Space never looked so scary.

Rating: 10/10 (19 November 2018)

My experience with Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, Alien is limited as I never watched it as a kid mostly because I was far too young to even see it and given how slow paced it is, I would have probably been bored by it if I did watch it, but as I got older and began to hear other people comment on how excellent the film was, I felt compelled to give Alien a watch and lo and behold, I absolutely loved it. From it's glorious visual style and effects to its marvelous soundtrack and performances, Alien is everything that most modern horror movies wished they could be.
The film opens with a massive mining spaceship called the Nostromo returning to Earth with its crew in status sleep. When the ship's computer known as "Mother" detects a distress call from a nearby planet, it awakens the crew and they are ordered to investigate. They land on the planet and Captain Dallas along with Lambert and Kane head out to find where the distress call is coming from. They soon discover that the call is coming from a gigantic alien spaceship and enter into its depths. Meanwhile, back on board the Nostromo, Ellen Ripley attempts to translate the distress signal only to discover that it may be in fact a warning but can't send the information to the other crew member. Inside the ship, the other crewmembers discover the remains of a massive alien lifeform. Kane then descends into a chamber full of egg-like pods and when he touches one, a spider-like creature leaps out of the egg and attaches itself to Kane's face. Dallas and Lambert bring the unconscious crewmember back to the shuttle and order Ripley to let them aboard but she refuses, stating that everyone else would be at risk but science officer Ash violates her order and lets them in. He and Dallas then attempt to remove the facehugger from Kane's body but with every attempt, it's grip tightens on his face but eventually, the facehugger lets go and dies. Upon returning to the Nostromo, Kane awakens from his ordeal but doesn't remember anything apart from a dream involving smothering. Before they return to status for the remainder of their journey, the crew have their last meal together. All of a sudden, Kane begins to choke and convulses in pain before a petit alien busts out of his chest and runs off into the ships cooling ducts. Now, the crew must find a way to capture the alien and jettison it out into space.
It's impossible to think that Alien was only Ridley Scott's second future film after 1977's The Duelists. The movie has the certainty of being made by a director who has decades of experience working within the genre and working with the most skillful filmmaking veterans, thus giving the film a rigorously gleaming grow to it, with an astonishing manner and craft. The movie has the look of an epic blockbuster but there's also no indication that the budget was ever compromised and there's very little to indicate that Fox tried to micromanage the production of Alien. It's difficult to imagine that Ridley's film ran into any of the same production problems Alien 3 was subject to because this movie holds everything in check so perfectly.
It's almost absurd to play down the importance of Alien both as a film and a gift to both sci-fi and horror. It popularized Ridley Scott and his visual style. It showed people that sci-fi movies could still be embedded in ideas and analogies rather than go the route Star Wars had gone two years prior as well as frightening the living crap out of movie audiences, something that it still does 39 years later and something a horror movie like The Nun hasn't been able to do. Much like Scott's other seminal sci-fi masterpiece, Blade Runner which is both innovative and sentimental which drew upon and renewed the understandings of film noir, Alien is on one point a meeting of two different genres of horror movies. On one foot, the movie is a haunted house film, centered around a foundation that dates back to the 1920s with a building that is haunted by an entity or a creature, which in turn bears ill will for those who enter while on the other foot, the movie draws from the slasher genre popularized by Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which a group of people is killed off one by one by an evil force of nature who then does battle with the final survivor.
