"I admire its purity"

Rating: 9/10 (21 October 2011)

The sci-fi movie, by the late 1970s was a very clean, bright-looking genre. In the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek space travel was all about gleaming corridors and friendly swishing doors. Aliens were generally friendly, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or if they weren't at least they were only trying to shoot you with a ray-gun, not bite your face off in some dank corridor. With Alien, the sci-fi genre reacquired that sense of horror and paranoia which it had had in its 1950s heyday.
The look of the thing is all-important here. The design team have created an environment that looks suitably space age-y but also very gritty and industrial, with an emphasis on tight enclosure. The room of the "mother" computer is easily the brightest, yet its low, curved ceiling makes it incredibly claustrophobic. Director Ridley Scott often keeps his camera amid the clutter. In the opening scene before the crew awaken, he sets up the feeling of eeriness with various indistinct movements in the depths of the set. Throughout the movie Scott integrates simple elements of light and sound – squeals, clanks, flashes – and his sense of timing really makes this a triumph of horror. One of the great things about the production design and the way Scott shoots it is that the creature often blends into the paraphernalia, creating several surprise moments where we realise it was in plain view all along.
Another brilliant thing about Alien is that the crew of the Nostromo don't look like a set heroic, uniformed space pioneers. They look – and act – like ordinary people doing their job. Although there isn't much room for dramatics here, there are many fine performances from the cast. Ian Holm does well, all things considered, throwing a believable inhuman streak into the mix. Veronica Cartwright is ostensibly the token screaming female, but she plays it with surprising realism and dignity. But best of all is Sigourney Weaver. The part was originally written for a man, and while heroic women in action movies are quite de rigueur now, compare Ripley to any other female character from a mainstream 70s movie, and you see the context Weaver was working in. And yet her performance is strong and confident enough that she seems completely natural in the tough, assertive role.
Stunning and innovative as it is, Alien remains something of a one-off. Although many 80s sci-fi movies adopted that dark, dingy look, they were typically more action-orientated affairs, most notably the sequel itself, Aliens. Such an even balancing of contemporary horror and sci-fi was not really attempted again. Alien remains a brilliantly constructed work in a field of its own.