Alien review.
45 years after its release, Ridley Scott’s Alien has lost none of its power. Our look back at a classic.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon
Starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto
Alien Review
Forty-five years ago, Ridley Scott, Dan O’Bannon, H.R. Giger, and a crew of perfectly cast actors made the sci-fi horror masterpiece. Like Giger’s creation, Alien is a perfectly designed organism. This isn’t a movie that simply “holds up”. It is the gold standard that all space horror is held up to. There are countless ways to look at Scott’s masterpiece…all of which have been covered in the last four and a half decades. For our purposes today…we’ll look at three. The Alien, the Setting, and the Final Girl.
Giger’s Xenomorph is the obvious place to start. We are presented with the entire life cycle of his uniquely unforgettable creature. The discovery of a gooey, fleshy pod leads to the arrival of the Facehugger. The Facehugger lays an egg in its host…eventually birthing the Alien. With its acidic blood and dark body perfect for hiding in shadows…the Xenomorph picks of the crew of the Nostromo one by one.
Each phase of the creature is accompanied by scenes as memorable today as they were when they were first viewed 45 years ago. The pod opening. The Facehugger attaching itself to Kane (John Hurt). The Chestburster scene marking the birth of the Alien. A tail that can be easily misconstrued for a chain hanging from the ceiling. Acid eating through layers of the vessel. A game of hide and seek inside the vents. There are so many effective scenes in Alien that the movie would be a classic if any of its other highlights fell short. It’s a masterpiece because none do.
That begins with the setting of the movie. Most of it takes place abord the Nostromo. A towing vessel whose crew is awakened from stasis by a transmission from a nearby moon. The date may be 2122…but the aesthetic of the ship is pure 1970s. Rudimentary computers connected to an overseer called Mother. A cockpit fashioned more like the cab of a semi-truck than the Starship Enterprise. The fashion of the crew makes no attempt at introducing a faux-futuristic style.
As the years tick by the aesthetic choices become more and more effective. Alien is imbued with a timeless feel because it is so purposely out of date. Compare it to the excellent sequel helmed by James Cameron. A movie filled with future tech and a committed sci-fi look. It looks more dated than the older original. Scott’s combination of space setting with a 70s look makes Alien feel timeless. Even the reveal of secret android Ash (Ian Holm) feels unique to this singular film. An idea completely steeped in science fiction…hiding in plain sight amongst technology that never advanced.
What did advance, however, was the presentation of the film’s final girl. It’s important to note that Alien arrived just seven months after John Carpenter’s slasher masterpiece Halloween. The final girl trope existed before October 1978…but the one-two punch of Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode and Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley canonized the concept. Aspects of the two characters are in the DNA of every similarly fated character that follows. While both find themselves in a situation no one could be prepared to deal with…they go about doing so in radically different ways.
Laurie Strode is a scared teenager being victimized by a masked killer. Her role in the original Halloween is to showcase the fear that comes along with that…and the inner strength needed to survive. Ripley is no victim. She is a natural leader stuck in a role where no one will listen to her. Every event aboard the Nostromo would have been avoided had the crew listened to her. Kane is compromised by a foreign organism and needs to be quarantined. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) demands entry onto the ship against those regulations. Ash obliges…following his own orders regarding company interest in the organism.
Even after the acid hits the fan the remaining crew is reticent to follow her lead. It’s no surprise that she is the one who survives the ordeal. But it is surprising that she even finds herself in position to. It is in no way clear when the crew emerges from their sleep who the lead character of Alien is. Dallas is the captain…and Skerritt receives top billing in the cast…but this is an ensemble picture that slowly thins the herd down to one. What makes Ripley such a compelling final girl is that, on top of her bravery and intelligence, she’s presented as both the most capable member of the crew…and one they are quick to dismiss.
Ripley presents pragmatic and, ultimately, correct ways to deal with their alien problem. She is met with arguments at every turn. Ash is purposely working against her at every turn for reasons that become clear. The rest of the crew does it out of fear. Even Dallas…brave enough to head into the vents to find the creature…demands it is brought on board in the first place out of fear for Kane’s life. Ripley knows better. And she’s inevitably left to clean up the mess.
Many of the final girls that immediately followed the Strode/Ripley duo follow in the former’s footsteps. Frightened but able to find an inner strength to overcome. Your standard 80s slasher villains came across many variations of this. Ripley’s become more influential as time has passed. Buffy Summers shares more than a little of her DNA. We watched Sidney Prescott grow from a Strode in Scream to a Ripley in Scream (2022) in a way that felt natural and earned. Mostly, however, what we see is a mix of Laurie Strode and Ellen Ripley. Characters who begin as potential victims but quickly show the capability and situational intelligence to turn the tables on whatever is after them.
What’s after Ripley is an iconic creature design abord a ship that feels timeless. Alien is a haunted house set in deep space…where no one can hear you scream. An antagonist designed to kill…camouflaged by every dark corner. It moves around silently and blends in with the scenery. Meeting it leads to almost certain death. The Nostromo isn’t just a haunted house…it’s the scariest haunted house ever presented on film.
Scare Value
There’s plenty more that can be said about Alien. Ridley Scott turns what could have been another schlocky 70s creature feature into an unchallenged horror experience. A lot of world building is done in the background…which the series would further explore to varying degrees of effectiveness. The most interesting thing about what happens to the series post-Alien is how hard future filmmakers would work to set the world in different genres…beginning with Cameron’s action classic seven years later. Claustrophobic horror had already been done to perfection in 1979. Trying again would have been a futile effort.
5/5
Alien Links
Streaming on Hulu
Rent/Buy on VOD from VUDU and Amazon
Buy on 4K/Blu-Ray from Amazon
