Alien is a 1979 sci fi horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and Ian Holm.
It didn’t surprise me to read somewhere that the original idea that sparked Alien was a recurring nightmare one of the writers experienced. The whole film plays out like one. And it’s excellent.
Alien succeeds at being a fascinating science fiction film and a superb horror film all at once. It’s a great example of ‘less-is-more’ (the Alien itself has very little screen time, but every second is wonderfully effective), and employs the lost art of the long, slow build up, amping up the tension of several scenes to absolute breaking point. The film scared the beejesus out of me when I first saw it as a kid. I still get squirmy during the last half hour when Ripley is alone on the ship being stalked by the Alien.
This film is an early example of what Ridley Scott does so well – establishes a believable world. This is far from the clean universe of so much of the other science fiction that existed in 1979. Scott’s universe is grimy and lived-in. The Nostromo is like an oil rig – we have a dishevelled, working class crew and machinery that seems old and worn down. These people aren’t out bravely exploring new worlds; they are company workers eager to get home after a long-haul and keen for a meal and a paycheck. This makes them so much more relatable than cardboard characters in jumpsuits. And thus the film is so much scarier when we start to see them get picked off one by one by the Alien.
The Alien itself is a wonder of design and special effects. Ridley Scott masterfully overcomes the limits of costume design and budget by keeping the Alien in the shadows for most of the film. This makes it all the more terrifying, and makes the jump scares work perfectly when it lashes out from those shadows. But what I love most is how the creature is explained by the Company android, Ash (Ian Holm). Somehow his admiration of the Alien and his description of it just make it all the more horrifying. I love his line about the Alien’s “structural perfection… matched only by its hostility.” And I love his parting thoughts to the rest of the crew about their chances of survival: “You have my sympathies.”
And I really love the slow build up. It’s over an hour into the film before the Alien makes its first kill.
This first kill is undoubtedly my favourite, though they are all so effectively done I had a hard time deciding. But I just love Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through the ship looking for the cat. This scene employs what has become a very tired (and often parodied) horror movie cliché – the character who gets separated from the group. Once Brett wanders off by himself we know he’s fucked. But Ridley Scott knows that we know. So he teases out this scene to an almost unbearable length. And when the Alien finally does emerge, I love that the killing is all off-screen. I love the way the focus is instead on the cat watching Brett being killed. The cat has this wonderful look on its face – sort of a mix of stunned curiosity and utter indifference.
Another almost uncomfortably tense scene is where Dallas (Tom Skerritt) goes into the air ducts to try and flush out the Alien. Again, we know how this will end, so we get another long, drawn out sequence where Dallas crawls through narrow, claustrophobic tunnels, the only lighting the flickering flames at the end of his flamethrower. It’s a wonderful use of light and shadow. But what I love most about this scene is that Ridley Scott keeps pulling us out of the action and showing us the other characters watching a ‘motion tracker’ device. Instead of cutting to shots of the Alien stalking through the tunnels, the only thing we see is a blip on a monitor showing it slowly advancing on Dallas.
As much as I love the Alien and the claustrophobia, my favourite part of the film is actually the first hour, where the Nostromo’s crew is awoken from cryosleep by a distress call that sends them down to the surface of LV-426 to investigate. Again, it’s the slow build up that I like. And again, it’s the android Ash’s dialogue during this sequence that makes it all the more creepy and effective. While Dallas, Kane and Lambert are going off to explore the derelict ship the signal is coming from, Ripley discovers that what they thought was a distress call might actually be a warning, a beacon someone set up to tell people to stay the hell away from the planet. I love Ash’s cold, calculating reaction to this: “the time it takes to get there…they’ll know if it’s a warning or not, yes?”
That said I’ll always have a soft spot for the film’s final sequence, where Ripley is finally alone with the Alien on the ship. She sets the Nostromo’s self-destruct so that she can escape in the shuttle but then hears the cat’s frantic meows over the PA. So, with strobe lights flashing she goes back and tries to reverse the self-destruct sequence, but it’s too late. What makes this scene so utterly terrifying is that she now has to run around the ship, not knowing where the Alien is. And she no longer has any help to call on. She’s alone. So you know the Alien has no one left to stalk except her. My favourite bit in this scene is right at the end, when she finally spots the Alien. In her panic she’s dropped the cat carrier and goes back for it, but the Alien has beaten her to it. I love the way the Alien stares at the cat in the cage. Again, it’s the way the two creatures regard each other with that curiosity that only animals possess that I like.
And the closing moments of the film will always be among my favourite scenes in any film, ever. Ripley has finally escaped in the shuttle and blasted the Alien out into space. She’s about to put herself into cryosleep for the journey home, but she stops to record a final message on the ship’s log. It’s a wonderfully reflective, quiet moment to close an incredibly tense film. I love the way she tiredly says, “This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo…signing off.”
Two terrifying hours extremely well spent.
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