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This article discusses the film Alien; for the video-games of the same name see Alien (video game) and Alien (Atari 2600). Alien is a 1979 science fiction/horror film directed by Ridley Scott, from an original story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The film's title refers to the main antagonist, a highly aggressive and intelligent extraterrestrial which threatens the crew of the spaceship ''Nostromo'' after hatching from the body of one of the humans. Of the seven main crew members, the film stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas, and Ian Holm as Ash. Alien became both a critical and box office success, spawning a successful Hollywood franchise of literature, video games, merchandise, and three official sequels. Along with launching the career of actress Sigourney Weaver, the film proved a pioneer as the first action film to feature a strong female heroine. While the alien itself (referred to in spin-offs as a xenomorph) proved a popular aspect of the film, the story of Ellen Ripley provided the connecting thread of the series. Some observers believe that the film helped to popularize the body-horror subgenre. The film produced three sequels: Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), and Alien: Resurrection (1997), and the crossover Alien vs. Predator (2004). Advertising for the film used a tagline which became part of popular culture: In space no one can hear you scream.
Synopsis
Early versions Dan O'Bannon (who had collaborated with John Carpenter on the cult sci-fi film Dark Star) wrote the original screenplay as a script titled Star Beast, a revision of some earlier ideas of O'Bannon's (one of which dated from some years before) about gremlins getting loose aboard a World War II bomber and wreaking havoc with the crew (the B-17 segment of the movie ''Heavy Metal'' used a significantly altered version of this original story). O'Bannon's original script bears many resemblances to the film as actually produced, yet with significant differences. The spaceship — designed with a low-budget production in mind — originated as a small craft called the Snark. In the original script, the ship has an all-male crew, including the Ripley character (though the script's "Cast of Characters" section explicitly states that "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women"). Actor Tom Skerritt originally won the role of Ripley, but in the course of developing the script, character re-casting made Ripley a woman, reportedly at the insistence of producer Alan Ladd, Jr.. This decision proved crucial to the film's success. After sailing in response to the intercepted alien message, the crew discover the derelict alien craft and its dead pilot. Ominously the pilot in its death throes had scratched a triangle on its control console. The crew members go outside and see the remains of an ancient pyramid. They lower Kane into the structure, where he finds a chamber with a breathable atmosphere. An altar-like structure houses the alien embryo-eggs, and a hieroglyph depicts the alien's lifecycle. This concept survived for a long time, and preliminary H.R. Giger pyramid drawings intended for Alien exist, but eventually the producers went with the idea of combining the wrecked derelict ship with the egg-chamber (also designed by Giger), although the ideas of the pyramid, the altar and the hieroglyphs re-surfaced in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator. The subplot of Ash as an android and the betrayal of the crew came in later in the script-development process. The production dropped a scene in which Ripley and Dallas have sex — in order to secure a lower censorship-rating. Substantial excerpts of O'Bannon's original script appeared as bonus materials on the 1992 laserdisc boxed set of Alien (though the 1999 Alien Legacy DVD box omitted these). The complete O'Bannon script appears in the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set as a bonus feature. Some early concept art came from Chris Foss and from Jean Giraud, better known as the comic-book artist Mœbius. Mœbius's designs for the Nostromo spacesuits made it into the final film. Sources Many reviewers have noted that the basic plot of Alien — the pitting of a small group of humans against a relentless alien creature in a remote location — derives from earlier sci-fi movies such as the 1958 movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space directed by Edward L. Cahn, Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951), and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965). • • • Other non-science-fiction stories such as Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None have been referenced as likely inspirations. • Script O'Bannon wrote the original treatment in 1976 while staying with Ronald Shusett after the collapse of a projected film version of Dune, on which he had worked and which Alejandro Jodorowsky would have directed. Artist Ron Cobb, who had worked with O'Bannon on Dark Star and Star Wars, produced a series of conceptual designs that defined the gritty realism of the film. O'Bannon and Shusett sold the script to the Brandywine company of David Giler, Gordon Carroll, and Walter Hill who had a production-deal with Twentieth Century Fox with Hill attached to direct. Hill and Giler re-wrote the script, discarding superfluous elements, making it more action-oriented, adding the character of Ash, and rewriting much of the dialogue — giving the characters more distinct personalities. These changes caused tensions between O'Bannon and the other production members that lasted through the making of the film. O'Bannon invited other artists who had worked on the Dune project to work on the film, including Foss, Mœbius, and Giger. At this stage, a hiatus occurred in the production, as the studio expressed alarm at the prospect of committing to a new science-fiction film when it feared the as-yet-unreleased Star Wars would flop. When Star Wars became a box-office hit, Fox gave the film the go-ahead with an $8 million budget — much higher than the writers had originally hoped. During the production hiatus, Ridley Scott replaced and revised many of the design-elements before principal photography started at Shepperton Studios in England. Giger, brought in from Zurich, set up at the studios along with Ron Cobb as a type of artist-in-residence. (Giger kept a diary through the production which became the basis for his book Giger's Alien). • The Alien
