Movie Review: Alien [1979]

Alien -- Director's Cut [1979]

It's near-impossible to state just how much impact the 1979 movie Alien had on pop culture perception on the sci-fi genre of fiction in general. Both Alien and its 1986 actionized sequel Aliens have, for better or for worse, shaped the sci-fi horror/action genre for decades to come. And while the actual Alien franchise might be hit-and-miss due to the creators pulling the franchise in so many different directions, but for this Halloween, I think it's going to be neat to go back and rewatch this very first movie. 

And now, mind you, this is a movie made nearly forty years ago, so a lot of the moments that made this movie revolutionary isn't really super-impressive anymore. The oh-so-iconic chestburster scene, which, at the point of this movie's release caused people to run out of the cinema and vomit in disgust, is just a "cool, gory stuff!" scene to me. Like, I recognize just how effective that scene was especially compared to the rest of the otherwise slow-paced movie, but it's never going to have the same impact on me as it did to the 1979 crowd. Or, to take another example, in the final climax of the movie when we finally see the titular Alien (or the Xenomorph) in its full glory... it looks utterly ridiculous and is obviously just a dude in a suit. Again, it's not very fair in an age where video games and movies and cartoons and all sorts of media have so much more to work with than the 1979 filmmakers. Likewise, it's hard to think of Alien's plotline as anything unique in this day with the "unprepared crew coming across a mysterious, unknown and utterly deadly organism" trope being sort of done to death, with every second sci-fi piece of fiction out there featuring this plot in some fashion.

And such, while I'll never be able to explore Alien as it was originally intended to be -- a groundbreaking sci-fi horror that did define a genre of its own -- I'll try to look past the outdated practical effects and just focus on the movie as it is presented to me.

(For those keeping track at home, I'm actually watching the Director's Cut, which I have not watched before -- I've watched the original theatrical release in the past prior to writing this review. I'll collect my thoughts about the changes that the Director's Cut did that improve or detract from my viewing experience) 

And it's easy to see why this movie became such a classic. The storyline is perhaps a bit tired now in the 2010's, but very effective, and the way that Alien's dialogue worked, with no cumbersome information-dump that modern sci-fi movies tended to do. Each line of dialogue feels natural and there's no obvious "this is an information dump to tell the audience about the setting" moments. Compare this to, say,  mission briefing scenes in Prometheus or Alien: Covenant. Not knocking those movies off, by the way, because the expository trope, when used effectively, is a way to build a richer world without being vague.

On the same token, though, while it does help to ramp up the tension, the 2-hour runtime is perhaps way, way too long, with a lot of scenes spent on honestly redundant scenes showing the exterior of the commercial spaceship Nostromo, and the climax in particular, I felt, ran too long. I do applaud the decision of keeping the titular Alien as mysterious as possible, as it works in the context of this movie, since, at the heart of it all, this movie is a horror movie. The alien's mysterious, we don't know how it works, if it's even applicable to compare it to the same sort of beast humans are used to dealing with, and add that to the fact that the Alien itself is shown in shadowed, partial cuts, with the few clear shots of him being extreme close-ups showing its now-iconic phallic head or its inner jaw... throw in the extremely bizarre eggs and facehuggers, the general 'bio-mechanical' feel of the adult xenomorph and the utterly disturbing chestburster scene, and we do get a very horrific creature that our heroes are struggling to deal with. It's not a fight against the alien, it's a movie where our heroes are just trying to survive.

And as someone who's played the video games, read some novels and watched most of the movies (I still have yet to watch the fourth one), it's actually genuinely interesting to see just how little the movie gives us. Sure, there's a hint at the (actually unnamed in this movie) Weyland-Yutani company is ordering the android Ash to hijack the alien for their own purposes, but unlike a modern-day movie, that's just an explanation for Ash's actions, and not actually the main driving force that our heroes must face and defeat. There's no huge, overarching plot beyond survival, and there's just something so primal and simple about that. Also, absolutely none of the now-common terms of "Xenomorph" or "Facehugger" or any of the sort ends up being said on-screen, and so much of the actual backstory -- especially the mysterious almost-humanoid alien with a broken chest that was the pilot of the strange spaceship they found (a.k.a. the Engineers for us modern fans). It genuinely builds up a mystique about this creature since our heroes never really find out anything much beyond "we found this weird egg that shot out a weird crab-hand monster that laid an egg that now became a murderous beast.

