Films Directed By Ridley Scott

"Time has been kind to Ridley’s Scott’s Alien since its release in 1979. What was initially regarded as a science fiction/horror genre work – albeit a superior one – now plays like an existential drama that just happens to take place in deep space. An example of what commercial cinema can aspire to, even on a limited budget, the film boasts an intelligent script, careful performances, clever visual effects and well-crafted sets. The titular alien, which was designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and is only partially glimpsed throughout, remains the most elegantly vile creature to ever grace cinema screens."

"Although the spaceship models look like they were patched together with Super Glue in your brother's basement, the majority of the 24-year-old movie holds up well. The production design in Alien was always among the movie's strongest points, and the bulky details (a motion detector the size of a leaf blower; spaceship monitors that look like Radio Shack TRS-80 computer screens) seem more industrial than quaint. Even with its horrifying villain and scenes of bloody excess, Alien endures as a superior piece of filmmaking, with a pace that's like watching an art film when compared to the over-the-top space operas in recent years."

"20th Century-Fox is rather superstitiously opening the picture on the same day that Star Wars opened two years ago, and in many of the same theaters, in hopes that box-office lightning can strike twice."

"It is easy to see that director Ridley Scott had hoped for a cast of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Jim Brown, for the three principals, but settled for lookalikes Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto. With only about 20 pages of script, it’s understandable why everyone is sulking and biting, even being obscene enough to give the movie an R rating."

"You’re going to be most appreciative of Alien in its most technically advantageous circumstances."

"Alien has been called the most influential of modern action pictures, and so it is, although Halloween also belongs on the list. Unfortunately, the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking. We have now descended into a bog of Gotcha! movies in which various horrible beings spring on a series of victims, usually teenagers. The ultimate extension of the genre is the Geek Movie, illustrated by the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which essentially sets the audience the same test as an old-time carnival geek show: Now that you've paid your money, can you keep your eyes open while we disgust you? A few more ambitious and serious sci-fi films have also followed in the footsteps of Alien, notably the well-made Aliens (1986) and Dark City (1998). But the original still vibrates with a dark and frightening intensity."

"One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings). It suggests the enormity of the crew's discovery by building up to it with small steps: The interception of a signal (is it a warning or an SOS?). The descent to the extraterrestrial surface. The bitching by Brett and Parker, who are concerned only about collecting their shares. The masterstroke of the surface murk through which the crew members move, their helmet lights hardly penetrating the soup. The shadowy outline of the alien ship. The sight of the alien pilot, frozen in his command chair. The enormity of the discovery inside the ship ("It's full of ... leathery eggs ...")."

"At its most fundamental level, Alien is a movie about things that can jump out of the dark and kill you. It shares a kinship with the shark in "Jaws," Michael Myers in "Halloween," and assorted spiders, snakes, tarantulas and stalkers. Its most obvious influence is Howard Hawks' "The Thing" (1951), which was also about a team in an isolated outpost who discover a long-dormant alien, bring it inside, and are picked off one by one as it haunts the corridors. Look at that movie, and you see Alien in embryo. In another way, Ridley Scott's 1979 movie is a great original. It builds on the seminal opening shot of "Star Wars" (1977), with its vast ship in lonely interstellar space, and sidesteps Lucas' space opera to tell a story in the genre of traditional "hard" science fiction; with its tough-talking crew members and their mercenary motives, the story would have found a home in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction during its nuts-and-bolts period in the 1940s. Campbell loved stories in which engineers and scientists, not space jockeys and ray-gun blasters, dealt with outer space in logical ways."

"[Alien is] just an intergalactic haunted-house thriller."

"In an interview looking back at the role, Weaver said: “The writers were especially smart in that they didn’t turn Ripley into a female character. She was just a character, a kind of Everyman, a young per-son who’s put in this extraordinary situation. Believe me, when we did [the sequels], I saw how hard it was to write a woman in a heroic, straight, unsentimental, authentic way.”"

"Alien has proved an ideal text for academics, a deep well – or perhaps a totem pole – of Freudian allusion from which critics and theorists have drawn whatever they fancied. Since it was first released, every frame of the film has been pored over for meaning. James Cameron’s excellent sequel, Aliens, has been studied too. (The other films in the series, not so much.) Most of this attention has been occupied by the character of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and the Swiss artist HR Giger’s terrifying design for the alien, or “xenomorph”. But the androids, the spaceship, the uniforms and even the ship’s cat have come in for analysis. In 2019, the rise of the Alien-academic complex shows few signs of slowing down."

