Alien (1979) Review: Blue-Collar Terror in Deep Space

Is Alien worth watching?

Yes. Alien is still the film every science fiction horror movie is measured against, and more than four decades on it remains patient, grimy and properly frightening. Ridley Scott treats a simple monster story with the seriousness of a thriller and the eye of a painter, and the result has barely aged. The one reservation is its pace: the first act takes its time in a way some modern viewers will find slow, though that restraint is exactly what makes the rest so tense.

What is Alien about?

The commercial spaceship Nostromo is heading back to Earth with a crew of seven when its computer picks up a signal from a distant planet and wakes them early. Company rules say they must investigate. A small team goes down to the surface and finds a derelict structure, a chamber full of strange eggs, and something that attacks one of them. What they carry back on board is the beginning of the nightmare.

Alien is directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon. It is an English-language American production that runs 117 minutes, with a cast led by Tom Skerritt as the captain, Dallas, and Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, alongside Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto.

A spaceship that feels lived in

The film’s great early insight is that its crew are workers, not heroes. They grumble about pay and bonuses, eat together at a cluttered table, and move through a ship of dripping corridors, blinking consoles and cramped service ducts. Ron Cobb’s industrial designs and the production team’s worn, heavy sets make the Nostromo feel like a place where people have been bored for months, and that ordinariness is what lets the horror in.

Scott’s camera is unhurried in the opening minutes, drifting through empty rooms before anyone wakes. It is a statement of intent. The film wants you to learn the geography of the ship, because later every corner will matter.

Giger’s creature and the power of not seeing

H.R. Giger’s designs for the creature and the alien structures are among the most influential in film history: biomechanical, sexual and deeply wrong in a way that a more conventional monster would never manage. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and its practical work still holds up because Scott so rarely shows it in full. The creature is glimpsed in pieces, in shadow, in the steam of the engine rooms, and the audience’s imagination does the rest.

Jerry Goldsmith’s score and the film’s sound design are just as careful. Long stretches play out to hums, alarms and breathing, so that silence becomes its own threat. One early sequence in particular has passed into film legend, and even viewers who know what is coming tend to find it shocking.

An ensemble that makes the fear real

Alien works as horror because the crew are believable before they are frightened. Skerritt gives Dallas a tired, practical authority, Stanton and Kotto bring a sardonic working-class grumble to the engineers, and Cartwright plays fear more rawly than most of the genre dared at the time. Ian Holm is quietly precise as the science officer Ash.

Weaver, in her first leading film role, is the discovery. Her Ripley is sharp, rule-bound and unsentimental, and she emerges from the ensemble without the film ever announcing her as its hero. The limitation, if there is one, is that the crew are sketched rather than deeply drawn; the script gives them just enough texture to care about, and not much more.

Who should watch Alien?

It is essential for fans of horror and science fiction, and for anyone who has seen the later films in the franchise but never the original. Give it a dark room and your full attention; it is a film of slow build-ups that loses a lot on a phone. Expect intense suspense, several bloody and disturbing scenes and strong language, so it is best suited to older teenagers and adults.

If it works for you, try these next:

• A Quiet Place Part II, a modern creature thriller that also turns silence and sound into weapons.
• The Empire Strikes Back, from the same era of hand-built science fiction, in a very different, adventurous key.
• The Dog Stars, for Ridley Scott returning to science fiction nearly half a century later.

The verdict

Alien is a near-perfect genre machine: a haunted-house story moved to deep space, made with the craft of a prestige drama and the nerve of a B-movie. Its deliberate opening will test a few impatient viewers, but its design, sound and performances make it as frightening and as influential as its reputation promises.

Rating: 4.5/5