Alien (film)

"Thirty-five years ago, when Weaver was cast in a sci-fi horror movie — with a little-known commercial director named Ridley Scott at the helm — Weaver would never have predicted that she'd be talking about the film in the far-flung future of 2014. "(Before I saw the designs,) I pictured this big blob of yellow gel rumbling around," she said. "At the first meeting with Ridley, he pulled out all these beautiful big drawings H.R. Giger had done. He's one of the main reasons we're still here talking about this film. ...I wanted to be part of whatever that was because I had never seen anything like that on the screen before."

"It really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress. In this case they’ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian."

"The mother of all action heroines is Ellen Ripley, the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. Ripley was no superwoman - just a capable crew member on a space barge that was invaded by a maternal monster who laid eggs inside humans. Ripley was a survivor, but in James Cameron's subsequent sequel, she morphed into an avenger, with more overtly violent tendencies and a surrogate daughter to protect."

"The plot wasn't new even when the film was first released. With its hook of a seven-member, multicultural spaceship crew running afoul of a ravenous space alien who gets aboard their ship and kills them, one by one, it suggests a mix of Stanley Kubrick's "2001," Howard Hawks' "The Thing" and every monster movie since "Frankenstein." But the look of the film was new. Few science-fiction movies are as cold, as full of cavernous space, angst and horrific beings. The original Alien is a work of popular entertainment and movie art in which the makers took the "art' as seriously as the entertainment."

"Alien was released a year after Carpenter's Halloween and it altered the landscape of high-budget studio horror as irrevocably as Halloween changed cheapo horror. Alien was a classy picture with classy people -- both Scott and Holm were later knighted -- but it was also gruesome, awful. "In space, no one can hear you scream," ran the original ad line; like Poole and Bowman in "2001," these astronauts are at the mercy of their ship, and even their computer, as well as the alien."

"The look of Alien remains fabulous: a cross between the elegant austerity of 2001 and the raw funk of Dark Star and other low-budgeters. The sets are dazzling and macabre. The characters are both archetypal -- even slightly cliched -- and cipherlike. Being trapped on those sets, with those people, still imparts a creepy chill. There have been three other Aliens since, by directors James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but though all have their points, none is as relentless as this. Weaver was never quite as sexy, vulnerable or compelling. And though they kept trying and repeating, none had an alien this gruesomely, shatteringly awry and unexpected. When it jumped, or when it jumps now, so do we."

"Alien opens on a disarmingly restful note, with establishing shots of a majestic spaceship in which we first discover the seven crew members slumbering away the long voyage home in "hyper-sleep." But the serenity soon fades as British director Ridley Scott and his collaborators build and sustain a brilliant nightmarish tension. Crew and spectators alike are kept in a state of hyper-apprehension, anticipating the sudden, deadly reappearance of a monstrous alien organism one of the most bizarre and vicious creatures ever to spring from the shadows of a movie set."

"Alien is a stylish update on the tradition of '50s science-fiction monster thrillers like The Thing or Forbidden Planet. Alien may seem no more ingenious or frightening than those films did at first sight, but it enhances their durable fear mechanisms with the latest refinements in special-effects artistry, space-age scenic design, sophisticated pictorial atmosphere, tantalization and dynamism. It is certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror."

"The monster in Alien variously recalls the shark in Jaws (film), the demon in The Exorcist, the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even the benign extraterrestrials of Close Encounters. But the most terrifying adaptation is the mouth: as it grows in both size and ferocity, the infernal beast, conceived by Giger and realized by several visual effects designers, flashes not only jaws but jaws within jaws. After the first shocking, snarling show of teeth, all that's necessary to provoke our self-torment is the buildup of suspense, which Scott orchestrates with masterful visual and rhythmic command and the startling emergence of fragmentary features from some border or background of the image. Alien is scary enough to create a sensation and justify taking the "R" rating seriously, especially for young children. Yet, it is graphically restrained and subtly abstracted compared to the excesses of The Exorcist or Dawn of the Dead. There are two spectacular gruesome passages, but even here the horror concept is at least as frightening as the depiction. Scott has opted for the minimum effective gruesomeness, given the circumstances and current standards in trick-effect traumatization."

