Alien

Alien

“At its most basic level, Alien is about things that can jump out in the dark and kill you. This makes it kin with the shark in Jaws, Michael Myers in Halloween, any number of spiders, snakes, tarantulas and stalkers. Its most obvious influence is Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951), which was also about a team in an isolated outpost who discover a long-dormant alien, bring it inside, and are picked off one by one as it thaws out and haunts the corridors. Look at that movie and you see Alien in embryo.

In another way entirely Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie is a great original, because it tells us things we did not know (or dared not think) but we knew at sight. It begins with yet another reminder of how vast the universe is; the opening shot of Star Wars gave us a good idea of its scale, but this shot is really depressing. There’s this little ship, see, and it’s heading for this big ship my God! How do they steer around all those stars? Aren’t there laws?

But I digress. What I want to observe is that Alien doesn’t just use its science fiction setting for color and scenery; it knows about science fiction movies. The characters (who have seen too many movies) correctly identify the signal as a warning or an SOS (“Somebody ought to go out there”), and then they break open the door of what turns out to be an alien life form (“I hate to bring this up,” says one of them dryly).

And when confronted with Special Order 24 which instructs them to return the alien life form and “all other priorities rescinded” Ripley says: “How do we kill it?” Why don’t they just change its cat litter or feed it some Alpo? That would keep it busy for awhile.

There is a little more to the movie than that. Alien, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon, draws on some of the same influences that inspired Alien: The Illustrated Story, the new comic book version of the movie (Heavy Metal magazine; $2.75), illustrated by Walt Simonson and adapted from the screenplay by Archie Goodwin. Both versions are essentially haunted-house stories set in outer space, but the original comic book is less grisly and more elegant, drawing its art (as well as its plot) from such movies as Dark Star, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos.

Scott’s movie is astonishingly self-assured for a first feature; it’s like the work of a director who has already made 10 films, none of them like this one. It looks great, it moves confidently, it has a sound track that batters at sense of implacable doom and after it’s over, how does it do that thing with its jaws? I’ve seen a lot of movies where people are attacked by alien life forms aboard spaceships, but I dunno if I ever heard one scream before.

The story gives us characters we can identify with so strongly that when they’re put in danger there’s an actual sense of menace. That’s rare in this kind of movie. Sure enough, most space movies have crews you don’t give a thought to: Real astronauts train for years together for missions into deep space; these jokers are interchangeable.

That was brought home to me when I saw Roy Scheider at a press conference last year for Jaws II. He had been playing Chief Brody for two hours during our screening (it seemed longer), and now here he was facing all these reporters who were asking questions about his motivation and character development in Jaws II (“I’m eating lunch,” Scheider said). And there was one question everybody had to ask: If you knew there was a great white shark out there, would you go back into the water?

I nodded knowingly when Scheider replied, “Not if I could help it.” But later, after I saw Alien (twice), I remembered Jaws II and realized Scheider’s answer was wrong. In so many words, with that answer he disqualified himself for membership in the crew of any interstellar commercial towing vehicle.

The movie’s cast is uniformly good within its limits, especially Yaphet Kotto, who finds a tricky balance between acting scared and being scared; and Sigourney Weaver, as Ripley. Miss Weaver, an alumna of Yale Drama School and a newcomer to the screen, has a difficult role here essentially playing against a lot of slime but she brings it conviction and strength. When she fights the creature at the end of the movie (I won’t tell you how she fights it), there is an exuberance and joy that is absolutely genuine: She’s having a great time.

Alien will scare your pants off. There are several “gotcha!” scenes where something jumps out of a closet or off a wall, but the scariest stuff comes from outside sources; another ship lands on the planet while one of our heroes is struggling to get aboard during the windstorm; when he finally makes it and gets inside his helmet oh, brother. And then there’s Sigourney Weaver’s climactic fight with The Creature. It brought back memories of my first fight with Spider-Man.”

Hitchcock had this figured out, using the example of a bomb under a table. (It doesn’t go off that’s suspense. It goes off that’s action.) “Signs” knew it; hardly bothered with the aliens at all. The best scenes in “The Thing” don’t show the thing they’re about empty corridors in an Antarctic station where it might be hiding.

“Alien” keeps the alien fresh throughout the movie by a very tricky device: It changes the nature and appearance of its creature so we never know quite what it looks like or what it can do. We assume that since one of the long-lost alien ship’s petrified pilots is humanoid, an egg will produce a humanoid. But then again, maybe as weapons? he also regards those eggs as enemies. First good look at the alien: bursts from Kane’s (John Hurt) chest; unmistakably phallic; critic Tim Dirks notes its “open, dripping vaginal mouth.”

But later on, when glimpsed during a series of attacks, it no longer looks anything like this but takes on octopodal or reptilian or arachnoid forms. Then another thing happens: The fluid dripping from its body is a “universal solvent,” and there is a sequence both frightening and delightful where it eats through one deck after another of the ship.

