Directed by Ridley Scott
Jones trained by Animals Unlimited
Alien design by H.R. Giger
Alien head effects by Carlo Rambaldi
Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder
Concept Artist Ron Cobb
Production Designer Michael Seymour
Art Directors Les Dilley and Roger Christian
Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon
Story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett
Director of Photography Derek Vanlint
Edited by Terry Rawlings
Executive Producer Ronald Shusett
Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill
Music by Jerry Goldsmith
Starring
Sigourney Weaver as Ripley
Yaphet Kotto as Parker
Tom Skerritt as Dallas
Ian Holm as Ash
Veronica Cartwright as Lambert
Harry Dean Stanton as Brett
John Hurt as Kane
Bolaji Badejo as the alien
Helen Horton as the voice of Mother
Jones is Jones
...
“Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you’d known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror.”
-Emperor Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe in Flash Gordon (1980)
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
In the future, being an intergalactic space traveller is just another shit-ass fuckin’ job. You’re basically an extension of an artificially intelligent space ship-the whole goddamn operation could run without any all-too-human bags of meat, couldn’t it? The only reason why you’re there is politics and economics: labor negotiations to ensure jobs for highly evolved primates inside the hyper-rationalized, mostly autonomous ultra-tech resource extraction industries of whatever distant century within which Alien takes place.
The space ship is the Nostromo, a vast and ugly, yet star-worthy, mobile ore extractor, refinery, and transport vessel, which visually evokes a dystopian devolution of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. When we first see the Nostromo it’s in visual contrast to a huge, Saturn-like planet with impressive rings of space rocks, and all this measured against the pitiless void of space. We eventually go inside the Nostromo, and it is so dense with Millenium Falcon-esque run-down retro-future details that, if you’re watching this at home-as opposed to a COVID-19 superspreader theater-you’ll want to pause and play back a lot of the scenes after you watch it through once without stopping, just to try to suss out what all the gadgets and junk are supposed to be:
-robot heads that seem to pilot the craft whilst the human crew are locked in cryogenic hypersleep-those fuckin’ robo-heads always creep me out, as they seem to be sending and receiving some kind of machine language, which you know is bad, right? When the machines are talking to each other when no humans are around . . .
-what is that-is that an elephant key chain hanging on someone’s astro-navigation monitor? Is that Dumbo? Someone adding a little kitschy human flair to their work station?
-smooth glide, stalkery camera maneuvers combined with Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score give us the sense that the Nostromo is haunted by some unseen, pervasive evil presence-which would be capitalism, of course-BUT, if you mute the sound and watch it again, it’s almost like a virtual tour of some second hand space craft. Try before you buy.
-and then we get to the hypersleep bed-pods. The lids open. John Hurt slowly sits up, awakening from a no doubt years-long slumber. He’s so pale and withered looking. Yet he has a kind of anguished Zen about him, as though he is resigned to his dehumanizing fate as a disposable cog in the overall corporate machine. A quintessentially John Hurt moment-see also 1984.
-and soon the rest of the crew is awake, and gathered around the mess table, eating a variety of vaccuum-packed self-heating meals. You’ve got the alert and by-the-book science officer Ian Holm, who’ll surely dole out plenty of technobabble and vital exposition as the movie chugs along. You have chief engineer Yaphet Kotto who brings up the “bonus situation” on behalf of himself and his fellow below-the-line engineer Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt as the laconic hard-on of a captain tells him everybody gets paid what’s in their contract-so, a very reasonable, “Fuck you.”
Warrant Officer Sigourney Weaver and astro-navigator Veronica Cartwright soon realize that their star charts are all wrong for an automated return trip to Earth. Something has diverted their homeward voyage: a signal, of either distress or warning, from an unknown source on an unexplored planet. The laws of space travel require that any capable crew has to assist another vessel in distress, and so the homeward voyage becomes a rescue operation.
Look, you’ve seen Alien, right? This is one of those movies everybody’s seen. Or it used to be. It still is, right? Is it possible to spoil Alien, in this miserable fucking pandemic year of 2020?
I’ll err on the side of caution. I’ll try not to totally spoil this one, ‘cause it is one of the best. Not so much in terms of absolute originality of ideas or themes-Alien is highly derivative of earlier sci-fi B-movie thrillers. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon may have lifted a crucially disgusting aspect of the titular alien creature’s life cycle from David Cronenberg’s Shivers, tho’ I don’t know that for sure. I wasn’t there myself, you know.
What sells Alien is the obsessively wrought production designs of the Nostromo and the structures awaiting the human crew upon the surface of the planet where the mysterious signal originates; the off-the-cuff Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes shot and edited in what William Friedkin would call “induced documentary” style; the nasty twists and turns of plot as the wealth of inductive details give way to terrifying deductions about the horrors that are possible in a universe that is both mind-numbingly vast and utterly indifferent to human moral conceptions-
-okay, okay, I’ll do a major spoiler . . .
. . . WARNING! WARNING!
YOU ARE ENTERING A SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE . . .
. . . the Company sends mostly extraneous humans on their mostly automated ship because machines can’t be infected with parasites. Thinky meat-bags chasing paychecks and financial stability and bonuses and class mobility are the bait, my friend . . .
YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE.
Just one more thing, Human.
There’s a scene that really got to me this last time I watched Alien.
Okay, the Nostromo is run by an intelligent computer called Mother. Mother-or some sub-system of her-is engaged with an ongoing translation process of the signal from the alien planet. This process is entirely automated. When it’s done, there’ll no doubt be a ping or a beep and an indicator light. But Sigourney Weaver insists on watching the raw feed, the translation-in-process-not because she or anyone else on the crew can do anything to make Mother’s work go faster . . . I guess she just wants to be there as the results come in, even if all she can do is take it in, and see if the new information clarifies the larger situation.
We are hypnotized by a flow of inductive detail, so compelling, so novel, leaving so many possibilities wide open, until we are crushed by the grand deduction that it all adds up to being cosmically fucked to death by both alien indifference to the value of our lives and human malice towards the same.
Enemy without. Enemy within.
Right.
