Alien Review
Welcome to the Halloween Horror Extravaganza. Today, I’ll be talking about another classic in sci-fi horror cinema- Alien, the Ridley Scott masterpiece written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronny Shusett. The legendary H. R. Giger did the creature design. Though, O’Bannon helped with some of it, as we’ll get to later. Enjoy this Alien review.
I have an interesting (and probably funny) relationship with this film. It was one of my first real horror movies. I was probably 11 or 12 when I watched it. Probably much older than some, but I’d never had the opportunity to watch movies like this until then.
I’d heard many things and the idea of the film had been growing in my mind for years at that point. I knew very little about what happens in it. I just knew what the Xenomorph looked like and that it killed people. I’d even developed an idea that the alien was intelligent- Like, space faring intelligent, with its own ships.
Listening to the 2003 Director’s Cut Commentary track gave a lot of background info I didn’t know before. I’ll be leaving little tidbits from that which I find interesting. They brought just about everyone in for that commentary and it shines a fascinating light. They had Scott, Weaver and the rest of the actors, O’Bannon, the editor, so many people who worked on the film.
Right off from the title sequence, they went through a lot of changes in that slow crawl forming the word Alien. They first wanted to go with bits of guts and bone to form the words, but they decided this movie was too classy for that kind of thing.
There’s class in this movie that you don’t see much of in horror cinema, back then or today.
Here We Go
We first see the Nostromo and its write up. “commercial towing vehicle ‘The Nostromo.’ Crew: seven. Cargo: refinery processing 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore. Course: returning to earth.” I’m fond of the economic reasons the Nostromo’s out there. Often in science fiction, we see science vessels or military craft. Not here, just a giant freighter cutting through the endless night.
12-year-old me could very much tell it was a model against a black background. That got my guard down a bit. Oh, how that was a bad idea. I was so tense in those first moments. I knew quite a bit about sci-fi, but almost nothing about horror. So I knew none of the obvious tells and tropes that I can easily pick out now.
I love the Nostromo’s aesthetic. As Ridley Scott calls it, “retro industrial.” It’s not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. There won’t ever be a commercial ship that looks like that on the inside, unless it’s built as an entertainment vessel or by someone who really likes this movie. Even so, man does it look good. It’s very much a form over function situation with this and it’s fantastic.
From the commentary, it was mostly built from scraps scavenged from aircraft graveyards. Assembled like sculpture, and then painted. Then the pieces were joined together with polystyrene which was painted to look like plastic.
Captain Dallas, played by Tom Skerritt, after waking from cryo, speaks with Mother, the ship’s AI. Again, form over function with the computer room. It’s almost like the inside of an egg. Bright white walls with flashing yellow dots all around that room form this space which feels like it’s probably the center of the ship. Or at least, it should be. Since this was made in the late 70s, rather than communing with Mother over any number of consoles, he goes directly to that room.
As the crew get started in the cockpit, all still waking from their months in hypersleep, they find out they aren’t in the Sol system, not home yet. They’re still way out. Traffic control isn’t responding. To everyone’s bemusement, it turns out they’ve been awoken about half-way home. Mother intercepted a transmission on a Moon called LV-426. Company policy demands they go or they get no money.
Though they weren’t actually named in the first film, Wayland-Yutani corp. is stupid evil as we learn more through the franchise. It’s really cool seeing the first real hint of that.
I know that technically they call LV-426 a planetoid, but it’s clearly in orbit around a gas giant. That would make it a moon, so I’m calling it a moon.
So It Begins
As they descend on LV-426, it’s very violent. Lots of shaking and stuttering as they cut through the atmosphere. They had guys hiding out of frame shaking the chairs. O’Bannon, the writer, said this scene was the one that turned out the most like he’d imagined. Up until that time in science fiction, landing on planets was pretty much effortless. He thought about the times he’d been on a big airliner, especially the turbulence. He thought it’d be an interesting idea to show landing as a horrendous and dangerous process where you might be torn out of the sky before you even land. I love it. Plus, the crew immediately has a big problem. One of their landing gear crunches up on a rock and bends out of shape, causing structural damage.
Oh man the atmosphere. I love it. The creepy music with the howling winds, I can almost hear it as I write this. The bulky space suits that made me think of StarCraft back when I first watched it. It’s so good. Unfortunately, the reality of the shoot wasn’t good at all. The suits were so hot that the cast nearly suffocated. They weighed about 75 pounds, the promised air holes didn’t work, and the aerosol canisters built into the suits were leaking into their helmets. They didn’t have the money to run air tubes either. To be an actor back in the 70s… I can’t imagine. Hopefully the actors saw it as worth it once the final product came to be.