"I left Alien feeling contentedly manipulated, but not in an unparalleled entertaining panic. The monster’s one blood-spattered attack will probably become the most talked-about sequence in Alien. The climactic episodes are a rather more impressive cinematic achievement.”"

"Alien is all about “the dark side of technology, of science,” says David J. Skal, author of “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.” “Despite all the things we’re told that will make the future a better place, what happens in Alien is our worst nightmare.” That’s exactly what Dan O’Bannon was thinking when he set out to write what he calls “a scary spaceship movie” in the mid-1970s. Influenced by 1950s sci-fi films like “The Thing,” O’Bannon was determined to make a “monster thriller about a monster from outer space, done with the style and technology that had accumulated since the 1950s.” This merger of horror and science fiction proved extremely fortuitous. There had been plenty of monsters in movies before Alien, but mostly they had been of the “man in a rubber suit” variety. Thanks to the creepy vision of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, the extraterrestrial monster in Scott’s film, with its insect-like body, acidic blood and knife-sharp teeth, was truly nightmarish."

"“The H.R. Giger alien was like nothing you’d ever seen before,” says Gordon Van Gelder, editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. “ Alien was the first film that put the splatter element into a sci-fi context.” “The monster is skeletal, it’s mechanical, it’s insect-like,” Skal says. “It’s all of this stuff hitting you at once, and it’s bound to elicit a response from the viewer.” Thanks in part to an innovative marketing campaign -- the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” might be one the best ever devised -- that response translated into a $79-million domestic box-office gross (huge for the time), three sequels and stardom for Sigourney Weaver, whose sexy but no-nonsense Ripley became a template for all subsequent female action heroes. And the film itself became a model of sorts. Take a sexually and racially diverse crew; place them in an out-of-the-way space station, planet or underwater research facility; then have them menaced by a horrific creature until there is only one man, or woman, left standing -- “Leviathan,” “Deep Blue,” “Event Horizon,” “Pitch Black,” “Screamers,” the list of films seems to go on endlessly, and in a sense, that’s the problem."

"“It’s an impossible nightmare, this fusion of technology and vermin, death and sex,” he says. “It goes back to what monsters are: They’re always a fusion of contradictory aspects. They’re things that don’t exist and can’t exist, but they work on a dream level; they capture our imaginations.”"

"Forty years after its release, Ridley Scott’s 1979 chiller is rightly regarded as a sci-fi horror classic. It has aged beautifully – its industrial yet futuristic production aesthetic retains a cutting-edge realism, H.R Giger’s creature and ship designs are unsettling yet perversely beautiful and Dan O’Bannon’s naturalistic dialogue is memorably understated. Alien’s pervading, gloomy atmosphere and sense of lonely terror ensure it remains a touchstone in haunted house cinema. As in other genuinely frightening films, less is more: by cutting his camera away early, Scott leaves much in the minds of audiences. We fill in the blanks by conjuring up nightmarish thoughts and images. Much commentary on Scott’s film justifiably focuses on the film’s technical achievements – direction, cinematography, music and the fearsome alien creature. What’s less remarked upon is how its tension is amplified by Alien’s realism, its sense of everyday life turned upside-down. Yes, this is science fiction and this is outer space, but Alien feels real."

"Although we’re far into the future and far from Earth, the film feels palpably naturalistic and relatable, which makes the ensuing horror even more disturbing. By presenting engineers, technicians and navigators – regular, blue-collar workers complete with hierarchical and contractual disputes – audiences more easily engage with the story. This is something that Lachlan Walter argues in his article ‘Apocalypse Soon-Ish: Blue-Collar Science Fiction and the ‘Ordinary’ Worker As Hero’:"

"Impeccable directing, acting and music aside, Alien’s ‘look’ is perhaps its most memorable feature. While otherworldly, surrealistic art may seem a far cry from workers and realism, it’s worth emphasizing again that were it not for Alien’s remarkable visual style and unshowy presentation of employment in space, the film’s impact and enduring qualities would be much diminished."

