Alien at 40

The crew awakens from hypersleep in their pods.  The ship's computer, "Mother," has detected a signal of unknown origin coming from the moon of a nearby planet.  The film will not look this clean and warm and inviting again.

In the early summer of 1979, I had just completed my sophomore year of college and was at home with my parents working in a carpet mill.  That summer I dated a girl who was the daughter of friends of my parents.  We had a mutual attraction to a few things and one of them was movies.  I took her to see Alien at a big theater in Chattanooga and a fancy dinner beforehand.  It was fun.  She grasp my hand through half the movie, both of us transfixed and tense as we watched it.  

Back then there were no CGI effects.  Everything had to be done with models and prosthetics and whatever else filmmakers could come up with.  That is one reason so many late-70’s films, in the science fiction genre in particular, feel a bit dated today.  The scares that seemed so incredible back then have been replaced by even more horrifying scenes shot with better effects and greater boldness over the past four decades.

But Alien holds up well.  Though its iconic scenes have been copied since then, no one had seen anything quite like it before.  It is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead in outer space. Yet, unlike those famous B-grade films, Alien is a first-rate studio production, with a budget of over $8 million, superb writing, acting, effects, and direction by Ridley Scott, one of my favorite directors.

Sure, the computer aspects of the film are badly dated.  40 years ago all we knew were DOS-based operating systems.  Graphics were anything but extraordinary.  Windows did not exist, nor was it even on anyone’s mind.  Personal computers existed but they were for academics to use.  No one I knew had a PC, including myself.  So, Alien is set within a future world where computer interfaces should be more powerful and interactive.  It’s all still clunky binary code on the interstellar spaceship.  

So, as a viewer, you have to sort of work around that aspect of the film.  Luckily, Scott’s brilliant direction makes that easy.  There is still plenty to enjoy that still feels fresh and was, for its time, innovative and pioneering.  Alien gave the lead role to a woman (Sigourney Weaver) which was a kind of watershed moment for sci-fi and for cinema generally.  She delivers a solid performance of Ripley, full of determination mixed with primal fear.  The special effects themselves are quite good and even shocking, even today.  The musical score by Jerry Goldsmith is wonderful and majestic as well as, when necessary, relentlessly pounding.  The acting is engaging and easy to empathize with, empathy being a critical component in the terror to come. 

The atmospheric aspects of the film remain strong. Alien not only felt “real” to its audience, but it managed to carve a niche out for itself somewhere between the “fantastic” action of Star Wars and the “clinical” experience of 2001.  Ridley Scott created a gritty, blue collar world among the crew members of The Nostromo, a gigantic commercial spacecraft bringing millions of tons of valuable minerals back to Earth.  The crew eats and complains about the food.  Some of them complain about their pay.  Many of them smoke, drink beer, tell jokes amidst a spacecraft that is anything but clinical.  It is lived-in and used, somewhat distressed, everything geared toward corporate mining and transportation.

The ship's commander, Dallas, queries Mother as to why they were brought out of hypersleep.  Tom Skerritt gives a great performance in the film.  The computer technology of the film dates it a bit, but you have to look past that.  And there's plenty to look at and enjoy.

Lambert (Vernoica Cartwright) and Kane (John Hurt) on the bridge.  Kane draws on a cigarette while seated in a torn and weathered leather chair.  The film has a earth-worn feel about it that helps distinguish it.

This shot is a use of special effects pioneered by Stanley Kubrick in 2001.  The Nostromo approaches a nearby planet...

...which orbits a bluish star.  The radical shift in the size of the ship compared with the planet and moons reverses the immensity of the ship in the previous shot, here rendering it tiny by comparison as it makes its approach.

The command craft dislodges from the massive mining and cargo sections of the ship.  Its thrusters carry it down to the surface of the moon where the signal is still repeating.  Ripley, studying it, suggests it is not a call for help but rather a warning.

A beautiful atmospheric shot by Ridley Scott.  Three of the crew check out the source of the signal on foot as the moon's bluish star rises.

They find another space ship of unknown origin, apparently trapped there for an untold number of centuries.

The film incorporates all these elements as it takes a direct approach to the horror of the situation, without any character development or deep narrative.  All the characters are in the present and you only know about them through their actions in the moment.  There is no talk about any of their backgrounds, no time for introspection, no flashbacks to earlier points in their lives.  They project appropriate attitudes toward one another to give it a human feel and to ratchet up the tension as needed.  But their actions and attitudes are all synchronized on the alien, once it appears, almost halfway through the film. 

Which is one of the movie’s many strengths.  Scott’s slow-building tension is masterful.  The director is in no hurry, the initial “boo” moments are mostly accidents, as Hitchcock would do to prep an audience for the real screams.  Scott manages to lure you in through long dolly shots and casual crew interactions.  Though there is an underlying tension, nothing seems rushed to begin with.  He wants to make you gasp several times before anything really frightening occurs.  In this way he sets you up for the film’s gripping second-half rollercoaster ride.

