| Dark, foreboding, macabre and
intense, Ridley Scott’s Alien is perhaps the finest
example of horror and sci-fi fused into a sublime work of
cinema. Often copied but never equaled, this tale of survival
manages to be outlandish, creepy, deathly serious, scary and
somehow within the boundaries of nightmarish believability.
In the cold depths of space, Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney
Weaver) and a crew of six other members man the mining ship
Nostromo, a horrifyingly beautiful spacecraft housing shadowy
corridors and claustrophobic ingresses. When a distress signal
is picked up from a nearby planet, the crew is awoken from
hypersleep to investigate. A small search party examines the
dilapidated remains of an alien vessel, resulting in Kane
(John Hurt) being unwittingly attacked by a spider-like parasite
that affixes itself to his face. He is returned to the ship
for examination, resulting in one of the most memorable and
gut-wrenching scenes ever filmed. As shocking as the shower
scene in Psycho, an alien creature tears its way out of his
rib cage, spewing blood and viscera across an appalled dinner
table of crew members. Attempting to catch the tiny snakelike
creature, the dwindling group is slowly picked off one by
one as the alien grows rapidly in size and deadliness.
One of the most unique aspects of the film is the maturity
of its characters. While slasher flicks make use of screaming
teens that run frantically from a deranged killer, Alien instead
features a crew of adults. Perhaps unintentionally, the older
crew has a hardened, experienced feel about them, creating
a more mature and realistic sense to the game of cat and mouse.
Few films have been able to genuinely capture the immediacy
and seriousness of fictional and outlandish alien situations.
Director Ridley Scott miraculously managed to create two of
the most important and influential science-fiction films of
all time with Alien and later Blade Runner. The scares and
terror that surmount are stunning in their simplicity and
yet carefully executed with fascinatingly eerie sets, biomechanical
alien designs and an overabundance of steam and slime.
H.R. Giger, a famous Swiss surrealist was assigned the daunting
task of creating the ultimate alien life form. His design
is flawless due to the ingenious reproductive cycle he envisioned,
as well as the biomechanical design of the horrifying adults.
James Cameron would later alter the cycle by creating the
Alien Queen in the first of several sequels, but the main
idea of an egg bearing a parasitic facehugger which lays another
egg in the victim’s chest, remained the same. After
bursting out of the body, the worm-like chestburster would
grow to a bipedal monstrosity complete with a banana-shaped
head and a tongue lined with teeth. In the original blueprints,
the alien drone would be capable of mutating human bodies
into in an egg to start the process again.
Rivaled in suspense by its sequel Aliens, but not in sheer
terror, Alien is perhaps the greatest science-fiction horror
film ever made, and has certainly introduced us to one of
the most terrifyingly formidable screen villains of all time.
- Mike Massie |
