(2003 Director’s Cut)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt, and Harry Dean Stanton
Directed by Ridley Scott & written by Don O’Bannon and David Shusett, featuring creature design by H.R. Giger, production design by Michael Seymour and Anton Furst, art direction by Roger Christian, Ian Whittaker, and Leslie Dilley, cinematography by Derek Vanlint, and visual effects by Carlo Rambaldi, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder, and Denys Alying
1979
R 124 min
Microsoft Windows is the worst thing to ever happen to movie computers. In the days of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Alien,” and even “Tron,” computers were so sturdy, loud, clicky, monochromatic. They were minimalist and cruel, but they were machines, not ware.
“Alien” (1979) and “Aliens” (1986) make one of the finest movie “pairs” of all time. Don’t worry about the other two films in the series, “Alien3” and “Alien Resurrection.” Just stick with the two winners. Their success is in no small part due to their differing tones. “Alien” is the sleeping movie, the nightmare, slow-moving and ghostly, with an amazingly simple story. There are details, yes, but they are spoken softly, into the chest and tossed off, and the movie has only a tenth as much important dialogue as its sequel. “Aliens” is the monster brought into the waking world; more is explained and there is more to follow, although the movie wisely guards many of its mysteries. Both films have similar run times, but the second is more complex, in which we understand its world and predict how it works. The characters seem awake enough to be aggressive about their situation. You can reason your way out of this danger. But with “Alien,” directed by Sir Ridley Scott, the appeal is more trance-like, more mysterious, more spacey. You can run, but something’s always waiting for you.
The set-up by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, as I said before, is simple: a spaceship, deep in the oily blackness of outer space, receives a faint, indecipherable signal of unknown, yet intelligent origin. The signal brings the craft and its crew of seven to a primordial world of blinding winds and dark days. There they find something, bring it back aboard, and it turns out to be savage, picking them off one by one from the shadows. The nature of this something will dominate the thoughts of the crew for the rest of the movie, as we catch glimpses of a tail, row upon row of teeth, and long elegant fingers. Its chief characteristics are to remain unexplained and in darkness for as long as possible.
“Alien” is a film in which atmosphere is supremely important. It is an outer space of machines that don’t always work, of cigarettes, of sweaty hair matted to wet foreheads, of cheap plastic dishes. The movie’s production design and art direction is just flawless, especially the giant cargo ship “Nostromo.” Its exterior, as many have pointed out, is a four-gabled Gothic mansion transformed into a space-tug, towing something like twenty million tons of unspecified “ore.” With many of the steel grey details made famous by “2001” and “Star Wars,” the “Nostromo” is, of course, a model, but has a tremendous amount of weight and genuine heft that puts to shame the shabby sloppiness of modern CGI. The insides of the vessel are even more impressive, part hospital, part trailer truck, part warehouse, part airport, part steamship, all kind of grungy and in need of a few more lightbulbs.
The “Nostromo” is vast and labyrinthine, with every corridor terminating in another intersection of corridors, and although the crew seems to knows its way around, we never do. At times the ship is dank, steamy, shadowy, even rainy as condensation drips from high windows. All is evocative and shadowy, yet strangely organic, and there are several moments in which the beast and the machine are indistinguishable. There is a second spaceship, on the far-off lifeless world where the crew finds the beast. The second craft is even more organic, more slippery and gooey, and contains a giant fossil, frozen in time and locked at its controls. But the less said about all that the better.
When it comes to acting and the personalities of the crew, “Alien” is very much a movie from the 1970s and blessed with a perfectly restrained ensemble cast. The crew is not comprised of heroic explorers of the “Star Trek” caliber or the energetic adventurers of “Star Wars.” The “Nostromo” is not on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations, but a cargo ship bringing fuel back to Earth, which makes it kind of like a giant semi-truck. Like “Five Easy Pieces,” conversation onboard the “Nostromo” is genuine and feels ad-libbed; the men and women are casually professional, good at what they do but by no means the best, and are more like truck drivers and oil rig workers than astronauts. Everyone’s face is a little worn, rugged and pale. Dressed in faded jumpsuits, they all look like they’ve really been cooped up in this giant tin can-cum-haunted mansion for months upon months. When it comes to their dialogue, more often than not it only matters that they are talking, not what they are talking about. Talk like this must be picked over, both by writers and actors, in order to be delivered just right, and the cast of “Alien” does not let us down.
They form various, subtle alliances as they deal not just with the beast but with problems involving take-off and landing. The flight crew (Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, and Sigourney Weaver) appear educated and are initially at odds with the working class mechanics (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton), but stress eventually changes these arrangements. In a movie without a clearly defined “lead” character, all the performances are quietly magnificent when it comes to fear, exasperation, boredom, patience, and that strange tolerance we have for people we work with but don’t quite like. Also, by denying us a clear main character, we don’t know who will live and who will die; by refusing to kill everyone in reverse billing order, like “Saving Private Ryan,” we’re left adrift, nervous and disjointed, when it comes to latching onto someone. Kubrick’s “The Shining,” made the following year, pulls a similar trick by not giving us any really sane character to use as a lens into the action.
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