Uniquely alien

Rating: 9/10 (23 June 2010)

An austere, despairing vision that far from finding any wonder or beauty in space instead dares to find a universe of limitless horror. 'Alien' remains the ultimate fusion of the horror and sci-fi genres.
Its underlying fascination lies in its keynote title. No film has ever imagined anything as uniquly, unsettlingly 'alien' as this. Not just the monster itself - a parasitical predator that has fine-tuned Darwinian adaption to the ultimate in survival - but also the derelict spaceship which harbours the egg from which it springs, after waiting millennia in gestation. No one has ever bettered designer HR Giger's concept of complete non-human otherness.
This was only Ridley Scott's second feature. His highly acute visual style (developed after years as a leading director of UK commercials) brilliantly establishes mood. His direction of drama is detached, almost eavesdropped in snippets, not allowing the audience to get too close to the protagonists. It's an approach that keeps the narrative single-mindedly on track.
And the tone is relentlessly bleak. The Nostromo's crew inhabit a dehumanised industrial complex of a spacecraft with few concessions to comfort. Among them there seems to be little more than indifferent companionship. The planet they visit is a hellish world of ferocious storms, smothering vapour and barren terrain. Jerry Goldsmith's music is correspondingly sparse, almost grudging in conceding any high notes.
Everyone remembers John Hurt's famous stomach-churning demise. But perhaps the most telling shot in the film is the one of Jones, the ship's cat, peeking out from behind a corner as the Alien devours a victim, feline eyes glinting in wary fascination at a primal scene it can empathise more instinctively than its hapless companions...