There is something to be said about world-building and showing more clarity, which movies like Aliens and Alien: Covenant did to their respective preceding movies, but credit where credit's due, the ambiguity here definitely helps to build up a huge chunk of atmosphere to the movie. 

And part of that atmosphere, for good or for ill, is helped by its pretty slow opening sequence -- something you'll rarely see in a modern-day movie -- where the crew of the Nostormo is awoken from their cryo-slumber. We've got the nice heroic captain Dallas, the obstructive by-the-book bureaucrat Ripley, the pair of grease monkeys who just wants to get a raise Parker and Brett, stiff science officer Ash, the ship's resident too-tired-to-give-a-shit other lady Lambert, and, um... first victim Kane. Note that there's really not any singular "THIS IS THE PROTAGONIST!", and, hell, while Ellen Ripley might be iconic nowadays, it's actually interesting to note just how utterly unremarkable she is compared to the other members of the Nostromo cast. Hell, at a point she ends up being cast like a villain to a less cynical sci-fi setting, being the one who's bound by rules and refusing to let the Facehugger'd Kane to be brought into the Nostromo without proper decontamination. Which, of course, is the logical choice considering what happened, but also cold-blooded as hell. 

Anyway, the crew of the Nostromo explores a derelict ship and they make it clear that, no, there aren't actual aliens known to mankind in this space-faring setting. The claustrophobic spacesuits and the exploration of the alien ship on a planet with slightly-hostile weather might be a little low-budget, but the equal amounts of confusion, fear and wonder shown are pretty well-shown. And I suppose there's a bit of exposition, but it's worked smoothly into Ash, Dallas, Kane and Ripley arguing about protocol -- especially considering that they're essentially a group of glorified future space-truckers.

The scene where the crew discovers the mysterious dead navigator of the ship with a hole in his chest, and no other members of the crew, and then the strange, rock-like eggs with placenta inside, with the crab-like, hand-like facehugger jumping out... I've always felt that this sequence is far more unnerving than most of the things that the adult alien does, really. And then we have a rather long bit of the crew discovering the acid blood as they try to figure out just what to do with the-comatose-Kane-with-a-facehugger-on-his-face.

And then, of course, the facehugger ends up letting go of Kane and shriveling up, before a fun dinner where he suddenly has convulsions and the worm/penis-like Chestburster bursts out of his chest in a gruesome fashion, and the rest of the movie ends up being a cat-and-mouse game of chasing the alien, with the crew being picked off one by one. Brett dies next for the mistake of going off alone to look for a cat, and then Dallas, trying to do the heroic thing to get into the vents, gets picked off next -- Dallas's death with the 'jumpscare' is one of the scenes that utterly underwhelmed me, by the way, although the buildup with the rest of the crew only having 'blips' to work with is pretty tense.

And then the movie takes a brief break from the Alien-hunting to have Ripley and Ash argue about objectives, especially when Ripley finds out that Ash has been receiving secret orders to bring the creature back, with the rest of the crew being expendable... leading to Ash trying to... choke Ripley to death by shoving a magazine into her mouth? For a robot that later displays superhuman feats of strength, that's kind of a bizarrely odd scene that I'll genuinely criticize. The subsequent struggle as Parker arriving, and then knocking off Ash's head and discovering that he's an android? I really do love how the cast implies that, yes, they know what androids are, that androids exist... it's the fact that Ash is one that's interesting. And Ian Holm does deliver a magnificent performance, and anyone watching Alien with the knowledge that Ash is a robot with secret orders will actually see a lot of behaviour that does help build this up without letting anything slip. Oh, and it's around this part of the movie when you realize that Ripley's the main character -- although the movie still splits up its screentime relatively equally between her, Lambert and Parker. After a quick interrogation and killing Ash, the remaining three decides to escape in a shuttle and blow Nostromo up...

