Alien Review

When I was 16 years old, my mom was still a pretty strict interpreter of movie ratings according to age, so when I told her I wanted to go see Alien with some of my friends, the first thing she did was look up the film's quarter-page ad in the Movies page of the Miami Herald.

"Hmm," Mom said as she scanned the black-and-white reproduction of the now iconic "cracking egg" poster with the stark ALIEN logo and the tagline "In space no one can hear you scream."  And for a brief, hopeful moment I didn't even breathe, until....

"It's rated R. I am definitely not going to see this movie, and you're not 17 yet, so sorry, you have to tell your friends you can't go see it."

Of course, I was disappointed, but I knew that if I tried the But, Mom, everyone else is going ploy I wouldn't get anywhere; if that line of reasoning had rarely worked for my older sister when she was a kid, it certainly wasn't going to sway my mom.

And of course, when my friends told me how cool - and gross - the famous "chestburster" scene was and how scary the alien was, I felt exactly the way I had when I had not been allowed to see Jaws at the age of 12.

I did - eventually - buy a videocassette recorder in 1984, and several years after that I bought the VHS edition of Alien, so it all worked out well in the end.  (I even got mine back, in a lighthearted way....I got my mom to watch the movie with me; she likes it even though it is pretty scary!)

Alien: "In the movie theater, everyone can hear you scream...."

Written by Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star) and directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down), Alien is the perfect symbiosis of science fiction and horror. In its 117 minutes of running time, we are locked aboard the space tug Nostromo with its seven crew members and that most unwelcome hitchhiker, the titular Alien.

Alien's plot is, on the surface, very simple: the Nostromo -- a heavy-duty space tug which is lugging 20,000,000 tons of raw material back to Earth, is suddenly pulled off its preset course home by Mother, the ship's main computer and autopilot. The seven crew members -- Captain Dallas, first officer Kane, third officer Ripley, navigator Lambert, science officer Ash, and the engineering duo of Parker and Brett -- are awakened from cryogenic suspension ("The ol' freezerinos," as Brett puts it) and ordered to investigate what Mother interprets as a possible SOS from a small planetoid way out in the galactic boonies.

Although not everyone is pleased -- chief engineer Parker, for one, protests vehemently -- the Company's rules about investigating signals of unknown origin are clear: either you go and find out who -- or what -- may be trying to make contact, or you don't get paid.

Naturally, the Nostromo heads for the mysterious and forbidding planetoid, flying through a rougher-than-usual atmosphere and sustaining enough damage to require a longer than usual stay on the cold and barren world. Naturally, too, they land not too far away from what appears to be a U-shaped ship belonging to another spacefaring race...and the source of the mysterious distress call.

But when Dallas, Kane, and Lambert march over to the alien derelict and investigate, they soon end up wishing they had listened to Parker's "I don't want to go there" rant. For, in addition to a fossilized skeleton in the ship's bridge, deep in the cavernous cargo hold of the crashed vessel there are thousands of leathery containers that look disturbingly like eggs.

Well...they look like eggs because, as Kane and the rest of the crew will soon find out, they are eggs, and when the first officer inadvisably touches one of them, the top opens up and out comes the first stage of the dreaded alien, the skeletal looking "face-hugger."

Normally, of course, the landing party wouldn't have been allowed back on the Nostromo for a full 24 hours and until the three members had gone through decontamination procedures, but Ash, the cold and oddly twitchy science officer, has other ideas and defies Ripley's order to not let their three crew-mates back aboard. And, of course, Ripley's objections will be fully justified soon enough; the face-hugging thing (it looks like a skeletal hand with a tail) not only bleeds acid -- so you can't simply shoot it without crippling your ship in the process -- but it also has deposited something even more horrifying; a symbiotic larva which will feed off its host then emerge -- in the famous "chest-bursting" sequence -- when it is large enough to be "born."

My Viewpoint: Considering it was shot on a very small budget, Alien nevertheless works as both a sci-fi and a horror movie. Unlike the utopian "the future is gonna be bright and wonderful" vision of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the film's view of space travel is dystopian, not only pointing out that space travel is inherently dangerous, but that the culture that sent out the "seven space truck drivers" aboard the Nostromo is no better or more moral than our own late 20th Century-early 21st Century Western civilization.

When we learn, for instance, why the Nostromo was pulled out of its course to "seek out new life" on that nasty, deadly planet, we realize how truly venal the Company is. It is, of course, a very '70s movie in its Big Business Can't Be Trusted message; the Company knew the signal wasn't a distress signal...it was a warning. Essentially, the Nostromo's owners are part of a huge military-industrial complex, and the Bio-Weapons Division wants to get its greedy hands on a walking weapon of mass destruction..."all other priorities rescinded," as Ash coldly puts it.

As for the horror aspects of the film, very few movies come close to topping Alien in sheer suspense-and-fright levels. O'Bannon and Scott achieve this by the quality of the script and the wise decision on the director's part to use the actual alien sparingly.

Like the shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (a thematic cousin of this film), the alien is hardly ever seen, and then only in brief shots that show only parts of the creature (a head here, a clawed hand there, and that sharp stinger-equipped tail!), saving the full-body reveal for the climactic confrontation between it and Lt. Ripley.

Scott adeptly ratches up the tension by degrees, using the ship's confined spaces and many dark and narrow hallways and air ducts to convey an almost claustrophobic environment from which the embattled crewmembers can't easily escape. At least, the viewer realizes, in a haunted house there is a wider world into which one can flee if an exit is found. But in space, not only can no one hear you scream, but there's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.