Set-design and construction The film's production designer was Michael Seymour. John Mollo supervised the costumes, including the distinctive spacesuits and Carlo Rambaldi producing the crucial mechanical effects for the title alien's head. The team of Brian Johnson and Nick Allder — who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999 — headed up special effects. Scott turned to a computer-animation pioneer Bernard Lodge from his old college — the Royal College of Art in London — to produce the film's influential green line computer displays. The thin layer of mist that "notified the eggs" came from smoke and a pulsating laser, which the film-crew borrowed from the band The Who. According to the behind-the-scenes documentary The Beast Within: The Making of 'Alien, the film-crew built the spaceship set in one piece. To move around the set, actors had to navigate through the hallways of the ship. Toward the end of the shoot, many members of the cast and crew recalled walking inside the set alone as a very unnerving experience. Some maintain that such emotions come across on the screen. According to the DVD behind-the-scenes commentary, the film-crew kept details of the scene where the Chestburster emerges secret from all actors except John Hurt (Kane). The rest of the crew entered the scene with Kane already on the table and all cameras set. Veronica Cartwright later recalled feeling suspicious at finding all the movie-equipment covered with protective sheets. None of the other actors knew what they would witness, and as a result produced genuine reactions of shock, horror, and disgust. Other filming has re-used the set: the BBC One series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy re-used some of the Nostromo hallways, as well as other parts of the set. When the BBC sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf moved production to Shepperton Studios it used some surviving Nostromo hallway sets from Alien in Series 5, most notably in the episode "DNA" (as revealed on the DVD commentary). Cast Music Jerry Goldsmith composed the original score for the film. Despite the film's futuristic setting, the composer's score reflects the film's underlying horror-film genre with its use of oscillating string textures and bizarre sounds. Goldsmith composed a main theme in the romantic style that barely appears in the finished film. Director Ridley Scott and editor Terry Rawlings became quite attached to several of the cues they used for the temporary track while cutting the movie. As a result they moved around much of Goldsmith's score and had many sequences rescored. (Interviews on the "Quadrilogy" DVD release of this film document the viewpoints of Goldsmith, Rawlings and Scott in regard to this situation and why it occurred.) Two cues from Goldsmith's earlier score for Freud appear in the film, and a section of Howard Hanson's second symphony, "The Romantic" replaced the end credits. As a result, Goldsmith's original soundtrack LP represented more the original score he wrote than what ended up appearing in the film. The initial DVD release (the 20th Anniversary edition) of Alien included an isolated score track that synched the original music up to where it would have appeared in the film, as well as an additional track with the re-scored tracks (the production audio plays when the music does not appear). The soundtrack CD has gone out of print, however. In the final DVD release, most of the scenes showing the Nostromo exterior, and all of the sequences from Howard Hanson's 2nd Symphony ("Romantic"), some of which went along with them, have disappeared, for reasons unknown. Themes Most critics and fans of the film have commented on the theme of the human birth cycle. When Kane, Dallas, and Lambert venture into the alien craft, they enter through giant vagina-like openings and travel up a tunnel that resembles the birth canal. The fossilized alien sits in a long, telescopic phallus-shaped piece of machinery, and the audience can intrepret the egg that Kane finds as an ovum. Such imagery fits with the often sexual nature of Giger's art. The film presents a version of birth that might seem almost empathetic with that of the woman's experience: the alien bursting from Kane's chest reflects the intense pain that a woman experiences during natural child-birth (birth without anesthesia). The film also more broadly deals with issues of human sexuality, including rape, free love and even homosexuality, although these last two points only emerge in the director's audio commentary on DVD. Another major theme of the film deals with blue-collar workers faced with extraordinary circumstances. With the exception of Ash (the science officer), all the characters, even the officers, appear as working-class. In contrast stands the image of a corporation that puts profit before the safety of its workers. Ripley speculates that the company wanted the creature for its weapons division. To acquire it, the company makes the lives of the crew members expendable. This may reflect an American view of the economic culture of the 1970s, when millions of blue-collar workers lost their jobs as American corporations shut down factories and other production facilities in favor of cheap, overseas labor. David Giler and Walter Hill added these paranoia themes, much to the chagrin of Dan O'Bannon who thought they had used his film to make a trite statement against the American work-ethic. The film also explores the confusion of artificial with organic. The initial stress laid on life-cycles and biological processes eventually eases off once the alien births. After it escapes, much weight is given to visually confusing its smooth head with metal piping and its spindly, bristling legs