"Responsible for designing the seductive yet deadly alien, the insectile ‘face-hugger’ creature and the forebodingly derelict alien ship was Swiss surrealist artist, Hans Ruedi (H.R) Giger. Much like in the ‘body horror’ films of David Cronenberg, such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), Giger fuses human and machine, with his sleekly imagined biomechanical mash-ups of bone and metal resulting in images that take on a kind of disordered symmetry. Giger also designed the surface of LV-426, a sunless, boulder strewn, god-forsaken planet where brutal winds never stop blowing and jagged rocky outcrops, almost phallic in appearance, punctuate the landscape."

"Alien’s visual centrepiece is the alien itself, inspired by Giger’s 1976 print Necronom IV. It’s a truly hideous creature, replete with a long, smooth phallic skull, a set of razor-sharp teeth and a second set of pharyngeal jaws similar to those of an eel, which shoot out, stabbing and penetrating flesh. The creature also appears to have no eyes, but we know it sees, and its gender is never revealed, though it displays both male and female characteristics. The creature’s hands are monstrous and dragon-like, with long fingers and claws, but its body resembles the cross-section of some complex industrial machine, with human-like ribs lying externally over a mass of coils, springs and what look like hydraulic mechanisms."

"Areas of the Nostromo are reminiscent of various blue-collar workplaces, a counterpoint to the sleek spaceships imagined in much science fiction before Alien. In his article ‘The set design of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Christopher Aguiar explains that this approach had rarely been seen in science fiction before 1979, which adds to the quality of trepidation: “Fear is built largely from the camera prowling around the empty spaces of the Nostromo ship – a battered, truly ugly spacecraft, unlike the Death Star or USS Enterprise… instead of being outside and exploring the world as sci-fi often wants us to do, we’re largely stuck inside the rundown, twisted corridors of a ship. That immediately works as a way of Scott installing fear and uneasiness.”"

"Sci-fi cinema has a long history of ruthless and evil corporations, including the Tyrell Corporation in Scott’s subsequent Blade Runner (1982), Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator films (1984-), Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop (1987) and the Soylent Corporation in Soylent Green (1973). The interests of these conglomerates, often inspired by real-life organisations, lie entirely in profit, operating with a total indifference towards the welfare of their employees. The companies at the heart of blue-collar science fiction such as Alien, Moon and Outland are similarly ruthless. Viewers watching Alien 40 years later may have little trouble recognizing the practices of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation; the way it controls its poorer workers with unfair and dangerous working conditions. Grounded in Scott’s gritty, blue-collar vision, it all seems both credible and familiar. As in 1979, 2019 and so in 2122, money is the ultimate goal, not worker’s rights or their well-being."

"Its plot is a kind of nightmarish allegory for the socially conservative backlash, in which a gender-egalitarian and sexually liberated future is torn apart by a monster whose only concern is impregnating everyone against their will. The gender politics of Alien are shockingly progressive, even now."

"Alien is a movie about the tyranny of the body over the self. Culture and technology allow us some degree of reproductive and sexual agency. Alien is about how terrifying it feels to have all that agency stripped away by something that defines you purely by your body — how it feels to be turned from an adult human being to a fleshy vessel that can be used to host and birth someone else’s young."

"In 1979, we had the luxury of imagining the Xenomorph as something fundamentally estranged from humanity. It is, as Ash says, a being comprised of pure reproductive instinct, with no culture or intellect to get in the way of its drive to propagate the species: “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Yet today, it’s precisely those conservative “delusions of morality” that are forcing people to live in bodies and lives they haven’t chosen and don’t want."

