Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto
Time for another franchise review, and this one is going to be good. The Alien and Predator series were things that I grew up on; the movie in question today, which we'll get to in due time, is one of the first movies that I actively started to seek out once I got a little bit more into horror than the fourth-grade dabbling phase. I taped that bitch off HBO ('memba doing that?) and it rocked my world. The Predator films, on the other hand, was probably my favorite two-movie combo during my early middle school years, and to this day I can quote the original film from front to back. Because I'm a winner. Woo. While there were brief dips here and there, by and large, both of these series are just FUN incarnate. Except for, ironically, the AvP movies that should have been my wet dream. Screw them.
There's only one place to start, though, and we're going to be jumping all the way back to 1979. Crazy to think that the first movie was released in the '70s, isn't it? There were plenty of movies before it that made aliens scary, but nothing could have quite prepared viewers of countless 1950s creature features for what they were about to see when this beast hit theaters. Director Ridley Scott gave those people an alien that was malevolent, savage, and really, really pissed off, and all of the bad stuff was shown to you in glorious close-ups. It also introduced audiences to Sigourney Weaver and the Ellen Ripley character, a mainstay in this franchise all the way up until the aforementioned crappy AvP flicks. A whole slew of like-styled ripoffs followed in its wake...not to mention the video game inspirations, as early NES classics Metroid and Contra borrowed heavily from its lore. In short, kids, if you haven't seen this one, plunk down whatever a copy is going for on Amazon and sit down.
Most horror movies in space that people may or may not have seen feature characters that are government professionals in some way, be they astronauts or scientists. This one had a stroke of genius, as the crew of the Nostromo is essentially a group of space truckers. As the movie starts, the bunch is awaken from stasis by a curious message being relayed to them, and the law dictates that they have to investigate it. The first act of scripting according to people who know about such things dictates that a person or persons' lives are about to change in a big way, and the setup here is fantastic. Also, interestingly enough, the Ripley character isn't given much focus early on. Don't get me wrong; we get to know her, and Weaver is already awesome in the role that would grow to define her, but the main character fairly early on is Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt). This results in one of the more effective kill scenes in any horror movie later on. Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
What follows is one of the longest, slowest builds for any horror film you've ever seen, as the crew lands on a distant planet and finds a wrecked ship. There is also a derelict alien body on board the ship, presumably after being overpowered by something on board. Cue the discovery of the pod-like eggs and that immortal scene where one of the crew members eats a face hugger to the...um...face, and the rest is history.
The script of Alien was written by Charles O'Bannon, a guy who would later go on to direct the minor '80s classic Return of the Living Dead, and I don't think enough praise can be leveled on this guy for the antagonist alien creature that he created. There's no way that I would have ever came up with it, that's for sure, and not just because this thing has an ecosystem that's more complicated than your average member of the amphibian family. See, the thing that just attacked this character is called a "face hugger" because that's exactly what it does. Unbeknownst to everyone else, however, it's also laying an egg in the unfortunate host's stomach that quickly incubates, resulting in a later twisted birth sequence and the baby alien (now a miniature version of its later adult counterpart) rapidly grows and develops a need to kill everything it sees. What's more, the damn thing's blood is like pH 1-level acid that eats through anything it touches. As one character flawlessly puts it, you don't dare kill the thing. That whole concept is simply TERRIFYING. So kudos to Mr. O'Bannon, because this is some of the best scripting you'll ever see. Not just in horror, either. Anywhere.
John Hurt is the actor who got the call to play the cursed crew member who found the alien egg, and he's quite simply fantastic in the role. He would also get the opportunity to make fun of himself a few years later in that awesome Spaceballs diner scene that pays credit to his death scene here. Really, though, ALL of the actors here are awesome. Just read that list on the marquee above. If you're a horror fan or grew up on '80s movies and Roger Ebert film companions like I did, you're no doubt familiar with pretty much all of them. Even if you're not, you've probably seen all of them in a few other flicks before. But here, as the game of "Ten Little Indians" begins and the crew starts getting picked off by the now adult, giant and really, really fast and angry xenomorph, the death scenes actually have impact because the actors were good enough to get us invested.
In that way, this movie was a product of its time. Halloween had just been released in the prior year, and Alien definitely was a slasher flick set in space, minus all the gratuitous nudity. It's a body count film, with one slam-bang death scene right after the other, set in a confined area with no place to hide not unlike the device that Friday the 13th would make popular the following year. There's also a really great plot twist involved as one of the crew members is revealed to be something that you would never, ever guess, a plot mechanism that was mined further in the sequels. There's an ungodly scene set in the ship's ventilation shafts that managed to get a good jump out of me re-watching it for the first time in ten years.
Eventually, it gets down to Ripley vs. the Alien, and this is where the movie especially shines. The best thing about Ripley in this film is that she's a badass female character that they actually, you know, don't shove down your throat that she's a badass female character, a fatal mistake that a lot of film and TV properties these days tend to make. She's tough, but she's also vulnerable, and the audience is firmly behind this "final girl" as she faces off with the ultimate threat (with the benefit of some well-timed explosions and a flamethrower, of course). And she also looks fantastic in underwear during the film's climax. /record scratch
I mentioned before that the first act in the screenplay is the one where someone's life changes. This movie has that. The second act is the "fun and games" act, and this movie also has that...well, at least as "fun and games" as watching the giant alien pick off one person after another can be. The visual effects here are still really good...again, mostly because they're done in a conventional way, but I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me beat on that dead horse by now. While the xenomorph itself would be onscreen more in the sequel, I don't think the thing was ever as SCARY as it was here, mostly because there was just a certain level of tension that the sequels couldn't replicate due to the audience going through the "discovery" phase along with the characters. How the thing grows, feeds, and operates was a mystery then. But eventually it gets solved, and once the script hits the third act "insurmountable problem" section, that mystery is a big fucking problem.
It goes without saying that most horror films are a dime a dozen, and I say that as no indictment of the genre as a whole. I love horror more than life itself. I've spent much of my life seeking out as many horror-related films, TV shows, books, etc., all in the pursuit of getting scared. Every once in a while, though, there is a horror story that truly is special, and in the world of movies, it tends to be the special ones that get blessed with that holiest of gifts from the Hollywood Gods - the big budget. Alien had that golden gift, and thus, it also had a top-notch cast, set, makeup, kill scenes, you name it, this flick fires on all cylinders.
**** out of ****. The flick is an essential watch and a classic start to a pretty damn iconic series...but we're just getting started. /thundercrash
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