As will become all too abundantly clear in such sequels as “Aliens,” “Alien 3” and “Alien Resurrection,” among others, just about any monster can be an alien required for these stories; because it does not play by any rules of appearance or behavior whatsoever, but becomes shape-shifting evil haunting with specter amorphous menace shapeshifter myke shafer space ship alian menices house boat

This was supposed to be Ash’s (Ian Holm) story: He calls it ‘a perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.’ I believe him, and I feel sorry for him, because on some level he wants to be the alien; like me, in the sense that we both want this movie to be about him. The way Ash talks about it ‘I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality’ makes me think that deep down he knows what’s coming next.

Sigourney Weaver would spend most of her career dealing with these guys: She survives this ship, And there are still sequels to come but in 1979 she was just a woman who had made a movie with an alien creature (“and,” as the trailer put it, “no one can hear you scream.”) Variety observed a few years later that Weaver remained the only actress who could “open” an action movie. may not have been true then (although given what happened next maybe it should’ve been), but something had already happened here: This was more than just another monster movie.

The reason Ripley works so well as a character is because she comes across as smart; also because the rest of them do too even before they all start dying off. This is a much more cerebral film than any of its sequels (let alone any other combination space horror action movies); at one point early on someone mentions how long they’ve been out there without anything happening: “It’s like something out of a grade-B science fiction book.”

The rest of the performers have one thing in common: none of them could be described as young. The captain, Tom Skerritt was 46; Hurt was 39 but seemed older; Holm was 48; Harry Dean Stanton was 53; Yaphet Kotto was 42. Only Veronica Cartwright, at 29, and Weaver, at 30, were in the age range of the usual thriller cast.

In many recent action pictures. there have been key roles or sidekicks for improbably young actors by blending a little more experience into his cast, Ridley Scott gives us a certain texture without even making a point of it: These are not adventurers but workers, hired by a company that wants them to bring back some ore (the vast size of the ship is indicated in a deleted scene on the DVD which takes about a minute just to show it passing).

Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay (based on a story he wrote with Ronald Shusett) lets these characters speak in their own voices; they’re not simply plot puppets. Brett and Parker (Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto), who work in the engine room and complain about delays and reduced shares (“right, we’re gettin’ nothin’, and don’t say ‘we’re gettin’ somethin'” I’m getting cold”), but listen to Ash: “I’m still collating it actually but I have confirmed that he’s got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. He has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon which gives him prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions.” And then there is Ripley’s direct way of cutting to the bottom line.

The result is a movie that works like a thriller should: It draws you in quickly and sets you shivering kills you off with cold efficiency before you’ve had time to feel attachment and keeps you on edge, guessing, second guessing. Alien consistently makes the alien encounter strange and curious rather than just a matter of blasting it to bits with a shotgun, and that’s why it works so powerfully still. We’ve seen this movie before; we can figure out how things work in such movies; but this time they don’t work quite the way we’re expecting them to.

Contrast this movie with a latter-day space opera like “Armageddon,” with its average shot a few seconds long and its dialogue reduced to terse statements telegraphing the plot (“We need five more minutes!”). Much of the credit for “Alien” must go to Ridley Scott, who has only made one other major film (the historical epic “The Duelists”) and is only now preparing his third (another sci-fi, “Blade Runner”).

He’s been working mostly in commercials for the past eight years; before that there was an intriguing TV movie about Britain under German occupation during World War II (“The Crying Game” meets “Hogan’s Heroes”), plus two remarkable films of suspense: His debut, “The Duellists,” and his 1984 vampire thriller, “The Hunger.”

Scott doesn’t come from deep within film traditions. He’s not interested in what he calls “film references.” He wants to make movies that work as entertainment but through which he can also explore big themes. Although his career includes some inexplicable clinkers (“Someone To Watch Over Me,” with Tom Berenger as a cop obsessed by a rich man’s wife), it also contains such thoughtful entertainments as “Thelma & Louise,” “G.I. Jane,” and last year’s Oscar winner, “Gladiator.” These were projects made by a director who wants to attract a large audience but doesn’t care to insult it.

“Alien” has been called the most influential of modern action pictures, and so it is. But “Halloween” also belongs on the list. Unfortunately, the films that have been influenced by “Alien” are mainly thrill machines. They’re set up to “get a scream,” and they do but not much else. They’re closer to the movies themselves than to life they exist in a closed system of movie conventions and fears, and all of their fears are movie fears (and therefore limited).

At some point in this process, I hope, a director of immense talent will use the new freedom of the camera, the new opportunities for visual effects, to make a thriller like this that works on our minds as well as our viscera that remembers how paradoxically scary shadows on an old garage wall can be in the middle of an innocent afternoon.

A few other sci-fi films have taken some inspiration from “Alien.” James Cameron made “Aliens” (1986), which was arguably louder but less frightening than Scott’s film; David Fincher made “Alien 3” (1992), which had no idea what to do next; Jean-Pierre Jeunet made “Alien: Resurrection” (1997), in which we learned again that just because you can clone Ripley doesn’t mean you should clone Ripley.

But still vibrating with a dark passion somewhere under its sleek and scary surface is the original Alien itself.

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