Ridley Scott's first masterpiece, and one of the expertly crafted thrillers of all time. See the original soon if the "remake" stories are true.
Disclaimer: Alien is this author's "desert island movie."
By Jeffrey Siniard
5/29/09
Monday was the 30th Anniversary of Alien's release. Sure enough, 3 days later, stories broke all over the Internet about 20th Century Fox's plans for a "remake." This is among the worst ideas ever. Alien is, without question, the greatest science fiction thriller of all-time. In fact, James Cameron's sequel Aliens, John Carpenter's The Thing, Byron Haskin's War of the Worlds, and Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet are the only other films that belong in the discussion. Additionally, Alien is among the 10 best science fiction films ever made, and simultaneously among the 10 best horror films ever made.
I intend to make the case here for preserving a classic in your minds, before 20th Century Fox ruins everyone's memories.
First of all, a remake of Alien is pointless, mostly because it is already a remake of past science fiction thrillers, among them It! The Terror Beyond Space, Howard Hawks' The Thing, Them!, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds, and scores of other forgotten B movies of the 1950's. In this way, director Ridley Scott is entirely in keeping with what George Lucas did with Star Wars, and what Lucas and Steven Spielberg did with Raiders of the Lost Ark; recycle beloved classics, serials, and adventure stories into something totally familiar and yet totally new, thanks mostly to improved special effects and the loosening of societal mores that governed what you could put on screen.
Alien opens in the future, in a distant system at least 10 months away from Earth. Dark, sinister, and completely unknown, the opening sequence is the first of Scott's masterstrokes in this film. Perhaps only Stanley Kubrick's The Shining has succeeded as completely and as quickly as Alien in establishing a sense of desolate lonliness and isolation. Less than 2 minutes in, and you have the sensation of being completely cut off from all help.
There's no help here, at all.
Scott's second masterstroke is the introduction of the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo. As designed by Ron Cobb and realized by Production Designer Michael Seymour, the Nostromo is a gigantic hunk of slow-moving commercial spacecraft, towing a huge refinery. Inside the ship, you see cramped, leaking, industrial corridors stretching into the distance. An empty mess hall that appears as antiseptic as an operating table. A utilitarian bridge, full of industrial monitors and analog switches. Clearly, form follows function, and the Nostromo is established as a workhorse; the anti-starship Enterprise. Lastly, and most eerily, where's the crew?
The Nostromo's computers recieve a signal from the "Company" and monitors come to instant life. Then, winding through a corridor we enter a room with seven sleeping pods arranged like a blooming flower. The lights come on, the room pressurizes, and the pods open.
Scott deftly tweaks audience expectations and gives us a group of blue-collar workers, as opposed to explorers. Best of all, as soon as they wake up, the are complaining about things the way that any blue-collar grunt would. Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) hates the cornbread, Engineers Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) gripe about not getting their bonuses, Navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) whines about being cold, Exceutive Officer Kane (John Hurt) feels "dead" (a nasty in-joke, by the way). Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) watches and interacts with a sense of amusement and boredom; he's heard all these gripes before, ad nauseum. And Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) quietly minds his own business, until the ship's orders arrive.
Per "Company" bylaw, the Nostromo and their crew must divert from their return trip to Earth, and set down on an unexplored planet to "investigate a transmission of unknown origin."
Most know what happens next, though there is a hidden element. Alien is among the slowest-paced horror films (again, similar to The Shining). Some audience members get impatient waiting for something to happen, and they play right into Scott's hands. The tension is already palpable, and slowly, inexorably building. As Roger Ebert rightly points out in his review of Alien: "It's not the slashing we enjoy, it's the waiting for the slashing." The Nostromo sets down on the planet, damaging it's engines and other shipboard functions in the process. Dallas, Kane, and Lambert set out to locate the transmission's source, and encounter a derelict ship unlike anything anyone has ever seen.
This is where Scott's background in art design really pays off. On the advice of screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, Scott hired Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger to design all of the "alien" elements of the film. The derelict is the first moment when the audience realizes that Alien is really going to deliver on the promise hinted at in the title. The Derelict ship looks like a crash-landed wingbone, with no obvious engines, bridge, or anything remotely familiar. The entrances to the ship are vaginal in appearance. And inside, it appears to be a bio-mechanical fusion of bones and tubes. The explorers find a fossilized alien crewmember; Dallas notes it "looks like it grew out of the chair." Dallas also notes how the "bones are bent outward, like he exploded from inside." Scott was smart enough to give Giger free reign, and his imagery (again, beautifully realized by Seymour), a combination of bio-mechanical, organic, and brazenly sexual, is the stuff of nightmares.
