realms of human imagination. H R Giger’s sinister, creepily sexual art design gives the film a disturbing psychological depth. Consider the Xenomorph’s stiff, penetrative mouth and phallic curves. Departing from both Lucas and Kubrick, Scott kills the concept of the clinical, spotless, gleaming white spaceship. The Nostromo is an oily beast, a mess of steel chains and scratched plastic decorated with pin-up posters and cigarette ash. This is a profoundly industrial vision of space travel that looks like it could double for the background in a Nine Inch Nails music video. Before we get to the infamous chest-burster scene, there’s a solid 45 minutes of pure atmosphere.
Scott’s camera explores the darkness of the spacecraft, de-emphasising our iconic final girl heroine as it focuses on the squabbles within the microcosmic class system that has formed on board the Nostromo. Working class laid-back Hawaiian-shirt sporting engineer buddies Brett and Parker are unhappy with their paltry wages and openly rebellious against the monolithic corporation that employs them. Dallas heads the upper strata of the spaceship, backed up by Ripley, Ash, Kane and Lambert. The engineers work in the oily bowels of the ship. They drip with sweat and grease, they swear and they backchat their bosses. The better paid officer-class crew are officious, strict and well-spoken. Corporate culture has survived long enough to reach the uncharted depths of space. It was only with Aliens that Weaver became a badass action hero. In Alien she’s a fortunate, quick-witted survivor, and she’s just as strict and cold as the other officers, if not more so.
Scott cleverly introduces us to the majestic fantasy of space travel through office politics and workplace factionalism. We instantly relate to the crew because they aren’t plastic space men floating through the air and spouting dull jargon. They’re a group of edgy employees desperate to finish the job as quickly as possible and go home. The air of the Nostromo is thick with cigarette smoke, the crew eats Cheerios for breakfast and we quickly see that the ship is held together by rubber wires and steam pipes. Scott moves forward with an extremely deliberate slowness. An extended Kubrickian section of planet exploring reveals the ancient skeletal remains of an outer-space massacre. Only after John Hurt is attacked and impregnated with a monstrous alien serial killer does the slasher plot come into full force.
This odd dual structure (atmospheric world-building/unstoppable alien killer) is a resounding success, investing us in a recognisable vision of the distant future before playing around with the eerie, cinematically ideal territory of the gigantic, claustrophobic space vessel. There’s nowhere to run and everywhere for the creature to hide. Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusset’s script sharply mixes the prosaic with the fantastical, introducing a extra-terrestrial slasher villain into a grimy, realistic sci-fi environment. By taking its time establishing tone, character and location, Alien makes the threat posed by the Xenomorph all the more chilling. Scott’s film is dreamy and sedate before it becomes nightmarish. Hypnotic stretches of cautious movement are interrupted with vicious killings in rooms that look like a factory floor.
The seventh instalment in the Alien franchise, Alien Romulus, was released this month. The franchise has long since moved past its iconic leading lady, establishing a grand mythos with prequels and sequels that reveal more and more about the origins of the Xenomorph and all life in the universe. Opinions on the sequels after the excellent action-thriller Aliens are mixed. I don’t think any of them come close to the glory and beautiful simplicity of the original Alien. Scott’s created a perfect location for outer space horror and populated it with one of the greatest casts ever assembled. None of the other films in the franchise were able to create an atmosphere this thick because they didn’t take the time that Scott invested in his deliberately dreamy prologue. We see the characters wake up, drift across their vessel and look out to the stars. From its opening seconds we feel the sinister isolation of space travel, the sense of vulnerability and threat posed by the infinite blackness of space.
Alien achieves a spectacular blend of mystery, sadness, humour and horror by grounding itself in the eeriness of space travel and the familiarity of office politics. I’ve never seen a sci-fi movie that I’ve enjoyed more than this one.