Ridley Scott's second feature is a lean and mean organism (apologies to anyone who thought I was going to write "machine"). His previous was The Duellists, an engaging epic of persistent aggression over decades in the Napoleonic era. Costuming and setting aside, Alien isn't a million conceptual miles away. There is a core of violence to both that is handled to great fascination. What Scott added to progress his own practice was to keep it minimal. Like spacecraft design itself, there would be no room for anything inessential; this wasn't a saga, it was a slasher and it would enter cinema history as one of the best. Even its opening sequence of the slowly completing letters of the title against the background of a dark ringed planet. At first (to Jerry Goldsmith's eerie score) they look like an off world alphabet but, piece by slowly appearing piece, they spell out what we're already feeling.
Dan O'Bannon's screenplay is similarly lean but it suggests universes. Unfairly described as a rip off of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, O'Bannon wrote of colonisation, interstellar commerce, gritty industry, and enterprise bargaining as a bed to what only needed to be a monster movie. And those other things, the world building, add enough grimy realism to allow its audiences to forget about all the sci-fi on screen as the survival story keeps them at their seats' edge.
The third essential element was the design of H. R. Giger. The Swiss artist brought his painstaking and disturbing aesthetic and rendered the film impossible to forget with its machine organic ick. Debbie Harry had inadvertently supplied the title of her solo album when shown Giger's cover art: Koo Koo. So we see spaceships with large vaginal entrances, rows of vertebral spikes as interior design, and an alien that prevented all future contenders from looking like actors in suits. Giger's alien (later dubbed the xenomorph which is a Greeker way of saying alien) had aspects of deadly insects, reptiles, the big cats, and something more distressingly mechanical. When it opens its fanged mouth another mouth extends and its like a razor toothed eel. It's tail is active, spinal prehensile and penetrating. It speeds across the floor but climbs like a snake. It's also hard to envisage as it's almost entirely seen in shadow. This was a practical decision as the complex animatronics needed to operate the Alien meant that it was impractical to build a complete body that moved the way the creature needed to. There are a few shots of the entire body but they obey the balance of sight vs articulation by being static.
Despite the awestriking work this took to realise, the film takes pains to prevent it from just being humans being picked off. That does happen but by the time it starts we've got to know them. The term dirty space later coined to describe space-set cinema that blended the fantastic nature of the stories with mechanical realism was advanced here. I first noticed it when I went to see Star Wars in 1977 (now called A New Hope) and saw rusty space ships. The dirty space of Alien is sweaty, oil drips and steam flushes in the engine room. There's ugly ducting and fatigued keys on data entry consoles. The maintenance staff complain about shares and are only quietened when told that not responding to the distress call would result in forfeiture. These people actually work on this ship.
And what people. John Hurt (with an ashy cigarette possibly another first for sci-fi on screen), Ian Holm as the creepily emotionless Ash were stalwarts but Tom Skerrit, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright were on the rise from bits to leads. No one plays like it's Star Trek or Star Wars, if anything the performances are closer to the naturalism of a Ken Loach. But this is Sigourney Weaver's film. Her Ripley emotes intellect and, driven to action, hurls herself into rationally sound violence. She lets this break in the finale but at that stage we're with her panic and wide eyed at her quick thinking. For all its technical virtuosity, she made this film as it then made her. She not only had a great ignition but her career remains sound and busy.
Alien redefined the sci-fi movie as a horror setting, bringing it both closer (worker's privileges) and pushing it further out (the alien and its planet) in relation to its Earthly audiences. I was sufficiently struck by its believable weirdness that I had a nightmare: I was guarding a house that held a holy figure. The windows were black and I wasn't meant to look into them. I did, of course, and saw the one behind me was like the alien's mouth, opening on mouth after mouth of razor sharp teeth. The blackened valley around the house offered no escape.
There were sequels and some of them have merit. The prequels were disgraceful revisions by Scott who seemed to have done got religion in the meantime and were better left unmade. Scott himself in the shorter termed future, continued to make strong cinema but this was his breakthrough, the one that gave his name to the anticipation of his next, Blade Runner. It's tag line, "In space, no one can hear you scream," oddly enough resonates like the distant scream in the first few moments of the title sequence, never explained nor even identified, something that really did establish the horror of the endlessness of space. We're relieved to see the Nostromo glide into view and hear the crew talking like real people. But that, of course, is just the start.
Viewing notes: I watched my 4K disc for this blog. It's a sublime, deep transfer with a big dynamic audio track. I chose the 1979 cut for authenticity's sake and noticed no difference from memory (the director's cut is actually shorter but not by much). It's rentable from the usual outlets and available at Disney+ for subscribers. If you have 4K, just get the disc. You'll hang on to it.
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