"The 1979 film had married science fiction with horror in a way unseen since the ‘50s, reviving the monster genre, which had, for the most part, died out in the wake of Psycho’s ushering in of an era of more personal, intimate, human horror."

"Ridley Scott’s 1979 thriller was greeted with no particular fanfare by the reviewers, and if there was a critical consensus it was that the film was at best watchable pabulum-reasonably professionally handled visually and enjoyably scary, but without significant nuance to qualify for discussion as art. Jack Kroll’s comment was typical: “It’s about time someone made a science fiction thriller that thrills, that has no truck with metaphysics, philosophy or theosophy and just boils everything down to the pure ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.” Aside from its manifest violence, the only aspect of Alien that attracted much critical fire was what one reviewer called its “gratuitous sexism.”True to a two hundred-year-old tradition of gothic horror, the film relies for its most gut-wrenching effects on the spectacle of a helpless beautiful woman threatened with violence by an unspeakable, inhuman, but quintessentially masculine horror. Significantly, one scene repeatedly mentioned as a “gratuitous” injection of voyeurism involves Sigourney Weaver’s stripping down to her underwear just prior to a final attac by the alien and her subsequent blasting of the creature into space and, presumably, oblivion. The implication seems to be that Alien was overall good, clean, horrible but simple-minded fun, and shouldn’t have been compromised by random intrusions of irrelevant sex. A close look at Alien, however, reveals that not only is sexuality not occasionally intrusive in an otherwise prestine film, but that sexual symbolism and iconography of a singular kind are pervasive throughout the film and may actually be its “leitmotif”. What Alien is about is gestation and birth. The sexuality of the film has strong reproductive overtones that distinguish it from the kind of garden variety titillation of most thrillers. The centrality of the birth process to the film is not hard to demonstrate."

"The film was nominated for Best Art Direction at the Academy Award and won for Best Visual Effects. Anyone who has ever seen the notorious "chestburster" scene – which was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 painting [[w:Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion|Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion – will understand why Scott's special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, deserved to win."

"The premise is simple: seven astronauts working on a battered cargo spacecraft, bring something back on to the ship after touching down on a strange planet, and the alien starts preying on them."

"Make no mistake about it — the gore, which is essential to this film’s effectiveness, is excessive enough to help earn the film the first ‘R’ rating given to any of the four recent sci-fi blockbusters. Any theater playing Alien may well consider building new wings on the restrooms to accommodate queasy patrons.”"

"Alien is such a great and groundbreaking film that no amount of redundant prequels and sequels will ever reduce its luminous majesty. It will always be there as a never-to-be-improved-upon metaphor for the icy despair and inhuman horror of deep space."

"The gender politics of Alien have been grist for endless deconstruction, although “Memory” does examine a few fresh wrinkles. Philippe unpacks the feminist dimension that links the movie to other 1979 releases as different as “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Elsewhere, his subjects discuss the Alien’s stature as a Fury, an extraterrestrial manifestation of a figure from Greek mythology, exacting retributive violence on behalf of the repressed feminine. Pointedly, Philippe begins the film with a shot of the Temple of Apollo ruins at Delphi and a dramatization of the Furies, played by a trio of actresses with a few creepy Giger-esque visual enhancements. It may seem like a curious point of entry, but it reinforces that Alien is timeless, in part because it brilliantly cross-pollinated so many of our most ancient and enduring myths. Its abiding respect for the past is what gave such shattering force to its vision of the future."

"Much admiration is justly lavished on the exquisite Lovecraftian qualities of Giger’s designs, his creation of a monster whose various slime-dripping protuberances managed to be hideous, beautiful and unnervingly sexual all at once. It was Giger who gave Alien its vision. It was Scott, with just one feature (“The Duellists”) under his belt, who gave the movie its impact. To watch Alien now is to marvel at just how patient and stealthily elegant a picture it is, particularly in its first hour, with its creeping camera movements, hypnotic pacing and enveloping, womb-like sense of dread. Released today, it would no doubt feel like an art film among so many noisier, clunkier blockbusters. If Alien looks formally radical in retrospect, it was also thematically provocative in its moment: Here was a movie that turned on the audacious spectacle of a man being raped and impregnated and that gave us a (still) too-rare female action protagonist for the ages in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley."

