Acid Trip

Rating: 9/10 (21 March 2013)

Alien (1979) is a science fiction classic that is strangely unoriginal. The "used future" idea that is so central to the movie's success was used before in scriptwriter's Dan O'Bannon's own Dark Star (1974) and in George Lucas' Star Wars and not only that, but the plot is a crossbreeding of The Thing (1951) - the dark prowling search for the monster through underlit corridors - and It! the Terror from Beyond Space - the actual plot of the alien running amok through the spaceship. Having read Dan O'Bannon's original screenplay (with a co-story credit for Ronald Shusett), it's easy to see why studios were reluctant to pick it up: one dimensional characters, a very simple, linear story progression, an alien that looks like a chicken. It is promising script that could turn into a good film. Yet is this hindsight, knowing what would come from it? When Walter Hill's company Brandywine bought it, they immeasurably improved the characters, removed a lot of unnecessary to-ing and fro-ing, crucially added the android Ash to add another layer of complexity to an otherwise too simple story and, at the suggestion of (possibly) Twentieth Century Fox head Alan Ladd Jr., turned Ripley into a woman. O'Bannon provided the bones, Hill along with David Giler, added the meat. However, no script credit for them, due to a series of falling-outs with O'Bannon and the W.G.A. ruling (wrongly in my view) in favour of sole credit for O'Bannon. However, we still have a remarkably derivative script; no magic here.
It would take two people to turn a script that was an unapologetic throwback to fifties' monster movies into a classic, for that is what the final film is: Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger. There must have been some nervous studio executives the day Scott agreed to do the film; his only other movies had been 1977's The Duellists: a good period film, uses Harvey Keitel and David Carradine well, but trades too heavily on the tricks of Barry Lyndon. In fact it gives you a pretty good idea of the vices of Scott: too impressed by technique, whereas Stanley Kubrick knew its limits as well as its virtues. Still, Brandywine had been impressed enough when they saw it at Cannes to hire him; they felt his handling of sets was exactly what was needed. He was. Ridley Scott's direction helps turn the film into something mysterious, beautiful, scary: even today, his skill is eye-wateringly impressive. The killing of Brett is an audio and visual sequence that should be taught at film schools: the slowly, delicious building of tension, while (crucially) no music plays: just the sound of dripping water and swaying chains, a sound that would later be utilised for the early promotional trailers. His constantly moving camera up and down the fantastically realised sets of the spaceship Nostromo turns the ship, along with the camera, into another protagonist. Scott had evidently studied Hitchcock well.
Giger's involvement though was a make-or-break decision. His art is so sexually disturbing and pushed too far, the film could've become dominated by it. Cleverly, Scott separated his legends of science fiction art design: Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Moebius, to tackle only the human built aspects: the spaceship and its cargo. Thus, when the Nostromo intrudes into the alien landscape, there is clear difference in the look that could have become blurred if all the designers had worked on everything. Giger tackled only the alien and its environs like the Derelict and the Space Jockey. The Alien, a truly sexual predator, is his piece d'resistance, boldly and brazenly horrifying like no other creature of the night before or since, at least forty percent of the film's success is due to it. The acid blood of the creature underlines too how much of a fantasy it is as it leads to the question, why doesn't its blood burn through its own skin? It's a clue that the film, despite on the surface being a science fiction picture, is in fact really, deep down, a horror film.
Another reason the film works as well as it does is because of its canny casting: Sigourney Weaver, strong but vulnerable, a great female role that helps define the film. John Hurt, a last minute replacement for Jon Finch, an unsuspecting victim of oral male rape and the anchor to the still wince-inducing chestburster scene. Together with Ian Holm, Tom Skerrit, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright and the great Yaphette Koto, a crew is created and characterised so you know and care about them before the killing starts.
Alien is a Freudian bisexual horror in that both male and female characters are raped and are equally dealt with by the alien; is this seventies feminism, with a female lead who is treated in a non-sexist way by her compatriots, taken a step further? Or is a cautionary parable about the future and an early warning against corporatism that would become so much part of the cinematic landscape in the eighties? So many different readings, but Scott concentrates on the most interesting: our darkest fears and their unique link with sex in an almost Cronenbergian way. The alien is all the more scary because it isn't infected by Hollywood thinking: it's not out to take over the galaxy, to destroy mankind. It's just a predator, not even unique, sharing similarities with Earth-bound parasites on a larger scale and finally, at the end, it is the end old struggle: a woman against a monster (is it the alien then the ultimate rapist?). Alien finally then fits into the horror mould of the seventies and eighties in a tradition that continues to this day: the lone, heroic woman trying to survive against a knife-obsessed killer. Alien then has its roots in the Giallo, transplanted to America via Halloween (amongst others) and brought into space. In space, no one can hear you scream.