Soon after, Kane descends to the lower levels, and encounters a chamber full of "leathery objects, like eggs or something." One of the eggs opens while Kane peers inside, and a creature explodes onto Kane's facemask, burning a hole through it. Dallas and Lambert try to get Kane back aboard for medical help, only to have Ripley deny them entry, due to "quarantine procedures", quite accurately pointing out that "if we let it in, we could all die." In fact, Ripley defies Dallas' direct order to let them aboard. Ash, previously the stickler for rules and regulations, allows them entry. Later, Kane will appear to recover, and the Nostromo will set off for Earth. Everything seems okay, until...
The notorious "last supper," and probably one of the 2 or 3 greatest shockers in cinema history. What makes this scene work so well? Consider the set design. When Kane is laid out on the mess table, kicking and screaming, he's underneath an abnormally bright light, rather like the light used in a surgery room, or a maternity ward. The mess hall is painted in white and off-white colors, all the better for blood to stain it. The use of real sheep, pig, and cow parts to make the chest wound look real, as well as smell real to the cast. Never mind the deeply unsettling Freudian concept of a man giving birth to a creature shaped like a writhing phallus.
With this scene, Alien evolves into an absolutely relentless film; the pace that some in the audience were bemoaning earlier now has them covering their eyes at every camera move and loud noise. Scott doesn't assault the audience with buckets of gore after this scene, and he's smart enough to keep us from seeing the creature in it's entirety; enough is seen that it petrifies the imagination without ruining it. The creature, as designed by Giger, is a Freudian sexual nightmare come to life.
Most importantly, and this is Scott's greatest achievement; the audience has bought completely into the concept. The characters, while not possessing much depth, are smartly realized and brilliantly performed by a great ensemble cast. The ship design is so functional, so real, that we never doubt the way it works. Everyone in the audience identifies with blue-collar grinders just trying to do their jobs and go home. Everyone identifies with working in a place they hate, that doesn't work as well as it should, but works just well enough to get by. Lastly, eveyone identifies with having co-workers you can barely tolerate or trust. For Dallas, Ripley, Lambert, Brett, Parker, and Ash, their lives now depend on trusting a ship that doesn't work perfectly to begin with (and is further damaged from their rough landing ealier), and trusting each other to work smart, hard, and fast.
Scott's command of the camera, aided by cinematographer Derek Vanlint, is absolutely masterful. As the movie progresses, the camera moves faster and faster around corners and through corridors. The camera moves beneath the actors, and tilts up, heightening the impression of the Nostromo squeezing in on the crew as their numbers decrease.
In the exterior shots of the Nostromo, the ship moves slower and slower towards Earth, while the light from the stars gets dimmer and dimmer.
The terrifying sequence with Dallas hunting the alien in airshafts owes something to Spielberg's Jaws (where the barrels signify the shark, a motion tracker signifies the alien).
Beautiful touches abound, such as the way the opening of the sleeping pods echoes the opening of the alien egg (the flower motif is also used on the Nostromo's bulkheads). A string of spaghetti hangs from Kane's mouth, just like his innards will hang from his chest seconds later.
As stated earlier, this ensemble cast is sensational, but Scott's last masterstroke is with Ripley. When this film was released in 1979, everyone expected that Tom Skerritt's Dallas would be the last man standing. To see him die induced a state of panic in the audience, who watched Sigourney Weaver's (then an unknown stage actress) Ripley go from being the most attractive woman (i.e. alien bait) aboard, to the smartest, most resourceful survivor. Ripley's survival was as big a shock in it's time as the creature itself.
Maximizing all that has happened above, is the ingenious score composed by Jerry Goldsmith. Full of haunting melodies and bizarre sounds, the score puts the audience ill at ease from the opening all the way through the conclusion.
One last element is introduced in Alien to unsettle the audience, a theme that was pervasive in the mid-to-late 1970s: Corporate paranoia. This is the topper of dread that courses through the end of the film, and allows it to hold it's unsettling grip after the end credits roll. As much as the creature terrifies the crew and audience, even worse is the realization that this ship and crew have been sacrificed by the "Company" on the altar of profit. Ripley may have survived, but, to paraphrase Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "the world she's returning to is the one that betrayed her in the first place."
Alien, at it's heart, is a classic B-monster/hanuted house movie. What sets Alien apart, is the manner in which it is executed. It is the quintessential example of how good acting, superb and original design, filmmaking craft, and a unique concept can take something routine and turn it into an unqualified classic.
Note: Ridley Scott is apparently considering a prequel to Alien, to be produced under the Scott Free production banner with his brother Tony. They have also selected a director for the film, a commercial filmmaker named Carl Rinsch. This would be better than a direct remake, and with Ridley Scott's involvement, an intriguing idea. But the speculation also centers on a small crew with one alien aboard a ship. Unless this is the derelict ship found by the Nostromo's crew, then this new film, even if set prior to Alien, will come across as a pale imitation.
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