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Pop Culture Digest

By Harrison Gish

Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 genre-bending tale of what might lurk in the depths of space, has been re-released in theatres this past weekend as a director’s cut. With a few additional gut churning scenes, it recognizes the original film as the intensely frightening space opera that it has always been and the classic that it has become. While the preview for the director’s cut declares that Alien is the scariest horror film ever made, it misses the point. The film is not just a horror movie; the world in which it is set is too scientifically sound to allow a supernatural creature such as like Freddy or Jason to exist-—which makes the film, compared to the countless drones it has inspired (Species, anyone?), that much more frightening. Seen today, Alien is revolutionary in its mature construction of fear – like 28 Days Later did with the zombie film, Alien revamped the space creature genre into something much more affecting, much more palpable. Next year’s Alien vs. Predator, which Alien is being re-released in anticipation of, will have a hard time topping it – no other film has.

The tagline of the original Alien trailer states that “in space, no one can hear you scream.” In Scott’s film, the universe is such a lonely, empty place, that even if sound could travel in the cosmos, it wouldn’t be heard. His portrayal of outer space, considered today, is operatic in much the same way as Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, space is vast and empty, a feeling connoted to the audience by long shots of distant solar systems and some of the slowest, most graceful camera movement in film history. Like Kubrick, Scott knows that depiction of space doesn’t have to be an action packed interstellar metropolis, like in George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars. The unwillingness of his camera to rapidly change its focus gives the viewer the sense that they are witnessing one particular microcosm in all the vastness of the stratosphere, and that there is no one else within screaming distance.

The interiors of the spaceship Nostromo are shot in much the same way as the universe outside. It is here that the alien bursts out of Kane’s (John Hurt) stomach and proceeds to terrorize the ship until only Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the cat are left alive. Besides ten crew members and twenty million pounds of mined ore, the Nostromo is vast and empty, giving the ship a lonely melancholy during the first act and a hair-raising eeriness when the alien appears in the second.

Compared to current science fiction or horror films, the events of Alien unfold unhurriedly. For the first hour the camera focuses on Dallas (Tom Skeritt) and his crew’s interaction with the Nostromo, giving the ship the feel of an unspectacular factory. Only halfway through the film does the alien grow to its full size, and even then it spends more time in the air ducts than engaging in the unrepentant destruction it is now, twenty-four years later, renowned for. When the alien does appear, part of it always falls into shadow, whether it is curled around itself or standing upright and sticking its spiked tail into a victim. Shots of exploding faces appear when it kills, but they stay on the screen for an infinitesimal amount of time. Ridley Scott knows that the anticipation of violence is enough to move an audience, not necessarily the violence itself. If Star Wars and John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, both masterpieces in their own right, can be seen as the progenitors of Alien, an interesting consistency can be noticed in the current sequels of all three movies: the directors pile on the action and the gore quickly and excessively, not having much of a clue how to construct a palpable sense of fear or expectation of anything onscreen.

Most importantly, Ridley Scott, who also directed 1997’s G.I. Jane and 1991’s Thelma & Louise, made the revolutionary move of putting a female in the role of the protagonist in a violent hard-nosed science fiction nightmare, casting off sexuality as well as the sexual attractiveness of the onscreen image as being necessary for his film. It hadn’t happened in American cinema before, and directors have been scared to do it since. The scant underwear Sigourney Weaver dons during the finale is the only out-of-place occurrence in the movie, and the actress would, after this role, never do it again. In the rest of the movie Weaver is tough as nails, whether interacting with the crew or fighting the alien. Her performance as well as the role itself blurs the importance of a noticeable dichotomy in this genre between masculine and feminine.

In 2003, Alien can be seen as representative of our relationship with technology and commerce run amok in a way where efficiency is the priority and human lives are negligible. The film posits that the unknown humanity races so quickly towards is not the star child of space odyssey, but something much darker, bleaker and more terrifying – in fact, it has teeth. In truth, what’s so excellent about Alien is that, when Ian Holm’s scientist describes the creature as “the perfect organism; its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility,” he could just as easily be describing the film itself.