Alien
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- Release Date: May 25, 1979
- Directed by: Ridley Scott
- Written by: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett
- Runtime: 1 hour 57 minutes (Theatrical Cut)
1 hour 56 minutes (Director's Cut) - Series: Alien
My first viewing of Alien hit me like a truck. First, some context: I've loved monster movies ever since I was a little kid. By 2009, I was entering middle school, and I began to get more and more into horror. I would read the Wikipedia plot pages of all of the big classics, and would eventually watch every one I could get my hands on. My biggest sources of horror films at the time were the local Family Video, the On-Demand service, and the SyFy channel. I had a steady diet of bad-CGI TV horror movies like Ice Spiders, Wyvern, the Lake Placid sequels, and so many others. Alien was being shown on TV one night, and I managed to catch it near the beginning. I don't want to bore you with a complete personal history after that point, so I'll just cut it short and say this: it's been my favorite movie of all time ever since then.
First off, the characters in Alien are so well written and memorable. Each one has a very distinct personality that you'll immediately be able to latch on to. Some are along on the mission for scientific purposes, while others like Parker and Brett are clearly here just to get paid for their work. I've always loved the fact that they're a bunch of blue-collar space truckers who wear things like sneakers and Hawaiian shirts and smoke in the spaceship. As for the setting, the Nostromo is a claustrophobic maze of dark corridors and steam-spewing pipes. The technology on the ship is this fun hybrid of what-if future mixed with contemporary 1970s tech. Computers are massive rooms with tiny text-based screens, banks of blinking incandescent lights, and the constant sound of clicking processors. There's clutter all over the place, and one character's bunk even features cutouts from adult magazines pasted all over the walls. This isn't a sleek, optimistic future of something like Star Trek. Everything feels so damp, grimy and lived-in, and that makes it feel so much more real.
The most famous thing about this movie is clearly its titular monster, and on my first viewing, it scared the living shit out of me. The jump-scare where the Facehugger first emerges from its egg got me good, but it was nothing compared to what would come later. The iconic Chestburster scene was one of the most graphic and shocking monster introductions that young me had seen at that point. One of my biggest fears was and continues to be body horror. Just the idea of something forcing another organism inside of your body, having it grow inside of you, and having to break through your ribcage to be born is unimaginably disgusting. The Xenomorph's design, with its multiple mouths, biomechanical body, penis-shaped head and spear tail was so far removed from the humanoid aliens that I was used to seeing in movies. This also extends to the alien spaceship that the crew visits, with its vagina-shaped doors and giant fossilized captain. H. R. Giger's design work is unlike anything else from contemporary sci-fi, and has stood the test of time for good reason.
A director's cut of Alien was released in 2003. While I normally tend to prefer director's cuts if they're available, this is one situation where I prefer the theatrical cut. The director's cut features some neat scene additions, such as the crew listening to the transmission they receive from space, and the famous cut scene of Ripley discovering that her crewmates have been cocooned in the walls by the Xenomorph. On the other hand, there are cuts made in the beginning scenes that trim a lot of the quiet parts down and speed up the pacing, and this ruins the slow-burn buildup of the original version for me. The famous full reveal of the Xenomorph in the docking bay is also ruined by a shot where the creature is seen clear as day simply swinging on a chain before it's fully revealed. It looks so awkward, and I have no idea why Ridley Scott chose to leave it in there. I would normally feel bad about criticizing a director for putting whatever he wants into his "definitive cut", but when even Scott admits that he already thought the theatrical cut was perfect and didn't want to change it, I don't feel so bad anymore. It's worth checking out as a curiosity, but only after you've seen the theatrical cut.
I honestly had a hard time writing my thoughts on Alien because there is so much that I love about this movie, and it's really hard to organize all of my thoughts into a cohesive review. I terms of characters, story, pacing, production values, effects, creature design, and atmosphere, everything is perfect to me. It sparked my love for its franchise, as well as the Predator franchise with its later crossover films. Get yourself a copy of it, turn off the lights, and be sure to watch it alone, where no one can hear you scream.