Loving the Alien (A rambling appreciation of Alien)

With Prometheus coming out this week, it seems now would be a good time to review where the germs of the film started, in what is definitely not a shameless attempt at ratcheting up my blog's traffic several notches. I know there are countless other reviewers out there who broke out their copies in time for a retrospective, but this doesn't apply to me. I'm not a horror film fan - I'm ridiculously easy to startle, and just a casual glance of the horror shelves at HMV reveals countless direct-to-video schlock where gore is spilt and beautiful women are disfigured.

So when I sat down to watch Alien on Blu-Ray (£6 for a new copy, no less), this really was virgin territory for me. Considering that sci-fi and horror media don't usually occupy large spaces of pop culture, the impact this film has had is impressive - it made names of Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver and arguably H.R. Giger. It birthed a truly iconic movie monster, one that would still captivate and horrify even to this day. It is the Little Film That Could - what started as a humble B-movie became one of the most influential films of all time.

Let's see if it holds up after the jump. (Warning - one of the images here may be NSFW. You'll know it when you see it.)

Normally there'd be an alternative poster, but why bother when the official poster is this damn good?

The USCSS Nostromo, a commercial towing starship, is making its way back to Earth, much to the delight of its crew. Travelling for several months, if not years, from one planet to another for a mining operation, is exhausting, especially when you're stuck in one environment for most of the trip. However, a transmission from a nearby planetoid forces them to head there under corporate directive. The search party find a gigantic desolate spacecraft on the surface, and upon investigation, find the hollowed-out corpse of its pilot and a mysterious room full of leathery eggs - one of which "hatches" an alien that attacks one of the crew. When the Nostromo leaves, they quickly discover that something else has hitched a ride.

And it's inside one of them.

To the surprise of no-one, Alien does indeed hold up. More than that, it's timeless, no small feat for a film that was made on a budget and which cut corners everywhere to keep costs down. All of this works - Alien is as tight as a drum in a corset. Like its title character, its "perfect organism", everything present is there because it has a reason to be. Nothing is wasted. Considering this was only Scott's second film, the amount of professionalism present is astounding.

I feel the need here to properly define the difference between "plot" and "story", because it's easy to get the two mixed up, with examples:

• Plot: the sequence of events in a narrative, e.g. the plot of Apocalypse Now is of Captain Willard sailing up the Nung River to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz.
• Story: what the narrative is about - the story of Apocalypse Now is of the horror of war, and how in order to survive, one must subvert their humanity and their sanity.

Everyone's on the same page? Good. The plot of Alien is pretty spartan - it's basically And Then There Were None in space, with a group of people trapped in an environment and gradually getting picked off by an unknown horror one by one. Writer Dan O'Bannon gives this idea a fresh coat of paint by making the setting a spaceship drifting alone through the cosmos - more than just a shift in location, it's an airtight location that the protagonists literally cannot escape, unless they want their lungs to be turned into little deflated fleshy balloons.

Wake up your sleepy head...put on some clothes, shake up your bed...

The titular extraterrestrial doesn't even appear for a good hour, with time spent giving the characters some dimension, fleshing them out just enough so they seem like actual human beings. Particularly in modern horror films, writers don't bother to give you any reason to care about their characters, so when they do get torn to ribbons by Baddie du Jour, the audience is either indifferent or, worse, cheering their deaths on. Alien does what it can - Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is laidback and courageous, but also foolhardy and acts on instinct. Parker and Brett (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton respectively) have an easy friendship, bonding over a lack of pay, something most people can identify with. They eat together, they laugh together, they complain about the terrible food together - you get a real sense of camaraderie from the Nostromo crew, so it hurts to see them picked off in rapid succession. The famous Chestburster sequence occurs at a rather jovial breakfast, and it's the last happy moment the crew have together - it's sad to see it  cut short, particularly to the poor bastard who gets to experience childbirth.

So that's the plot, but what of the story? The title doesn't just refer to the antagonist - O'Bannon and co-creator Ronald Shusett settled on the title because it's both a noun and an adjective. The Nostromo crew aren't just under threat from an alien, but from the alien, the unknown, the Other. The non-human. The first warning signs of this come from the downed spacecraft and its colossal pilot, known only as the Space Jockey. The ship is very different to the Nostromo, looking more like a demonic horseshoe, and its inhabitant is many sizes greater than Dallas, Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) and Kane (John Hurt), as you can see in the image below. Already, we get hints that humanity is tiny, literally and figuratively, compared to what's out there.

But they still like having phallic objects in their transport.