"Culture, technology, medicine — all the tools that help us to live in our bodies while retaining autonomy and agency over them — are not only necessary, they’re what make us human. Alien rings true for us, 40 years later, because it understands that truth. It shows us that brute, mindless animal existence — a life concerned only with making more babies, no matter the cost — is hideous, horrifying, and destructive."

"What is it about Alien that gets under our skin? Scott’s film pursues an astronaut crew hunted by an alien life form aboard their spaceship. It’s interwoven with endlessly interpretable themes: artificial intelligence, desire, rape, fear of the unknown. But the alien’s ruthless biological imperative to reproduce is the film’s masterstroke."

"On planet earth, predators hunt their prey to consume them. Alien deviates from this evolutionary food chain – the creature is more interested in impregnating humans as carriers for its biological spawn. Scott’s film evokes primal horror of violation and sexual perversion; it’s no accident that the alien itself is so phallic."

"In the original script, characters’ genders were explicitly interchangeable. This was a distinctly unusual feature for a sci-fi script at the time, and meant that the lead Ellen Ripley, the now iconic female action hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was never initially conceived of as a woman at all. This might explain why her behaviour doesn’t conform to the sexist stereotypes rife in 1970s filmmaking. Weaver also told the Independent in 2012 that Ripley was an expression of 1970s feminist insurgency: “Women were agitating to be in the army, to work in warehouses and as truck drivers.” Other than making room for a powerful female lead for the film, the gender-neutral script underlines something crucial about Alien’s horror: all human life is at threat. Audiences were already familiar with women as the targets of sexual assault, but Alien brought a new horror into the mainstream, a truly inhuman sexual attacker indiscriminate about its targets."

"When the BBFC were deciding how to rate the film in 1979, they gave it an X (18) certificate for depicting “a perverse view of sexual function” which runs “like a dark undercurrent” throughout. As we follow Ripley fleeing through the ship’s labyrinthine tunnels, we can imagine the alien’s desire."

"The 40th-anniversary reissue of Alien this month feels timely. While other sci-fi classics like Blade Runner or the Star Wars films showcase technological advances of a coming space age, the vision of the future seen in Alien is one focused on a primal fear that predates technology. The future, Alien asks us to imagine, might not look so different from the present: rape and sexual violence might be more of a threat, not less. Our contemporary cultural landscape is in-comparable to that of the 1970s, and today we are far more aware of the insidious nature of sexual violence. What enables Alien to endure 40 years on is how it suggests men, as well as women, should fear rape. Sexual assault is not limited to female bodies. If Alien makes one thing plain, it is that everybody, regardless of their gender, suffers if sexual violence is allowed to take place unopposed – a message that will be appreciated in 2019 perhaps more than ever."

"With no consideration given at this point to the ideas generated by the film's narrative, I assure anyone with the slightest affection for the SF genre that it's worth its admission price simply for the intelligence and audacity of its look."

"It melds the American-pragmatic form-as-function look of "2001" with the European fantasist influence of artists whose work appears in the upscale-head-comic magazine Heavy Metal. The spaceship in which most of the film takes place is a humble freighter, and it looks used. The crew has humanized it with toys, wind chimes, a cat, and non-company-issued clothing. The outside of the spaceship is standard-issue count-the-rivets Star Wars. But the space suits are based upon 15th-century Japanese samurai warriors. And the dead race which once lived within the alien planet upon which the ship lands created works of engineering which appear made of organic matter. The first half-hour of the film, before we settle in the space-freighter interior for the rest of the evening, is one breathtaking visual effect after another."

