by John C. Snider

Alien Head Graphic from www.alien.com, the official website.

Directed by Ridley Scott

Created by Dan O'Bannon (who also created Alien Nation and SeaQuest DSV)

Starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, 

Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt and Ian Holm

"In space no one can hear you scream."

That was the tag-line anyway; but we did hear them scream - long and loud.  And loved it.  The crew of the deep-space freighter The Nostromo are diverted to investigate what they believe to be a distress beacon.  Landing on the surface of a fog-enshrouded planet, they discover a bizarre alien spacecraft.  The craft's non-human pilot is long-dead - and there are signs he died violently.  In the ship's hold they find a huge repository with hundreds of large, leathery "eggs."  A hatching embryo attaches itself to one of the crew, rendering him unconscious, and when they bring parasite and human host aboard (against protocol) all hell breaks loose.

Ridley Scott (who directed last year's mega-hit Gladiator) took the grimy, lived-in look pioneered by such movies as Star Wars, and mixed it with the gritty punk feel of Heavy Metal magazine to create one of the most celebrated movies of all time.  Alien is hailed as a masterpiece in two genres - science fiction and horror.  At its core, Alien is just a respinning of the slasher flick.  One hapless victim after another is taken out by a largely unseen menace.  But the movie also introduced us to two new icons of science fiction film - the Alien, with its complex reproductive cycle, acid body chemistry and unstoppable predation; and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who is lucky enough (and smart enough) to survive humanity's first encounter with this vicious threat.  Little did we know that Ripley would become the can-do super-heroine of the later movies.  The movie also brought us one of the most memorable moments in cinema history - the "explosive" first appearance of the alien itself (if you haven't seen the movie yet, I won't give it away).

The Alien was designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger (rhymes with "eager"), who made his mark beginning in the 1960s with his horrific, erotically suggestive biomechanical artwork.  Giger went on to create the alien designs for Species, and was connected to several other aborted movie projects (notably an early attempt to bring the novel Dune to the big screen).

The movie spawned three sequels.  In Aliens, Ripley (rescued decades later from deep hibernation) acts as civilian advisor to a platoon of Marines who go to investigate the disappearance of missing colonists.  In the quirky Alien3, Ripley, having escaped once again from the Alien threat, crash-lands on a prison planet.  And in Alien Resurrection (an unworthy successor to the franchise), a Ripley-Alien hybrid clone helps a band of smugglers escape from a government facility where the "lab experiments" have gotten the upper hand.

Love it or hate it, Alien lives on as one of the greatest monster movies.  Twenty-plus years later, the film still holds up visually (except perhaps for the incessant cigarette smoking the crew engages in).  In addition to the sequels, the film spawned a litter of alien copy-cats and a series of comic books (including the wildly popular Alien versus Predator).

Links:

Alien: The Official Website

H.R. Giger's Website

Return to Ten Movies that Changed Science Fiction.