"The horror genre, in any period, is one that you like, or leave distantly alone. The violence in Alien is less ’real’ than the shark-infested waters of Jaws. But telling yourself that these galactic goings-on are improbable nonsense is less effective than it should be in unclenching your fists or making your heart stop pounding. Surrender at all to Scott’s extraterrestrial make-believe and you are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights."

"Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production. Don't race to it expecting the wit of "Star Wars" or the metaphysical pretentions of "2001" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." At its best it recalls "The Thing", though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"A GIGANTIC construction moves serenely through space where, though the night never ends, there's always enough light to see strange objects. This one looks like the main set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance". It's as if Babylon had been cut loose from earth to sail back through space to its own time. In actual fact, it's the cargo-ship Nostromo on its return to earth at the end of an extended voyage to the far end of the galaxy. When we go inside, the ship appears to have been as suddenly deserted as the Mary Celeste. We wander down empty corridors into abandoned living quarters, into engine rooms and, finally, into the command room where the computers are the only signs of life. The interior of the ship is vast. It contains the kind of waste space one seldom sees anymore except in some rare old Manhattan pile like the Dakota. Something decidedly eerie is going on."

"Don’t race to it expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretensions of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its best it recalls The Thing (from Another World), though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"The amount of academic work that has been written about Alien is phenomenal. But in a way that should not be surprising. The film contains themes about motherhood, gender politics, post-humanism, biology and so much else. Almost everything we can do in film studies we can do through Alien."

"Weaver begins the action looking girlish and serious, but changes into the toughly self-reliant woman who defined her subsequent roles. Her career evolves before our very eyes. Interestingly, the famous, heart-stopping moment where the alien embryo jumps out of the egg happens much more fleetingly than you might remember. Scott cuts away from it quickly, leaving the negative image impressed on our retina. Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots. The idea of it starting the size of a toad, then emerging the size of a bus with multiple rows of razor-teeth is skin-crawlingly horrible."

"After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary. With screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare [parody]] of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry."

"Alien is another triumph of technology over art. It is also a horror movie set in space — and it just doesn’t work…. Scott does make a concession to feminism by casting Sigourney Weaver as the hero but he couldn’t resist a sexist jab at the end when, with no motivation, she removes her trousers.”"

"Many, many years ago — back in 1985 — I wrote an episode of my comic strip where two women are talking to each other. They want to go see a movie and one woman says, "I'll only go to a movie if it satisfies three criteria." I have to confess, I stole this whole thing from a friend of mine at the time because I didn't have an idea for my strip. My friend Liz Wallace ... said, "I'll only see a movie if it has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man." That left very, very few movies in 1985. The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster. But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it's this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test. Still ... surprisingly few films actually pass it."

"No other horror or science-fiction film has captured the humdrum reality of doing a day’s work for a day’s pay with such accuracy. For that matter, perhaps no film of any genre has. There may be sitcoms that depict these everyday frustrations and interactions as deftly as Alien does. But in the cinema? The most authentic ever film about earning a living could well be the one with a giant, slimy, acid-blooded extra-terrestrial monster."

"The sheer normality of these interstellar wage slaves is conveyed before we even see them. At the start of the film, the crew members of the Nostromo, a “commercial towing vehicle”, are snoozing in their suspended animation pods, but one of them has left a plastic drinking-bird ornament bobbing away on a table, and there is a coffee cup on a dashboard. Then, when the ship’s onboard computer wakes them, they don’t slip into form-fitting Starfleet uniforms and hurry to their posts: they shrug on their shapeless overalls, and then sit around eating and smoking while two blue-collar engineers, Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), grouse about “the bonus situation”."

"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."

"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.”"

"Anthony Hopkins - Hannibal Lecter"

"How long can a man stay silent before he returns to what he does best?"

"Never Forget Who He Is"

"Break The Silence"

"When the fox hears the rabbit scream, he comes a-runnin'... but not to help."