Cinema's Greatest Monster

Rating: 10/10 (4 November 2002)

It's a scholarly view that there are a very finite number of basic stories. All we do is tweak the recipes and tell the same stories over and over again. Rather than allow it do depress you, allow yourself to appreciate how great a role execution plays in this process, and how the most generic of storytelling formulas can be the basis for something completely unprecedented.
Alien is, at heart, a haunted house in space, mixed with Ten Little Indians. On paper it never tries to rise above that, and you could see in its earliest stages what a clever little sci-fi horror film it would have led to (and if you care to see that version, look no further than Italian genre entry Planet of the Vampires). But bring some visionary talent to the table and you get to see alchemy at work.
Picking up the pieces from Jodorowsky's aborted Dune, director Ridley Scott, despite only one feature to his credit to date, had a strong hand: a powerful visual sense, and the help of artists as diverse as visionary French illustrator Jean Giraud (Moebius, for fans) and Swiss conjurer of nightmares Hans Ruedi Giger. With such a creative trio, visually, this is as safe a bet as you could find. But visual thrills alone do not make a film: every story has to do, first and foremost, with people.
Credit the writers of the original script for a solid blueprint if you must but then tell yourself that first, Scott's tireless storyboarding of the whole film convinced the studio to double his meager budget, and second, for a director seldom credited with his work with actors, he pulled a fantastic casting coup: veteran hands for the most part, happy to mostly improvise the naturalistic banter of the ship's doomed crew, anchoring this tale and making it all the more horrific for it. The masterstroke, especially in retrospect as Alien went from standalone classic to cinematic saga, was the choice of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley.
Decades later, and Alien is a masterclass of both horror and science-fiction. it's that slow, agonizing build-up that enhances the effectiveness of the horror once unleashed. it's the forbidding look, and how everything is both terrifying and beautiful at the same time, from the cavernous ship itself to the titular monster, cinema's greatest without a doubt. It's in the frightful subconscious analogies from violent impregnation to rape, to the cruel meld of machine and organic that characterizes the alien and its origins. It's in the deaths themselves, each one an unforgettable, nightmare-inducing experience, none more-so that the captain's claustrophobic tunnel hunt.
You'll hear people rave about sequel Aliens and how much better it is. More action- packed, sure. More epic and more likable perhaps, but better? No. Not in a million years, and given the high quality of that classic film, it says a lot about the original.
This one will change you forever.