No. 3 – Alien

Ahead of the latest instalment, Alien: Covenant, I decided it was high time I watched the original Ridley Scott 1979 horror classic, Alien.

Set in Space (‘Where no-one can hear you scream’), the Nostromo and its crew are heading home, that is, until they are forced to investigate the source of a strange SOS signal. Anxiously venturing onto dangerous territory, they come across the body of an alien and what looks like a giant incubator full of eggs. After examining one of the eggs more closely, Officer Kane comes face to face (literally) with one of the beasts inside, and becomes the vessel through which this terrifying metal-toothed monster hatches. Now there’s an alien aboard the Nostromo and the crew must quickly destroy it, before it destroys them…

A brilliant and simple plot which uses the oh-so-popular ‘cat-and-mouse chase’ formula to its advantage,  Alien successfully creates and maintains both anticipation and suspense from start to finish. Inducing feelings of genuine horror by focusing on its human characters and their fear allows us to empathize with and experience the nightmare for ourselves. The alien is throughout, an alien figure to us, as it should be.

The special effects are also kept to a minimum and the alien itself is absolutely terrifying. With row upon row of razor sharp teeth and a body that towers over grown men, Scott successfully creates the most brilliant concoction of machine and beast. In creating a sci-fi horror, not only is the film ahead of its time, but aptly, so is its antagonist.

In terms of characters, Ripley* (Sigourney Weaver) plays the classic female heroine who, as always, miraculously manages to survive and in this instance, save her cat at the same time – but I did find her character a little bit flat. Whilst the film’s ending was so brilliantly captivating (Ripley detonates the ship before escaping via a separate vessel), whether she seemed truly terrified at 1) the thought of an alien chasing her and 2) destroying the ship and getting on board the shuttle all in under ten minutes, is debatable. Saying that, she does have a very practical attitude to everything from the start, so as an ultimate test of survival then fair enough, she got reasonably sweaty and upset  I guess.

This kind of leads me on to my main criticism (don’t hate me).  With such a brilliant concept, I  wish that Scott had made more of  the idea of, ‘being alone in space’ – after all, this is the ultimate fear; being totally isolated in the dark. Scott enriches the horror of this nightmare by adding a man-killing alien into the mix, but perhaps needed to do more with this i.e. hearing the sound of the creature lurking above them, or playing with the idea of being hunted down in the dark,would have given the film that slight edge. It does do this at one stage when Captain Dallas enters one of the ventilation shafts and the alien is identified only via a detector – this was a brilliant way of using the monster without a overly theatricalising it, but I just felt there needed to be more of this kind of thing.  Basically, I wanted it to be more like the Disney World ride, ‘Alien Encounter’.  

But of course, I’m not Ridley Scott and I am in not in the position to give any directorial advice on an award winning blockbuster. A bit like The Breakfast Club, I have to take into account the time period in which this film was made, and for 1979 it fully matches up to its horror classic counterparts.

 

Overall rating: 7/10

• I’m basing my analysis on this film not its sequels –  I am aware there are sequels in which she most probably gets more interesting.