

ALIEN
A
USA Great Britain (116 mi) 1979
‘Scope d: Ridley Scott
In space, no one can
hear you scream
Ridley Scott’s warm-up for his real masterpiece, Blade
Runner (1982), that would come several years later, including similar uses
of robots or replicants as well as the infamous rain sequences. Each deal
with the idea of technology run wild, while ALIEN has an extremely subversive
view of corporate corruption and deceit, particularly the idea of lying to
employees in order to protect top secret military aims, where the lives of
employees in outer space are literally owned by the corporation, requiring each
to sign a contract to that effect, alleviating the company of all liability in
the event something disastrous occurs. Therein lies the cold-hearted,
underlying premise to this story, where reality isn’t what you think it is, as
it’s disguised under the lies of an alternative space mission, where only the
top officers are aware of the circumstances, so some of the shudders in this
film is the degree to which corporate greed is emphasized—very much ahead of
its time in that respect. With several nods to Kubrick’s 2001 (1968),
certainly at the center of this premise is a ship computer, known as mother,
that no one has access to except the top officers. The rest are excluded
from the chain of command and thereby shielded from the truth of their real
mission. This story concerns an outer space cargo ship that is returning
home from a mining expedition, where its passengers are in a scientifically
imposed deep sleep, but woken up 10 months before their anticipated arrival
time to answer a distress signal on an isolated asteroid where they encounter
an alien life form that horrifically makes its way inside their space vessel,
eventually picking off the crew one by one. The pervasive sense of dread
turns this into a haunted house story with a monster on the loose, as in no
time this crew is lost in the woods with no way out.
Adapted from a Dan O’Bannon story, who previously wrote the story and
screenplay for John Carpenter’s DARK STAR (1974), assisted by Ronald Shusett,
with amazing visual effects from H.R. Giger (surrealist alien creator), Carlo
Rambaldi (alien head design), Brian Johnson and Nick Allder (special effects),
and Denys Ayling (miniature photography), with an extremely elaborate and
intricately created set design by Michael Seymour (production design), Leslie
Dilley and Roger Christian (art), and Ian Whittaker (set). From the
outset, the camera is the only stirring creature as it slowly moves around
corners and gazes at the dark cavernous design of the space ship interior,
taking on the attributes of inquisitiveness and curiosity. When the
humans awake to discover their situation, all done by computer (perhaps the
most archaic presence in the entire film), there’s an interesting use of
improvisation in their conversation, using the Altman style of overlapping
dialogue which creates a sense of authenticity in the moment, where soon each
of the characters begins to take shape in the eyes of the audience. The
corporate hierarchy (and great cast) is immediately established, where the
chief mechanics, the two guys that fix things and make the ship go are on the
lowest pay grade (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton as Parker and Brett),
while Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright are Ripley and Lambert, the
middle management officers under John Hurt (Kane), commanded by chief science
officer Ian Holm (Ash), and ship commander Tom Skerritt (Dallas). For
openers, the engineers complain they’re not getting equal shares of the bonus
pay for the work they’re doing, while in no time, Ash reminds them of a hidden
clause in their contract that if they fail to carry out their mission, as
assigned, they will forfeit all wages. So immediately they are put in
their place by the ship foremen, where life in outer space resembles the same
working conditions on earth of an overworked and underpaid work force.
But that similarity ends as soon as they explore the asteroid, where with
shuddering efficiency, there is a stunning violation of standard protocol as
they allow the alien to enter their ship.
What immediately becomes noticeable is the lazy nonchalance
in the way this is handled, and the lack of precaution used. Anyone with
a pet dog or cat, or even a bird, knows the care one uses to keep them from
escaping out of the house—by closing the windows and doors behind you.
This crew routinely leaves doors open allowing the alien free access to their
entire ship. And despite the obvious danger to all, when they have it in
their possession, no one is assigned to watch it. So they display a
rather casual display of ignorance in their approach to this alien intrusion,
all of which takes on even greater significance when the alien grows to
monstrous size and slowly starts attacking the crew. The monster itself,
whose appearance is delayed and only gradually seen until the end, is a marvel
of grotesque proportion, yet what we remember is the gooey slime it leaves
behind and the continually drooling giant teeth, where it stealthily moves
mysteriously overhead through the ventilation ducts. Despite the passage
of thirty years, the film still holds up because Scott does an exquisite job
conveying a creepy sense of panic and fear and things that go bump in the
night, even while most of the horrific violence takes place offscreen, where
the body count, quicker edits and dark claustrophobic interior adds to an
increasingly developing paranoia on the ship. The pulsating strobe lights
and emergency siren sound loop become almost unbearable as the film races to
its spectacular heavy breathing finale, which is an interesting mixture of
frantic desperation, matching Weaver’s sensuous vulnerability and cool head
against a ghastly beast that obviously uses and consumes humans at will.
In the director’s cut, the added scenes are a nasty confrontation between
Lambert and Ripley outside the infirmary, a brief shot of the alien hanging
like one of the chains hanging from the ceiling above Brett in the interior
rain (from condensation) as he’s looking for the cat, Parker gets Brett’s blood
splattered on him as Brett is carried off, and the infamous ‘cocooning’
sequence where humans become stored fuel for the monster. Along with his
next film Blade
Runner, Scott has created two of the best sci-fi films ever made and could
never have made that film without the meticulous precision shown here working
with such extraordinary special effects, creating one of the great monster
movies ever, certainly better than all the follow ups which resemble the CGI
assault to the senses shown today, a blitzkrieg of explosions and mayhem which
the audience substitutes for excitement. The thrill of ALIEN is largely
due to the deliberate pacing and stunning futuristic visual innovation of the
time which precedes the CGI revolution in cinema, where the director himself
had to know how, from the wordless opening restraint, he could use the
audience’s natural fear of the unknown along with a pervading sense of gloom to
help build the mounting tension to a peak of madness and hysteria, all the
while embracing the fundamental essence of what it is to be human.
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