And then... Ripley splits up, which honestly would set her for being killed, but all she does is chase the cat while the Alien shows up and murders Parker and Lambert. And the climax of the movie is basically Ripley against the Alien, which... which takes way too long, honestly. At this point it's just a bit repetitive as Ripley runs around in the Nostromo trying to activate, prevent and later evade the self-destruct sequence, which honestly felt a wee bit too repetitive. (The Director's Cut adds an extra, formerly-deleted scene of her having to confront the fact that the Alien seems to be trying to reproduce by turning Brett and Dallas into new eggs) And then the Nostromo explodes, and we have Ripley and Jones the cat in the shuttle, with her relaxed and the movie setting up for a calm ending... only for the Alien to reveal that it's snuck onto the ship. And it's... just chilling among the background, which I feel really tones down its scariness, and it's around this point that we actually start to see the full form of the Alien and... it's a lot less scary, although it might just be that I'm fully desensitized? I suppose. And I suppose I'm just used to the far more bestial and skeletal look of them due to other media. Ripley shoots the alien out into space, fries it with the shuttle's exhaust vents, and the movie ends with her and the cat as the only survivors.

And you know what? As a movie meant to be a stand-alone horror sci-fi story, this is pretty damn great and tense. It's no wonder that this movie ends up spawning a franchise of its own, and it's arguable, really, which direction is the right way to go, and at this point so many different portrayals of the franchise exists that it's impossible to say that we need to go back to the formula of Alien or Aliens or any of its sequel or peripheral material, especially when you take into account the current average viewer's tastes in media. And to say nothing of us fans that demand perfect continuity and explanations to mysteries (doesn't help that all but three of the new material are all prequels), and whether those mysteries should or should not ever be solved.

Overall, though, while its effects are dated and its pacing and climax might be underwhelming, it's interesting that despite a 40-year-old gap between its release and my rewatch of it last week, the movie still manages to retain an aura of tension, dread and horror. It's classic for a reason. 

Director's Cut Changes:

• I'm not going into pendantic detail on "this long scene was cut" or "this scene got an extra second or two added", just narrative elements that I noticed and felt like it improved/detracted from the movie. 
• The biggest scene, of course, is at the climax when Ripley discovers that Brett and Dallas aren't actually dead, but abducted by the Alien and are being turned into new eggs, and Ripley subsequently flamethrower-ing the half-dead crewmembers, which actually ends up tying into the whole "where's the rest of the crew?" question from Kane and Dallas earlier when they were exploring the derelict ship. It's definitely a contradictory scene for continuity purposes considering the egg-laying Alien Queen in Aliens (although, honestly, you could handwave anything about them with 'alien biology'), but it does add to the sheer wrongness and horror around the ship, and honestly breaks up the otherwise samey "Ripley runs a lot" segment of the movie.
• One of the more interesting alternate scenes added in the Director's Cut is the reaction to the crew after they returned from the derelict ship, with Lambert slapping Ripley for locking them out, and Dallas admonishing her for disobeying orders. Too add into the inter-crew conflict about what should have been done, Parker raises concerns about why they don't just freeze Kane and if he's still even alive -- which I thought adds a lot more of an organic reaction to the heated debate on whether Ripley should open the door to them. 
• Interestingly, the scene where Dallas notes that Ash was assigned to the crew of the Nostromo two days before its departure was removed, which ends up painting the whole movie as one of an unfortunate coincidence instead of being premediated -- although the orders from the Mother computer still does imply that the company wants the Alien, premediated or not. I thought this actually removes the "so what about the company?" thoroughline and makes the conflict boil down to just the crew surviving against the alien and Ash. 
• We get to glimpse the adult alien a bit earlier, when he's looking down on Brett from the chains above. Actually quite cool, and we also get to see Ripley and Parker running into the room to investigate Brett's cries and only getting splattered with blood instead.