Alien is a highly atmospheric film, meaning it creates a mood for its audience, particularly in the first half before the alien appears.  Everything is so routine; the story develops at a deliberate pace.  We are entranced by the sets, special effects, musical score, and the somewhat odd-ball assortment of characters.  Once the alien appears it is suddenly and briefly.  The sheer horror of the thing lies not only in its awesome power to kill with its projectile mouth and razor sharp teeth, but in the fact that we do not get a good, long look at it until much later. 

Initially, Scott flashes it to us and allows our imaginations to work more than the visuals.  This semi-masking of the creature and the methodical development of mood makes Alien seem like something H. P. Lovecraft might have written.  This Lovecraftian feel is the highest expression of the horror genre and affects the audience by menacing our emotions, somewhat claustrophobic and disorienting, before the first true horror takes place.  From then on, the thriller unfolds within a “place” of ominous mood which is all the more effective since Scott took the time to establish it in the first 40 minutes of the film.

Inside the ship there appears to be a large creature at some sort of console.  It has been dead so long that it is fossilized.  The crew not that there is a spot in its chest where the ribs are exploding outward, as if from some inside force.  This is a splendid example of H. G. Giger's strange aesthetic.

The crew go on and find these vagina-like openings to the interior of the ship.  They enter...

...and it opens into a vast cavern with hundreds of pod-like eggs shrouded under a blue mist.  This set design is more of Giger's work.  Kane is attacked by whatever is inside one of these eggs.  The attack happens in only 1-2 seconds onscreen, so it is jolting and disorienting. 

Which brings us to H.G. Giger.  Had the work of this artist not been discovered by the film’s producers Alien would have almost certainly not have been as remarkable.  No one had ever seen anything like Alien in part because of Scott’s directorial vision.  But, more fundamentally when it comes to the creature, only the cult following of Giger had ever seen anything like the erotic otherworldly artwork as published in The Necronomicon.  The rest of the world was about to shocked (and strangely attracted) by it as manifested in the film.  

The studio thought Giger’s work was too twisted and grotesque but Scott and his crew knew they were on to something special.  Indeed, when the film was released there was a cultish fascination with its presentation of Giger’s designs.  There was plenty of talk of the sexual connotations in both the sets and the alien itself.  Scott’s semi-masking of the creature only ratchets up the tension with the audience doing a lot of the work, guided by visual suggestion.  This is a powerful way for an audience to connect with a film.  Alien electrifies our imaginations with Scott’s constant tension and Giger’s nightmarish designs.

Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) keep the film grounded in the first half.  They are just regular guys trying to make a living keeping the ship running.  Some of Kotto's improvisations in the film are magnificent.

As an ensemble, the cast of Alien is terrific, turning in highly creditable and splendidly nuanced performances.  This enabled Scott to focus more on the appearance of each shot and how it looked and felt as opposed to what exactly was happening at any given time in the story.  The script is well-written and very tight and, for the most part, Scott shot the film that way.  But he did allow for various improvisations which only served to further legitimatize the story. 

And there is no better example of that than the film’s most iconic moment, the so-called “chestburster” scene.  Nothing made the audiences in the summer of '79 scream louder and yet be strangely stunned into gasping silence than this scene.  The audience and the cast reacted the same way to the same horror at the same moment.  It was a magical scream.

When making any film, the director usually shoots a “master take” of the scene which usually has the camera pulled back showing all the action without concentrating on anything specifically.  Then, the scene is reshot from various angles and close-ups to flesh it out, knowing that there is a “master” shot to return to cover any rough edits and ensure continuity of action.

The master for this famous scene was shot in one take.  The only variation is that Scott had 5 cameras rolling simultaneously at fixed angles and zooms.  Most of the cast was not told what exactly was going to happen.  Of course, they knew about the shot from the vague, general references given in the script, but no one was prepared for how far Scott planned to push the emergence of the baby alien out of Kane’s (John Hurt) abdomen.  The effect was to spatter blood over some of the actors seemingly from a violent eruption out of the actor’s stomach.  

Without foreknowledge, the cast improvised their reactions on the spot with the intensity of the moment so high that legend has it the actress playing Lambert (Veronica Cartwright, one of the more experienced cast members) fainted on the set.  She says that she merely slipped and fell.  Either way, the cast was unprepared for the sheer force of the moment, and that is powerfully conveyed on the screen.  Scott fully captured this moment and America was talking about it.  Only in Jaws have I ever experienced an audience screaming with such an intense mixture of confusion, terror, and disquiet.  It was stunning. 

Even today that one scene dominates any general conversation about the film. Of course, since then this “chestburster” type shot has been used over and over again.  But, even so, when you see it for the first time it is unforgettable, a shining standard of filmmaking that has not aged in the least, having been copied endlessly but never duplicated in terms of that initial affect.  That scene is an original.

