Alien (20th Century-Fox, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I did little but write an extended journal entry and, after 6:30, do one of my movie marathons, watching three films in sequence on Turner Classic Movies and then running a Blu-Ray disc of a fourth. The first film in my sequence was Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror thriller Alien (1979), a film I’d previously seen only under poor circumstances on an airliner as an in-flight film (one wonders how anyone who ordered an in-flight dinner during a showing of Alien could possibly keep it down!). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz reminisced about how he first saw Alien at home via a TV screener – this was before videotapes of movies were widely available but he had scored one for promotional purposes – and he had a hard time with the film because it wasn’t interrupted by commercials and therefore there was nothing to break Scott’s artfully built-up tension. Alien was filmed in 1979 in Scott’s native England (later, after its huge box-office success, he’d get the green light to film Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? under the title Blade Runner, but he had to shoot it in the U.S. and have to deal with American crews’ insistence on strict scheduled breaks and other inconveniences he hadn’t had to deal with at home).

It was based on a story by Ronald Shusett that was adapted into a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, and it concerns a cargo spaceship called the Nostromo (the name is from Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, though the plots of Nostromo and Alien seem to have little to do with each other) which is on its way back to Earth with about 20,000 tons of refined ore space crews on other planets are shipping to Earth for use. We first get some long atmospheric shots of the interior of the Nostromo, beautifully composed and accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning music (I know film scores aren’t supposed to call attention to themselves, but this one does and seems quite a bit better than the usual run of Goldsmith film music), before we start meeting the seven-member crew. They are Dallas (Tom Skerritt, top-billed – given that it’s become practically Sigourney Weaver’s life’s work to star in Alien movies, it’s surprising she didn’t get top billing on the first one), the ship’s captain; Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer; Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); Brett (the young Harry Dean Stanton); Kane (John Hurt); Lambert (Veronica Cartwright – I had quite forgotten there was another woman in the cast besides Sigourney Weaver!); and the token Black guy, Parker (Yaphet Kotto).

The opening scenes of the spacecraft reveal a strong influence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, oddly, the computer monitors look considerably lower-tech than they did in Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece and the onboard computer, “Mother,” can talk but mostly communicates to the crew via cathode-ray video displays that have already become obsolete) in the way the ship’s exteriors and interiors are constructed, the ways people interact on board (though the synthetic food they have to eat is considerably closer to the real thing than the stuff in 2001, which one critic referred to as “sanitized swill”) and the mixing Scott and his sound designers (imdb.com lists eight people on the sound crew) did, including the astronauts’ breaths heavily amplified to indicate they’re moving around in spacesuits. The action kicks into gear when the Nostromo receives what the crew originally interprets as a distress call from another spaceship right when they’re in the middle of an argument about the size of the bonuses they can expect and how to wheedle more money from the company they work for. Parker, the voice-of-reason Black guy around all the stupid white people, tries to talk the rest of the crew out of answering the call, but he’s overruled because company policy is that if there’s a distress call in space the crew has to answer it or forfeit their bonuses altogether. The ship duly sends out Kane to investigate the wreckage and see if he can find any living people to rescue, but all the humans are on board are not only dead but in a fossilized state. Of course, the creature that made them that way – a malevolent alien being that feeds on any other life form that crosses its path – latches onto Kane and makes its way into the Nostromo.

From then on Alien turns itself into pretty much a remake of the 1951 film The Thing – also a science-fiction tale about a military crew in an isolated environment having to battle a conscience-less space alien who thinks of them only as a food source – and indeed the huge success of Alien was used by director John Carpenter to get approval for a 1982 remake of The Thing that I thought was better than the earlier film (especially since Carpenter restored the monster’s shape-shifting ability it had had originally in the source story, John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” but which the screenwriter of the 1951 film, Charles Lederer, had deleted) – with Weaver essentially playing the role Margaret Sheridan had in the 1951 The Thing and Ian Holm as the Robert Cornthwaite character, the stupid scientist who wants to let the alien live and even protect it against the others because he regards it as a higher life form that needs to be respected. In fact, in a surprise twist towards the end of the movie that reveals a veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist message, it turns out that Holm’s character is actually a robot that’s been programmed with a secret order, unknown to the rest of the crew, to keep the alien alive at all costs and fly it back to earth. “Crew considered expendable,” the order reads, and it’s clear that the company operating the Nostromo is interested in keeping it alive to develop as a bioweapon for military use.

Of course the most famous scene in the movie is the one in which the alien bursts through Ian Holm’s shoulder not only killing him but literally splashing the rest of the crew with his blood and guts. It’s become as iconic a scene of movie horror as Anthony Perkins knifing Janet Leigh to death in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s been copied quite often – including a ludicrous low-budget ripoff from the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it had a real name instead of the preposterous concoction “SyFy”) in which the “alien” was so obviously a hand puppet you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all-too-sheer material. The scene was also spoofed in Mel Brooks’ 1987 spoof Spaceballs, which was mostly a takeoff of Star Wars – but Brooks couldn’t resist the temptation to have the alien burst through the man’s chest (John Hurt again!) wearing a straw hat, carrying a rattan cane and doing a tap dance to the song “My Ragtime Gal.” At the end the alien (created as a puppet by Carlo Rambaldi, who three years later would manufacture an animatronic puppet for a far more benevolent alien creature in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fairy-tale masterpiece E.T., though enough scenes in this pre-CGI film were done with a human actor in costume that Bolaji Badejo gets screen credit for playing the alien) has knocked off all the crew members except Ripley.

She’s inside the ship’s shuttlecraft and thinks she’s got rid of the alien at long last, but it’s right in there with her and she has to zap it into space in hopes of annihilating it before she reaches Earth. I had misremembered the ending from that long-ago in-flight screening – I had assumed Weaver’s character had sacrificed herself to keep the alien from reaching Earth and turning its entire population into food – and on the basis of that recollection I had questioned the whole idea of making a sequel to Alien. In fact, there have been three: Aliens, Alien3 (that last numeral is supposed to be an exponent but I don’t know how to do those on my current word processor) and Alien: Resurrection, with increasingly preposterous plot gimmicks to explain the continued existence of Weaver’s character (in Alien: Resurrection she was actually supposed to be playing her own clone!). At least the next two Alien movies themselves helped launch the careers of future major directors – James Cameron and David Fincher, respectively – and however silly the sequels may have got (though Alien3 is the only one I’ve actually ever seen, and that was 20 years ago!), the first Alien holds up beautifully as an artful combination of science-fiction and horror, and a nicely honed piece of direction by Ridley Scott in what was only his second full-length film!