What Alien manages to do in one full swing is to deal with the central issue of both these film genres by a blend of ambiance and character development. The faults of many haunted house movies boil down to a basic idea: if being in the house is so horrifying, then why out leave? In Alien, there is simply no getting out. The Nostromo is a boundless maze of passages and cooling ducts with a creature that could be lurking anywhere, ready to pouch. The film is agonizingly suffocating, so much so that there is a point when the viewer finds themselves rapidly looking around each corner of the screen as the tension and fear begin to build. Additionally, the main issue of most slasher movies is that more times than not, the characters are so poorly written and paper-thin that the viewer has no investment in them. The principle reason people paid to see all the Halloween sequels was because of all the detailed and cheesy ways the characters were killed. Over its 40 year history, Halloween went from Michael Meyers being this unkillable incarnation of evil to being in a reality TV show and reduced to battling Busta Rhythms. Alien, however, takes its time to develop its characters in the movie's opening act. The first hour of the film is surreal and takes its time, from the unhurried Kubrickian camera shots of the Nostromo's hallways to the time jump of John Hurt waking from hypersleep to the mocking conversation about the food the crew is eating and the additional situation. Even after the facehugger attaches itself to Kane's face, the movie to its goals and keeps the character growth coming regardless of the situation. It adds to Brett and Paker's outcast position along with their loss of respect for Ripley, all of which become ever more important as the story continues to play out.
Alien has often been described as the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey, the lower-class description of space set against the glistering white grandeur of Kubrick's ideas. This isn't surprising in the slightest as screenwriter Dan O'Bannon who also wrote John Carpenter's sci-fi film, Dark Star brings over a lot of elements from that movie and adds it to Alien. Rather than be a polished clean spaceship, The Nostromo instead is a grubby and dilapidated ship inhabited by hard-working men and women who don't care for many things apart from getting paid and getting home. Aspects of corporate suspicion and gender discrimination are key to the films' overall look and feel such as when Ash disobeys Ripley's orders to confine the other crew members and acts incredibly arrogant towards her when she remains him who's in charge while Lambert is the complete opposite of Ripley as she comes across as the typical screaming women archetype seen in many horror movies but she is still never the less an interesting character. All of this makes Alien feel like an early example of having a strong women character who isn't an overpowered and over-feminized much like more recent Hollywood blockbusters. As a matter of fact, it's really because of her grasping her femaleness that Ripley is able to defeat the alien. She decides to go back and save the cat even though the ship is about to explode and then undresses in the escape shuttle and basically becomes a sensualized object for a brief moment. Of course, this is the scene in the entire Alien franchise where Ripley feels the most womanlike but only after grasping a sense of femininity that she seems to have hidden for the majority of the movie. The company depicted in Alien with Ash as their ambassador, are snooty, selfish and indifferent to the lives of everyday people or even women. Those same people are the ones who end up saving the universe even if they have to risk their own lives in order to do it. Let's also take into consideration the character of Ash as because he is a robot, he is a flawless clone of a human, thus sowing the seeds for what Blade Runner would later do. Although he may not do certain things normal people do, Ash can still interact with the other members of the crew of the ship which in turn makes him all the more unaccepted than Ripley even is. There are no feelings of erotic slanting in his actions as the movie progresses much like the rest of the crew to a point that Ash seems almost loveless. However, once he starts glitching do his actions take on a more sensual approach. His body gestures during his conflict with Ripley no longer feels ordinary which given how Ash doesn't even act like a normal person but rather looks like he has blown a fuse. His bizarre actions start with his entrance into the Nostromo's navigation room. His mannerisms towards Ripley look disturbingly like a sexual violation, right down to his effort to suffocate her with a magazine so if this scene isn't some kind of Freudian declaration then I have no idea what is. All of a sudden, the character of Ash who has spent the majority of the film extroverted and informal becomes a passionate hunter in the same vein as the alien itself.
The final test for all horror movies is whether or not the movie is even scary, and while Halloween still remains the most terrifying horror movie I've ever watched, Alien is still pretty damn close in terms of suspense and dread. A high part of this lies in the practical creation of the movie. Much like John Carpenter, Ridley Scott understands that authentic horror exists in the viewer's mind and that people aren't frightened by what they see but rather by what they think they see. By displaying so little of the alien until the very end of the film, Scott implants a seed of dread and terror into the viewer's mind, which continues to grow as the deaths be