This is what was inside the egg, affixed to Kane's head with a membrane down his throat feeding him oxygen.  It also impregnates him, though we don't know this at the time.

"The Last Supper" shot is one of the few in the film where we see the entire cast ensemble.  This is the beginning of the "chestburster" scene.

Kane suddenly goes into convulsions as his crew mates try to help him as he writhes on the table.  Then we get the first burst...

Cartwright and Ian Holm react.  Neither of them knew what Scott had planned for the scene, thereby the director got truly horrified performances.  Incredibly, this was performed and captured in one take.

Kotto, Weaver, Stanton, and Skerritt all react in this second angle of the same master take.

A second, more forceful, burst brings the baby alien out of Kane's stomach.  Blood spews all over Lambert.  This was not in the initial master take.  It is a follow-up shot but is, nevertheless, effective in terms of tension and gore.

There is no need to search for anything “deep” or symbolic or allegorical in Alien.  It is a very simple movie.  It wants to scare you and it does so brilliantly, innovative for its time.  So, while the movie is a solid “9”, one of the best science fiction films ever made and a great mainstream movie in its own right, there is no depth to it.  Not much to analyze that way.  But, in another regard there is a lot of analyze.  Scott’s mix of Hitchcock, Lovecraft, and Giger creates a claustrophobic atmospheric immersion of the viewer.  Alien has far more atmosphere than it does narrative.  As someone who enjoys narrative and metaphor, that is fine with me.  It totally works.

The alien initially moves about the ship through the air ducts.  Dallas attempts to drive creature into a part of the ship where they can blast it into space.  Scott uses a simple, brilliant technique for one of the frightening moments in the film.  Dallas enters an air duct and shines his flashlight toward the audience, thereby lighting up the theater...

...when he flashes it around it finds the alien is already upon him.  This literally takes the light that was on the audience and transfers it to the creature adding yet another level of intimacy to the fright.  This shot lasts about one second in the film, so you see the alien but you don't see it well.  Your mind races to fill int he blanks of this horrific threat.  Even in this freeze frame you can't see the alien well as it is, like Dallas, crouching in the air duct.  No more Dallas.

Later, as tension mounts and more crew members die, Ash the Science Officer goes a bit crazy.  We come to find out he is the only one on the ship who realizes that the true mission of The Nostromo is to bring back the alien, the mining operation was a ruse.  The crew is considered expendable.  Ash knows this and starts to act hostile at the possibility of the alien being "blasted into space."  Parker has to beat him off Ripley with an oxygen tank, which shockingly breaks his head off his shoulders.  Ash is a company robot.  No one saw that coming.   

Ian Holm is excellent as Ash, who reveals to the remaining crew what he really thinks of the murderous alien, "I admire its purity."  It is perfectly evolved for killing.

Alien is not without its flaws.  But, the film accomplishes so much so well that some rather obvious issues are trivial by comparison.  For example…

Why would anyone design a self-destruct mechanism for a gigantic spacecraft that set off every possible alarm and distraction at the precise moment when concentration is required to execute the protocol sequence?  It creates a terrific amount of tension but it is also completely ridiculous and (necessarily perhaps) detracts from the realistic feel of the film.

Why would the alien, who has done nothing but hunt and kill all movie, just conveniently lay there in the escape ship knowingly allowing Ripley to put on a space suit and proceed to blast it out of the craft?  The film has a nonsensical ending.

As I said, these are trivial complaints and do not detract from how Alien affects its audience.  The movie grossed about $79 million in the United States in 1979 and about double that counting worldwide ticket sales.  It received mixed reviews but, nevertheless, its audience eventually became fanatical about it, to the extent that it spawned a sequel, Aliens, in 1986 directed by James Cameron.  I saw that film as well and, while it was nowhere near as good as the original, it was a decent movie and launched a slew of sequels and prequels (including Prometheus which I reviewed here) making Alien one of the most successful franchise films in history.

In 2003 a “director’s cut” of the film was released which had some additional footage.  None of it adds anything to the experience of the 1979 film, although for those who are interested in the entire Alien series it contains some information that might be of interest.  From a film-making standpoint, however, Scott was wise to edit all this stuff out to begin with.  Scott admitted that the additional footage was not part of his final vision for the film.  He delivered everything he personally wanted to accomplish in the original release.  

I did not get into all the various Alien franchise films.  As I mentioned, I saw Aliens (maybe 3 or 4 times) and liked it, I saw Prometheus (once) and was disappointed.  I have seen the original film probably a dozen times through the years.  Like all great films, it calls to me from time to time and I have to experience it again.  How wonderful of have enjoyed it and Apocalypse Now for 40 years!

In the end it is Ripley (with the ship's pet cat Jones) against the alien.  This is part of the rather silly (when you think about it) self-destruct sequence which nevertheless provides the film with a very tense climax.

Sigourny Weaver was pioneering as the lead role in the film.  It launched her sensational career and a lucrative movie franchise as well.