Then there's obviously the xenomorph, the Alien of the title. Probably the chief reason why Alien has withstood the test of the time is the look of it. French art magician Moebius designed the spacesuits and provided other concept art, coming - like O'Bannon - off the back of Alejandro Jodorowsky's failed adaptation of Dune (which truly needs to be read to be believed), but it was his fellow Dune and Métal Hurlant alumnus H.R. Giger that nailed the look - a terrifying fusion of the organic with the mechanical. This is how Alien planned on shocking its audience - sexually, in ways that would make Freud raise several eyebrows.

You ever get the feeling Giger and his father didn't get along?

The Facehugger is hermaphroditic - it resembles a vagina, but forces a probosis down the victim's throat pumping oxygen to keep it alive, possessing male and female characteristics. The Chestburster can best be described as an erection with teeth, and emerges from Kane in a manner very similar to childbirth. The fully-grown Xenomorph, based in part on Giger's Necronom IV, has that now iconic phallic head, a phallic-looking appendage in its mouth that extends with enough force to puncture bone, and also a rather feminine build - you can't quite tell what gender it is, making it even more unknowable. The most primal human characteristics - in this case, sex and genitalia - are perverted into something horrific, and that's what make it so disturbing. There are human elements, and it seems to have human vices given how the attacks resemble sexual violence - it's the worst of our base desires made manifest. It is, as Giger put it, "the embodiment of the fear of rape".

That's xenomorphs for ya, right? Use your body...

...and leave you with the baby.

Finally, we have the Nostromo's science officer Ash (Ian Holm), and to an extent the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. The revelation that Ash is an android is like the revelation of what Rosebud was in Citizen Kane - it used to be guarded as a spoiler, but now it's just seeped into the pop cultural ether. Watch the film a second time, and you'll notice something slightly odd about Ash - for example, when the crew sit down for dinner and breakfast, he's not seen eating. When he lets Kane back onto the Nostromo after being facehugged, in breach of quarantine, it's ostensibly out of compassion; but why would the science officer, who has to play by the book more than anyone, disregard protocol? When examining the Facehugger, he stammers and uses unusually casual language, referring to it as a "tough son of a bitch"; up until then, and even past then, his choice of words has always been neutral and colourless.

If the xenomorph is an unknown entity with some identifiable human elements, then Ash is the inverse - he looks and acts human, but is just another subversion, as can be seen by the fact he bleeds what looks like milk. What looks like an act of sympathy is revealed to just be him keeping "Kane's son" safe for the company like the midwife from Hell. Weyland-Yutani themselves are another threat to the crew's humanity - Priority One, the overriding directive that Ash has to carry out, declares the crew's lives to be expendable. They're not human, just toys to sate the passenger.

...Oh come on, it's a head and it's covered in white gunk. Write your own damn jokes.

Now a brief bit about Ripley - God, it feels weird discussing an Alien movie and not mentioning Ripley. Just as much as the xenomorph, Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley is the series' flagship character, and Weaver has reprised her role in every proper Alien film released, discounting Prometheus which is loosely connected to the series. (Any of you about to mention the Alien vs. Predator films, you are wrong and should be punched.) More of a promoted secondary character than an actual protagonist, Ripley has the most extensive arc, probably by virtue of being the only survivor. She starts out as a cold, by-the-book officer, an attitude that would have prevented all this madness if Dallas had listened to her and kept Kane in quarantine. As more and more of the crew fall, she becomes more pro-active and making suggestions, adapting to the situation; first proposing they capture it, then "blow it the fuck out into space". When the ship's computer lets her down, she flies off the handle; given the amount of crap she's had to deal with, it's a very human reaction. It's her decision to go and rescue Jones, the ship's cat, that inadvertently leads to her survival, and the final shot is of her curled up in a stasis pod with her feline companion. Once the stoic lieutenant, now the compassionate champion - it's by embracing her humanity that she emerges victorious.

If this seems more like a rambling about all these interesting things I've noted in Alien, it's because that this film, more than thirty years on from its release, is still very much worth talking about, and has more complexity and thought than most modern cinema - at least Hollywood cinema, I can't speak for international fare. Speaking as someone who has limited experience with horror aside from seeing The Woman in Black on stage and having to sleep with the light on, Alien is terrifying on a physical level - the dank corridors of the Nostromo and the mystery surrounding the creature builds up to unbearable heights, especially when it could be in the frame hiding in plain sight. But then, any good horror film could, and indeed should, do that; Alien remains so disturbing, and so brilliant, because it lets the audience sit down with their own inner demons, their fears and neuroses.

After all, there's not much else more terrifying than the darkness found in the human mind.

Starships, are meant to f...No, no. I couldn't live with myself if I finished that.