This is a Great Movie

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2013)

If you want cinematic kicks, Ridley Scott's massively successful Alien will give you them in profusion. Physically, I mean. No film I have seen in the last year or so, excluding perhaps The Deer Hunter, emanates so strong a whiff of palpable, nerve-straining shock. It is, in fact, an audience reaction picture par excellence. Which explains, perhaps better than the colossal build-up, why everyone wants to see it. The public now seems to be sitting back in its seats and saying "Amaze me." Alien, above all others recently, can be relied upon to do just that.
Alien
Production year: 1979
Countries: UK, USA
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 127 mins
Directors: Ridley Scott
Cast: Ian Holm, John Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt
More on this film
Yet it does so, oddly enough, with a story that is basically just a mixture of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing from Outer Space. A dozen other 50s-sounding titles spring to mind – well, 60s at any rate. The point is the added 70s proficiency. You won't see anything very original anywhere in the film, other than in the actual making of it. There, no holds are barred. Scott, a recruit from advertising, where instant atmospherics has to be the order of the day, manipulates his audience in a far stronger fashion than he managed with The Duellists. His combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice, however, it has in profusion.
The basics of the plot are simple. Seven astronauts, working on a battered space tug that is apparently commercially owned, touch down on another planet, find something odd for the boffins back home, bring it back into the ship and are faced with an ever-growing monster. It comes back aboard slapped across the face of poor John Hurt and ends up grinding its way through his stomach. From there on in, everyone is faced with imminent catastrophe.
Scott, aided by his special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, and many others who deserve to be mentioned but can't be, creates in the confined space of his main set a sweaty little world on its own that responds ideally to his obsessive close-ups and restless, magnifying style. Hurt has said that it was more a matter of reacting than acting, and one can well understand what he means. His own performance makes one miss it when it's gone. And that of Sigourney Weaver, as one of the two women astronauts, is also consistently watchable (with a bigger slice of the cake).
The others – Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright and Yaphet Kotto – do what they can faced by the swirling, well-drilled logistics of the piece. There's not enough writing for proper characterisation, not enough plot development for the mind as well as the senses to bite on. But for sheer theatricality, if one can apply that word to the cinema without insulting it, Alien is difficult to beat – even without that substance which might just have put it up there with the great movies of the genre.
Some people call it a cruel, heartless and essentially exploitative opus. Something to gibber at, in fact. But Alien is not in the business of old-style family entertainment (which was, after all, often as warm and gooey as hot treacle, and about as nourishing). It bases its appeal on a different set of values. Not very enlightening ones, no doubt. But exactly in tune with much more cynical times. It deserves its success for gauging, and gorging, its audience so thoroughly. Technically a British film, it certainly shows how much talent we have in this country if only we had the courage to develop it ourselves. But that's another story, and a much less exciting one.