Dallas leads the expedition across the surface to find the source of the signal. With him is Kane, played by John Hurt, and Lambert, played by Veronica Cartwright. Their helmets transmit camera feeds to the ship but as they get further from the Nostromo, their coms and cams cut off, leaving them alone and the rest of the crew unaware of what might be happening.
The three find a ship, nothing like theirs. It’s a nightmare. H. R. Giger’s work is showing now and things are freaky. The ship has a horseshoe shape to it and the aesthetic of everything forms into this pseudo spread woman’s legs, which gives it a really off-putting sexual aspect that I didn’t even notice until it was pointed out to me a while back. I’m not surprised though. Pretty much everything Giger did was making the sexual into something grotesque.
Apparently, for the inside of the ship, Scott had incense burned on set and then he waved it around with a piece of cardboard to make a thin and evenly distributed layer of smoke without any billowing or whisping to give a thickness to the air. Then he put a lot of effort into the lighting. He was obsessed with making the lighting perfect. So much thought put into making the lighting look as much as Giger’s paintings as possible.
Then we the Space jockey in the ship with its chest blown open from the inside. Scott considered it the pilot, making the ship some sort of weapon carrier. In his vision, the Xenomorph already took on the physicality of its host.
Childhood Nightmare
Now for the piece that really fucked with me the first time I saw the film, and for years afterward… the Facehugger. It’s such a disturbing idea. Just… all of it; the whole package is a testament to the genre. What it is, what it does, its role in the Xenomorph life cycle; how it goes about that role; what it does to the victim, what it looks like. I’ll be honest with you; I slept on my mother’s floor for about a month after watching this movie. It had nothing to do with the adult Xenomorph. Not even the chest burster scene, which didn’t freak me out nearly as much as it seems to have for most people. No, it was the damn Facehugger.
The story of the Facehugger’s design is fascinating because O’Bannon was the man who actually designed the version we got in the film. Giger sent some drawings of it which got locked up in customs because no-one understood what was going on and was really freaked out, so he had to go down to the airport and get them. When he saw it had fingers instead of tentacles (his original description had it use tentacles), he knew he had to get that in the film. He loved the finger idea. But no-one was taking the time to build it. Giger was busy with the adult humanoid Alien suit. So O’Bannon he drew it out. Fortunately, he had art training, so he knew how to do it.
Then he turned to the Ron Cob, who offered to sketch the skeleton to help figure out how the fingers attached to the body.
Once that was done, he took it to Scott. He liked it immediately. Then the sculptors built it out of foam-rubber. It hadn’t been painted yet and the material had a pale human-skin color. Up until that point, O’Bannon had been thinking about it as greenish and reptilian. But he saw that version and said he’d never seen an alien with that color. It added plausibility.
I found that story from the 2003 commentary fascinating. So I have Dan O’Bannon to thank for my month of nightmares as a 12-year-old. Congrats to him. He set out to make a horrifying parasite, and he did just that.
Back to the story, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ellen Ripley, did not want to let the expedition party back onto the ship after Kane got attacked. She wanted to follow quarantine procedures. And since she was the commanding officer with Kane and Captain Dallas off the ship, she had the right to make the call. Ash, the science officer, played by Ian Holm, went against her order and let them in, bringing the Facehugger on board.
Dallas and Lambert are pissed at Ripley. Ripley is angry at Ash. And Kane may or may not be dead because they have no idea what the parasite is doing to him. There’s lots of inter-personal conflicts going on now, on top of the massive cluster fuck that came from that egg bursting onto Kane’s face.
In one of the added scenes for the Director’s Cut, we see the crew outside the science lab, watching Ash and Dallas examine Kane. Ripley comes into the corridor and Lambert slaps her across the face, yelling and freaking out. Cartwright actually hit Weaver, quite hard, right on the face. No one expected it to happen and the scene just goes with it. You can see the surprise on Weaver’s face. She figured Scott told her to do that, but he denied it in the commentary.
By week 3 of shooting, everyone knew the movie would be a classic.
They used raw meat, including a large oyster, when they showed the inner part of the facehugger, making it far more realistic and gross.
Funny enough, this film was one of the only ones of its kind at the time which got good critical reviews. Most film critics never gave much thought to horror or science fiction.
O’Bannon did everything he could to make Alien feel like it wasn’t just a space movie. He wanted a terrible sense of dread and isolation so the audience knew no help was coming.
Waking Just to Die
Not long after they leave LV-426, Kane wakes up and the facehugger is dead. Kayne doesn’t remember much, but he had a dream of smothering.
Then we get the scene that’s gone down in film history. Part of the shock that comes from it is that none of the actors knew exactly what was going to happen. They were kept away from the set as the crew prepared so they couldn’t know what would happen. They used real blood and animal intestines. They only used one take with 4 cameras.
