Writing a traditional review of Alien seems almost pointless. This is one of the biggest franchises in not just science fiction, but movies in general. I don’t think there is anyone that hasn’t at least heard of it, if not seen at least one of the films. The accolades this movie has achieved from oscars and slews of other awards, numerous shining reviews at the time of its release and today, not to mention many sci fi fans naming it as one of their all time favorites. So what can i add? I mean, when I write a review here, I try to at least make it something that represents my specific feelings towards something and if you should go see it. But this? This is a movie that’s been reviewed, analyzed and studied for 30+ years, and it creates a certain challenge when I’m trying to review it and not sound redundant.
Thankfully, there’s an answer. What I plan to do is not only give my thought on the film, I will talk a bit about its history and as well as compare and contrast the different versions of it. Yes, thanks to the 2003 quadrilogy boxed set, each film has two versions; The regular theatrical cut and a special extended or director’s cut. I will look at both and give my thoughts and give each a separate score and which gets my overall recommendation. While I realize that this is a movie most people have already seen, I am still working off the principle of not wanting to spoil good movies, and so I will try not to give too many things away if I can avoid it. (bad movies can suck it though.) So now, with all this aside, let’s look at the movie that started it all back in 1979: Alien
Alien’s behind the scenes history is some of the most intriguing when you actually hear it, and the fact that it even got made in the capacity that it did is almost a miracle. It first started as an idea by screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. O’Bannon had made a film during his last year at USC with John Carpenter called Dark Star, it was pretty much their final project but sparked some interest from a distributor so they expanded it into a full movie. It was not a very successful film, but it was something to get them noticed, but O’Bannon wasn’t quite satisfied with it. He had a whole sequence where an astronaut, (played by himself) had to chase after and fight off a goofy looking alien creature in the form of a painted beach ball. This worked fine in Dark Star which was a bit of a dark comedy, but he always felt like the movie would have worked better as a horror film, that scene in particular. So he started writing Alien with his friend Ron Shusett, who gave him the idea for the film’s infamous chest-burster scene. The idea was that a group of astronauts would wake up from hyper sleep to find a distress signal of a ship that was long ago destroyed and in there investigation an alien lifeform gets on board, killing the crew off one by one. It was a good enough idea for a young film school graduate, it’s a solid enough idea and could make for a fun movie.
However, O’Bannon was then briefly involved with one of movie history’s most notoriously failed projects, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. While it was a rather wasted trip with that project finally imploded, O’Bannon did meet up with one Hans Rudulof (H.R.) Giger, whose art work he felt was the perfect thing for the creature in the movie he was writing and at that point planning on directing.
So, once back in the states he finally polished off the last of the script for the film and he and Shusett started handing the script around to various studios and actually almost started rolling cameras on the movie with Roger Corman, the king of the low budget, and his studio. However, the script ended up in the hands of David Giler, Gordon Carroll and Walter Hill of Brandywine films who liked it, through some re-writes and pushing along got it into the hands of 20th century fox, who after the success of Star Wars were putting the green light on anything they had that involve outer space in some way. Eventually it ended up in the hands of RIdley Scott which was where the movie finally had cameras roll and the rest is history.
Ok, that out of the way how did this not uncommon and yet strangely round about origin end up as a finished film? Well, to bring up the obvious, the movie is great. It has a solid enough premise, and went with the bold choice of having the film’s main hero be a woman, something that is far more common today thanks to this film’s success. So where do I start? What is it that makes this movie work so well and still hold up today? Atmosphere, this movie is dripping in it.
There is never a single moment in this movie that doesn’t have something going on for it. From its cold and unnerving opening where the ship looks almost abandoned, to the heart pounding climax. It’s a hard thing to do in a movie at all, let alone in a thriller where you have to keep the movie going while at the same time keeping the urgency up, but damned if Alien doesn’t do it amazingly well. That’s the movie’s major strength, and a lot of it I feel comes from the fact that it was a movie that didn’t have a single central voice calling the shots. Yes, a lot of the thanks needs to go to Ridley Scott for numerous touches that give the movie it’s pulse, but just as much needs to go to cinematographer Derek Vanlint who lights and frames the movie in such a pitch perfect way it seems almost like breathing for him and of course editor Terry Rawlings who seriously makes the movie.
I feel that’s the film’s greatest technical strengths. None of the scene never outwear their welcome, nor does the movie itself ever feel like it’s lagging. Rather slowly sucking the audience in and slowly building the intensity with how fast paced the final moments of the movie are. Rawlings skillfully handles everything with the touch of a master. Which is even more surprising when you find out that this was one of his earliest credits in the position.
And of course the cast must be mentioned for all they add. Everyone does a great job, and this is no big surprise since it’s entirely a cast of up and coming future A listers. But of course the big star launched that we should look at is Sigourney Weaver. This was not exactly Weaver’s first movie, but it was her first starring role and one of the things that everyone likes to talk about is how badass the character of Ripley is, which I think is a little odd if we just go by the first movie.
One of the things I always found most interesting about the movie is that Ripley just feels like a natural character. In fact it’s not even clear that she’s the heroine until the end of the second act when she has to take command. The performance is very natural, and it a performance of a person that is in serious danger that only keeps getting worse with each passing moment. Weaver imparts so much to the character with minimal dialogue and give this character a great amount of presence. Even while the movie was giving off a more ensemble feel at the start, Ripley has something about her that makes her stand out, all thanks to Weaver.
But what’s a hero without a villain? In this movie we are first introduced to the vicious xenomorphs. The design is fantastic, it’s one of the few alien monster designs that truly feel like something totally foreign, but at the same time feels hauntingly familiar. It’s elongated head and gnashing teeth with the inner mouth are just creepy and made even more so by the fact that the main body actually resembles a humanoid, giving us the unease of the idea of a body perverted. Each of the creature’s various life cycle stages all feel unique and complement each other as they never feel like clash.
I could write a book about this movie, I really do love it quite dearly, but at the same time I know that there are already so many already written and I don’t want to ramble too much. But I said there were two versions, and I’ve been talking about the theatrical cut. So how’s the director’s cut? Well to be honest, it hardly feel worth mentioning. It’s not that it makes the movie terrible, but when the movie was already so good, and so well balanced that it should have just been left as is. The movie had clearly left those scenes out for a reason, they weren’t needed and added to that the amount of retooling required to make them fit makes a lot of the film feel forced, which is sad. It’s nice to see how these scenes would have been in the movie, but that’s it. Now some may say that I’m being harsh and that I shouldn’t rain on the fact that a director got to have his version finally released, but that’s the joke, Scott prefered cut is the 1979 theatrical cut. Not kidding, in the insert included with the special edition dvd in the boxed set, he flat out says so:
“... I felt the original cut of Alien was perfect. I still feel that way.”
So to state the blatantly obvious, Alien get a big hell yes watch it from me. It’s a great piece of filmmaking and science fiction, and not very many of those seem to come out anymore. If you haven’t seen and think you’d want to, go for it.
Theatrical cut: 5 out of 5
Extended/Director’s cut: 4 out of 5
Next time, we look at how the franchise took off like a wild fire with the 1986 sequel, Aliens.
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