and tail with wires, chains, and grates. The film further explores this theme with the computer system "Mother", with the revelation of Ash as an android, and with the realization that Ash's mission involves regarding humans as accessories or mechanisms in the process of preserving the alien and of bringing it to Earth at all costs. The name of the ship, "Nostromo", provides a reference to the novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad, an author visited earlier by Ridley Scott in his movie The Duelists. In Conrad's Nostromo, a silver-mining corporation entrusts a dangerous cargo (silver — dangerous because revolutionaries want it) to an audacious anti-hero called Nostromo, tasking him with protecting it from the revolutionaries. This may link with the idea of blue-collar workers facing impossible odds, as mentioned above. Given the eventual destruction of the alien cargo, like the betrayal of the silver in Conrad's Nostromo, one could draw parallels between the eventual corruption of Nostromo and the "corruption" of Ripley. The shuttle Narcissus also comes from Conrad's oeuvre: see The Nigger of the Narcissus. In film Roger Ebert called Alien (and John Carpenter's Halloween) "the most influential of modern action pictures". He went on to say that many of "the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking", including the re-make of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.• As Andrew O'Hehir puts it, "almost every horror film since "Alien" has ripped it off in some way, but most of the imitations have focused on details." • Commentators point to Alien, along with The Brood, as launching the body-horror sub-genre of horror film. Also, the film's cramped, claustrophobic sets have become the de facto norm for horror movies set in space. The film's representation of the ship's crew has also had a huge influence. For the first time, a blockbuster science-fiction film depicted space-travelers as blue-collar company-employees rather than as highly-empowered agents of a quasi-military structure (such as in Star Trek). (A hint of this also appears in the earlier Silent Running.) The film Outland borrows much of this premise (as well as a good deal of aesthetics), and across the genre the aesthetic of Alien for future technology became the norm in the following decade. • Gender politics
Merchandising Alien became the first R-rated film to have a merchandising line aimed at children. The children's products released included various toys and models based on the creature and on its egg, jigsaw puzzles, a board game, a Viewmaster-style movie reel, and even a storybook, all of which rate as collectible today. Most notably, Kenner Products released a 18-inch Alien figure, impressively made (for its time) with articulated parts including the retractable jaw and glow-in-the-dark cranium. However, the toy did not sell well, probably because its target demographic failed to recognize it and parents deemed the toy too frightening for children. • Toy-lines for R-rated films would not become common until the 1990s. Some claim that the more ready accessibility to younger viewers of certain films (such as the Alien sequels) has caused this phenomenon, but others believe that a toy-market has developed that has adults as the target buyers (as has likely occurred with the popular McFarlane toys). At the time, Kenner's decision to do a toy-line based on Alien came while the movie remained in production. Due to their success with the other 20th Century Fox film, Star Wars, Kenner Products admittedly acted on the assumption that Fox would produce another space-adventure movie: their research failed to ascertain that the horror-oriented Alien would target adults. Popular culture For a list of references to Alien in popular culture, see List of cultural references to Alien Special Edition October 29, 2003, saw Alien re-released in cinemas as a Ridley Scott Director's Cut. It restores many — but not all — of the deleted scenes that have already appeared as bonus materials on previous VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases of the film, and makes some interesting deletions from the original cut. However, unlike the Star Wars "Special Editions", it does not appear to digitally enhance any of the film's original special-effects footage (though the film's original negative did undergo some digital cleanup and restoration). However, the new release added some minor effects to the film, such as the shot of the sunrise on the planetoid, the lights on the helmets of Dallas, Lambert and Kane move under a natural arc on the left side of the screen. Also, when the Nostromo aligned itself to the planetoid, effects added a field of stars to the background. Ridley Scott has stated that he did not really think that Alien required this tweaking, and that the term "Director's Cut" was used for marketing reasons only (and inconsistently as well). In the Alien Quadrilogy materials, he goes out of his way to state his preference for the original: "rest easy, the original 1979 theatrical version isn't going anywhere". He recut the film himself, only after viewing the studio's attempt to do so; a version that he felt was "too long" and ruined the film's pacing. A brief rundown of the restored footage or cut scenes, in the order that the scenes appear: The Director's Cut also deleted brief snippets of footage: The Alien Quadrilogy boxed set released on December 2 2003 includes both the Special Edition and the original theatrical version. Note that due to the scenes cut from the original release to accommodate the new footage in the "Director's Cut", the "Director's Cut" actually runs a full minute shorter in time than the original theatrical release. Spin-offs Spin-offs include comics, novels, and computer games. Note for example the novelization by Alan Dean Foster. The Aliens have also appeared in numerous crossovers featuring Predators, Superman, Batman, WildC.A.T.s, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and many others. Trivia | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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