As they’re hunting the chestburster through the corridors of the Nostromo, Scott made an interesting point that I’ve heard in other places but never from the people who made the film. It’s a B movie. “Ten Little Indians in the old dark house,” as he put it. It’s a really simple prospect, an idea that had been done many times and has been done many times after. But everyone involved elevated it. Yes, it’s a very simple story with simple characters. But it feels like there’s so much more to it.
Then we get the reveal for the fully grown Alien, played by Bolaji Bedejo, who was 7 feet tall with long and thin arms and legs. Though it’s a common sight in pop culture today, that thing was unlike any other monster in film history. It’s one of the greatest monster designs in any entertainment medium. It kick-started a thousand copycats. H. R. Giger was a genius. Twisted and demented, probably, but a genius none the less.
Once Bret, played by Harry Stanton, is killed by the Alien in the reveal scene, the tension becomes different. Now the crew knows what the threat is, finally. They make a plan to push it through the vents and blow it out into space.
Something I really love about this and other good horror films is that we don’t actually see the full-grown Xenomorph until more than half-way through the movie. Even then, it’s heavily obscured with tight camera angles. It’s so easy to show too early. A lot of movies, such as Jaws, had to do it. The monster just looks bad and it’s smarter to keep it obscured so you can keep the fear there. This thing actually looks good. I’d want to show the astonishing amount of effort placed into making the costume. That’s not what happened here. They did it right.
Dallas crawls through the vents to try and force it toward the airlock. Everyone else is outside the vents, trying to guide his path, close off the sections of the ventilation system as he moves, and figuring out where the monster is.
Fortunately, there were no accidents on set, even though they used a real flamethrower. They had no special effects back then to make good looking flame.
Then a genuine tragedy happens. Dallas is listening to Lambert, over the coms, who’s watching a motion tracker. As the Xenomorph starts for him, she tells him to start moving, but is freaking out so badly she doesn’t communicate that he’s actually running right into the thing. Dallas goes quiet after we see a flash of the monster.
An Unwanted Subplot
Then there’s an impressive scene where the survivors are trying to figure out what to do next. Parker, played by Yaphet Kotto, wants to just kill it. Lambert is panicking, saying they should just take the shuttle and leave. Ripley stands up now that Dallas is gone, taking control and telling everyone what to do. She’s coming into her own, becoming the Ellen Ripley so many of us know and love.
Ripley runs to the Mother console to figure out what’s going on. With Captain’s privileges, she uncovers the subplot which Dan O’Bannon didn’t write. The producers put this piece in because having a single plot wasn’t okay. One must, according to them, have a subplot.
O’Bannon was quite frustrated with the whole idea and said it was “An inferior idea, by inferior minds, well acted and executed.” You could hear the passion with that conviction. Even in the 2003 commentary, decades after they made the movie, he was still upset.
The subplot is about the science officer, Ash. The company placed him on the crew. It seems on some level, the company already knew something was up with LV-426, because Mother had an order in the directory for his eyes only. Bring back a specimen from the moon, all other priorities rescinded, crew expendable.
Then, as we and Ripley learn of this, Ash attacks her, almost killing her with a rolled-up magazine shoved down her throat. if not for the other two crew members finding them and beating Ash in a deadly fight. To everyone’s surprise, Ash wasn’t even a human. He was a bio-mechanoid machine, an android. Essentially, he’s a replicant in every way that mattered. Scott explained that Ash, though he wasn’t human and didn’t have the parts, he still had pent-up sexual desires. That’s why he chose that method to kill Ripley. There was some deep Freudian shit going on with him.
I find it interesting to hear Dan O’Bannon was upset about this whole thing. He wanted nothing to do with any of it. He’s almost ranting about how stupid the whole thing is and almost has an air about him saying he thinks it ruined his brilliant idea. He doesn’t quite say it, but he doesn’t have to. Then you hear the cast and Scott all talking about how interesting it is. How it adds a layer to the corporation. Where it can be inferred, they always send an android with their crews as an insurance policy against mutiny or going against the company’s interests. I find that whole thing fascinating. I also think the Ash subplot is one of the strongest pieces of the movie. And yet, the original script writer hates it.
I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during some of those arguments between O’Bannon and the producers who wanted the subplot. And I’d love to have seen what Scott thought of it all as it was happening. I didn’t know any of this until watching the commentary for this review. I knew some of the background but none of those politics about the subplot.
After that plot twist about Ash, the final 3 survivors shoot for getting the escape shuttle ready and scuttling the ship. Ripley splits off on her own while the other 2 get supplies. The Alien shows a curiosity about Lambert as it creeps into the room while they’re preparing. She’s frozen in fear. Parker screams for her to move so he can hit it with the flame thrower. Ripley is off gathering her cat, which has survived the film up until this point. Lambert and Parker are both killed.