"A warning: Despite the state-of-the-art visual effects and Scott's remarkably comprehensive use of the syntax of film, Scott seeks to entertain you by the brutally primal tactic of reaching into your gut and squeezing your adrenal gland: There's an awful thingie there in the dark, and it gets people, and you have to watch it as it does. The filmmakers have come up with some images that are sheerest nightmare. The film earns its shudders honestly: Scott is too talented to need gratuitousness as an aid. We are repelled more by the idea of what's happening than by simple excess of repellent images. Still, even while you acknowledge that the filmmakers are scrupulous, sitting with your arms wrapped around your head because you can't watch the screen may not be your idea of a good time."

"Alien is such a startlingly well-made film that it seems the height of something -- malcontentedness, I guess -- to complain even in low tones about its objectives. Inarguably, the filmmakers achieve their objective entirely -- they make us leave the theater reeling."

"Is it critical overreaching to ask that Scott had been more ambitious? Probably. You never want more from bad films, though. You just want out. Good ones, as they satisfy appetites, often create fresh hungers. But the movie Scott wants to make -- as opposed to the one I'd preferred he made -- works. Wow, does it work. If you leave the theater with your nerves unjangled, you arrived in a coma."

"Few scenes in cinema are as etched in the popular mind as the moment in Alien when a phallic-shaped metal-toothed creature bursts bloodily from the chest of Kane (John Hurt), a crewman aboard the intergalactic mining ship Nostromo, before scuttling off to lurk and grow and begin killing Kane’s crewmates one-by-one. For those who saw it at the cinema in 1979, the world was split in two: the time before the chest burster and the time after. Movies would never be the same. Science-fiction had found its darkest expression. Horror had a new name – the shape-shifting, acid-dripping, all-consuming creature that fans soon labelled the xenomorph, as far from the benign bug-eyed presence of ET as it was possible to imagine. The film spawned a franchise – three more Alien films, two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, and Ridley Scott’s more recent prequels, Prometheus and Alien Covenant – that have collectively earned more than $US1.5 billion ($A2.2 billion) at the box office, and a whole lot more on video, DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms. It has spawned PhD theses and endless discussion and riffs in popular culture. Earlier this year, it even spawned a high-school theatre version."

"We live now in a culture saturated in filmed images, but very little of it ascends to the level of shared experience, says Philippe. Game of Thrones was an exception, “but there are very few now that have these moments – like the chest-burster, like the Psycho shower scene – that completely traumatize a generation. They are very rare.” Philippe – who was born in Switzerland but moved to the US 26 years ago with dreams of becoming a professional golfer – is fascinated by these cut-through moments. His last film was 78/52, a forensic examination of the 78 seconds and 52 cuts that comprise the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. His next – which he was about to take to the Venice Film Festival when we spoke earlier this week – is a meditation on The Exorcist. What he sees in these films is an expression not just of their makers’ intentions and talents, but of something far greater – our collective unconscious at play. “There are certain movies that become phenomena because they express ideas that we need to see in our culture at a particular time,” he says. “And rarely are we actually conscious of the fact that we need to see those ideas being expressed.”"

"“I’m very interested in the idea of coincidence versus fate,” says Philippe. “The way I see it, nothing is ever completely coincidental and nothing is ever completely fated. Coincidence can become fate. “You could argue that it is audiences that willed Alien to life,” he continues. “Had Dan O’Bannon, Ridley Scott and HR Giger not been on the frequency for that myth, someone else would have had to be. When you look at the number of coincidences that happened for Alien to be Alien you have to wonder if there were greater forces at work.” The thing that most desperately needed to be expressed, he argues, was a challenge to the “patriarchal imbalance”. Kane’s “rape” by the alien – by the face hugger that latches onto his face and inserts its egg via a tube shoved down his throat – and the shocking experience of “birthing” the alien through his chest “jolted people into a feeling of unease”, he says. “There were things that happen to women that were suddenly transposed to Kane,” he continues. “I don’t think that was being processed consciously – I don’t think the studio was thinking, ‘Oh yeah, here’s $11 million, go make a male-rape movie in space’. I don’t believe O’Bannon, Giger and Scott were thinking along those lines either.” But they were images and ideas that we needed to see in order to deal with the underlying tensions in our culture, he believes. “What makes Alien so amazing is that it took 40 years for society to process and to start having a dialogue about those images and ideas,” he adds. “Alien is, in a way, much more contemporary today than it was 40 years ago.”"

