Alien

Entry updated 18 September 2022. Tagged: Film.

Film (1979). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by RidleyScott. Written be Dan O'Bannon, from a story by O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, with uncredited input from producers Walter Hill and David Giler. Alien design H RGiger; concept artist RonCobb; human spacesuit and uniform design JeanGiraud (uncredited). Cast includes Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton and Sigourney Weaver. 117 minutes. Colour.

One of the most influential sf films ever made,Alien is actually much closer toHorror in its adherence to genre conventions. The merchant spaceshipNostromo, on a routine voyage, visits a planet where one of the crew is attacked by a spider- or crablike creature in an abandonedAlien spacecraft. Back aboard theNostromo this metamorphoses, partly inside the crewman's body, into an almost invulnerable, rapidly growing, intelligent carnivore. Science officer Ash (Holm), who unknown to the crew is aRobot instructed to keep the alien alive for possible commercial exploitation, attacks Ripley (Weaver); he is messily dismantled. TheMonster picks off, piecemeal, all the remaining crew but Ripley.

There is a fine music score by Jerry Goldsmith. Giger's powerful alien design, inorganic sleekness blended with curved, phallic, organic forms, renders the horror sequences extremely vivid, but for all their force they are plotted along deeply conventional lines. Considerably more original is the sense – achieved through design, terse dialogue and excellent direction – that this is a real working spaceship with a real, blue-collar, working crew, the future unglamorized and taken for granted. Also good sf are the scenes on the alien spacecraft (Giger's design again) which project a genuine sense of "otherness". Tough, pragmatic Ripley (contrasted with the "womanly" ineffectiveness of Cartwright as Lambert) is the first sf movie heroine to reflect cultural changes in the real world, where by 1979Feminism was causing some men and many women to think again about the claustrophobia of traditional female roles.

Alien, which was made in the UK, was a huge success and won aHugo as best dramatic presentation. It had precursors. Many viewers noticed plot similarities withIt! the Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and with A Evan Vogt's "Discord in Scarlet" (December 1939Astounding), a story incorporated into hisThe Voyage of the Space Beagle (stories July 1939-August 1943Astounding, May 1950Other Worlds; fixup1950; vtMission: Interplanetary1952); a legal case about the latter resemblance was settled out of court for $50,000.

The sequels wereAliens (1986),Alien³ (1992) andAlien Resurrection (1997). The novelization isAlien (1979) by Alan DeanFoster. [PN]

further reading

DavidThomson.The Alien Quartet (London: Bloomsbury Publishing,1998) [nonfiction: #4 in the publisher'sBloomsbury Movie Guide series: pb/photographic]
Dan O'Bannon.Alien: The Complete Illustrated Screenplay (London: Orion,2000) [screenplay: pb/]
MartinBarker, Kate Egan, Tom Phillips and Sarah Ralph.Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Pivot,2015) [nonfiction: hb/]
John David Ebert.Alien: Scene by Scene (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace,2015) [nonfiction: pb/]
J WRinzler.The Making of Alien (New York: Titan Books,2019) [nonfiction: hb/photographic]