Alone
It’s just Ripley now. She’s all alone on this ship. Trapped light years from any help. She sets the self destruct sequence. We then get a scene exclusive to the Director’s Cut, which we only got to see after Aliens, by James Cameron, came out. Inside one of the many corridors of the Nostromo, Ripley comes across a horrific sight. Dallas is half melted into the wall, becoming an egg. Brett is almost totally an egg, only a small, deformed face, even says the egg was once human. Dallas begs her to kill him. Ripley flamethrows the morphing eggs on the walls.
Now for some head-cannon. Using people as eggs hasn’t really been seen in the Alien franchise outside this movie’s director’s cut. Almost everything relies on James Cameron’s addition of an Alien queen. There’s something about this idea that I almost like more. It’s more horrifying. To allow for both, I have my-own speculation. I very much doubt this is intended to be true, nor will we ever get a verification of it. But, as my personal opinion, this is because there were at least 2 separate types of Xenomorph on the ship.
We have the smaller Xeno species which we see in Aliens. They function more like an insect hive. Individuals of that species are still strong and dangerous, but they utilize numbers as their greatest weapon.
What we see in Alien is the other type, a much larger and far stronger variant. If we look to Alien Isolation, you can fire a gun at that Xeno and it just pisses it off, whereas a Xeno from Aliens will die from a handgun to the face. I understand that none of this was intentional and the Alien in the game was more mechanics based than lore based, but I still count it because this is a major point of contention in the lore of this universe and I’ve never seen a proper answer.
The variant we see here and in Isolation is a loner type. They don’t form hives and they can’t reproduce nearly as fast. They need two hosts to reproduce, one to become the egg, one to be impregnated. These ones are more individualistic and intelligent, more sadistic too. A slow-moving creature who enjoys stalking its prey before watching the terror as the creature realizes it can’t stop the Xenomorph. The other ones are more matter-of-fact. They still have intelligence, but they’ll just kill you when they get the chance, rather than toy with you first. The space jockey utilized 2 variants, depending on what kind of mission they needed.
I know none of this matters if we’re counting the Prometheus/Alien Covenant timeline, but frankly both of those movies are terrible and I don’t count them as canon. Prometheus is okay by itself, but not as an Alien prequel. If you like that lore, that’s totally fine. I wish I could like the official lore. But I don’t. So, I’m sticking with the old comic and book lore and the head canon of the two types of Xenos.
Unlike real life, we can pick and chose the facts of how our fiction works. That’s my opinion. If there is lore that you or I don’t like, I believe we can personally choose to ignore it, because this is all make believe anyway. We can decide what does and doesn’t work for our own personal enjoyment. It’s a concept called “death of the author” and I subscribe to that way of thought. I especially subscribe to it when multiple people over decades have worked on the same franchise. Of course, there are degrees to it and you can easily take it beyond reason, but again, this is all just make believe anyway.
If you have a different opinion and think that all official lore is sacred, more power to you. I won’t try to change your mind. I will, though, state that once we have the “all lore is canon” argument, once contradictions start popping up, which they do a lot in this franchise, we start down a whole path of deciding which canon is more canon than other canon. That quickly spirals off into its own form of death of the author. It’s a complicated subject and I believe it totally depends on the individual.
Be that as it may, feel free to ignore my little piece of head cannon. It’s just my personal thought and nothing more.
Now that I’m off my little ramble, back to the movie.
Ripley runs down to the shuttle, but the alien is there. She runs back to deactivate the self destruct, but too late. She makes one final mad dash for the shuttle and launches off just before the Nostromo and the 20,000,000 tons of ore get destroyed.
The Alien isn’t dead yet. It didn’t leave the shuttle; it climbed on board and hid. It crawls out slowly and, thanks to quick thinking on her part, Ripley puts on a space suit and evacuates the cockpit, blasting the Alien into the depths of space. Finally, after losing all of those friends, Ripley goes into hypersleep hoping to get found on the frontier.
Alien was one of the first movies to utilize the 4th act, the ending after the ending. Originally, Ripley got on the shuttle, the ship blew up, and that was it. But the 4th and final act, the final confrontation with the enemy, that was new. It’s yet another thing Alien pioneered and now thousands of other films have done.
I wasn’t expecting this review to become 8 pages on my doc, but it has. I guess I had quite a bit to say. I still haven’t said everything I could. I could probably go on twice as long as I have and still have more left. But I’m getting tired and I’m sure you have other things to do today. Thanks for sticking around to the end. I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes, my takes, and the story of how this film traumatized me as a child. Be sure to come back on Halloween when I give you my final installment for this year’s Halloween Horror Extravaganza.
Jeshua Hicks
Jeshua Hicks