"“The birth of the alien from Kane’s stomach plays on what Freud described as a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” determined Barbara Creed, professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” (Screen, Vol. 27, 1986), just one of hundreds of academic theses spawned by Scott’s 1979 shocker and its sequels. Academics have always loved science fiction, of course. No film studies syllabus is complete without an invitation to parse alien-invasion B-movies from the ‘50s as fretful cold-war allegories. There was always something a little lordly about this kind of approach to pop-artifacts, as if the little dears couldn’t tell what made their hearts pitter-pat so until the redoubtable professor arrived with his chalkboard, duster, and special subtext X-ray specs. But the cottage industry of analysis that has sprung up around Alien is something else again. In 1980, the highly-respected academic journal Science Fiction Studies devoted an entire issue to the first Alien—an event that may, in time, come to rank alongside Cahiers du Cinema’s All-Hitchcock issue of 1956. Since then, there has been no looking back. We’ve had Alien as feminist allegory (“Woman: The Other Alien in Alien,” Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1985), Alien as mothering fable (“Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby, and Mothering,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1990), Alien as abortion parable (“Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self-Annihilation Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1995). Even Jones the cat got his own diagram, courtesy of James H. Kavenagh’s essay “Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien” (October, No. 13, 1980), which sought to align the alien attack on humans with an Althusserian-Marxist takedown of humanism in general:"

"What is it about the Alien films? No other modern science-fiction film has inspired this level of termite-like deconstruction save perhaps Scott’s own Blade Runner, whose rain-soaked surfaces teem with postmodern theorists researching doctoral theses with titles like “American Exceptionalism and the Complicit Postcolonialism of Blade Runner” and “Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier.” This suggests that there is something about the rich, art-directed layer-cake of Ridley Scott productions that positively cries out for Greimasian semantic rectangles. “It has absolutely no message,” insisted Scott of the first Alien. “It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Of all the things you can do with Scott’s alien beastie—be frightened by it, thrilled by it, repulsed by it—studying it seems the last thing on anybody’s mind, except of course Science Officer Ash, secretly eyeing it up for the company’s weapons division. When it comes to the burgeoning field of post-doctorate Alien study, Ash graduates summa cum lauda. Study is all he wants to do."

"It’s one reason Alien scholars tend to be a little down on James Cameron, although they love the elevation of Ripley to post-feminist action figure—“get away from her you bitch!”—and approve of the fact that all the white males become dead white males at a faster rate than all the nonwhite males (see Greenberg, Harvey. “Fembo: Aliens’ Intentions”). Marxists, too, have clucked with approval at the series’ clear-eyed take on corporate malfeasance and outer-space worker rights. And Freudians, needless to say, have had a field day, at least with the first film. A movie more in need of a trip to the analyst would be harder to find."

"For a brief moment in the early ‘80s, it looked as if the brave new world of Alien studies was going to splinter irreconcilably on the issue of Officer Ripley’s panties—the anti-panty camp accusing the pro-panty wing of uncritical phallocentrism, the pro-panty caucus accusing the anti-panty wing of repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism. It was left to Melbourne’s professor Creed to broker a tentative piece between the two camps. “Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley undresses before the camera, because its voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine,” she wrote with an air of weary summary in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” Screen, Vol. 27, 1986. What if Ripley in her panties “signifies the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman. … The display of woman as a reassuring and pleasurable sign.” It’s the system of signification, stupid! As for the sex of the alien “the alien is the mother’s phallus,” she determined, “but the alien is more than a phallus, it is also coded as a toothed vagina, the monstrous feminine as a cannibalistic mother.” Voilà, thanks to another of those toothed vaginas that seem to be all the rage on college campuses these days."