July has rolled around once again and we all know what that means - ridiculous heatwaves that turn my cats to puddles and leave me sitting listlessly at the computer desk sweating out 10% of my body weight! And another series review marathon. this time around we're going for something a little more complicated, with not one but two series, for reasons that will soon become clear. So let's start things off at the beginning with Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi horror Alien.
In the future, the commercial starship Nostromo is heading back to Earth when the ship's computer detects a potential distress signal coming from a nearby moon and wakes the crew in order to investigate as per company policy. They land on the moon and some of the crew head out to investigate, finding a large alien ship on the planet's surface. The ship contains the mummified corpse of a large alien pilot, and a cave containing numerous "eggs". One of these eggs "hatches" while one of the crew, Kane, is nearby, and a strange creature emerges from it and, burning straight through the faceplate of his spacesuit, attaches itself to his face and knocks him out. The ship's third officer, Ripley, doesn't want to let Kane and the others back onto the ship because of quarantine procedures, but she is overruled. The strange creature's acid blood makes it impossible to remove it from Kane, but after a few hours it falls off Kane and dies, and Kane appears to have no ill effects apart from some memory loss. While the crew is eating a final meal before going back into cryosleep, however, Kane starts to choke and convulse before his chest bursts open from the inside and a new alien creature emerges. Now trapped on the ship with a clearly hostile and dangerous alien creature, the remaining crew try to capture and kill it, but others on board have other ideas...
If you didn't know the basic plot of Alien until now, hey, welcome to the 21st century. As well as being the same age as me, Alien is one of those films that can legitimately be described as genre-defining and iconic, having spawned a franchise, gained numerous imitators and even joined the very small club of horror films that have won Academy Awards (for Visual Effects). The "dinner scene" is one of the most infamous in film history overall, never mind horror film history, having been ranked the second scariest movie moment by Bravo in 2004 (Channel 4's 2003 list had it at #4). This one scene completely changed the tone and direction of the film, where before it had been more about the mystery of the alien ship - where it had come from, what had happened (although we figure that one out, unfortunately for Kane) - with absolutely no inkling of what was going to happen. There's an urban legend that the cast, aside from John Hurt who played Kane, had no idea what the actual scene was about, and so their shocked reactions are real. In reality, it was more that they didn't know just how splattery it was going to be, so while they're still shocked that they've been splattered with so much blood, they did actually have some idea of what was going to come out of Kane's chest.
Alien can be described in a lot of different ways. Obviously, there's the groundbreaking sci-fi horror reading; there's the "haunted house in space" reading; the "stalk-and-slash" reading, with the Xenomorph, as it's now become known, in the role of the slasher (and the slasher genre was still in its infancy at this point, with John Carpenter's Halloween having only been released the previous year); the "men's fear of penetration and rape" reading; and my own personal favourite, the one where Jones the ship's cat is on a mission to protect his humans from the Big Ugly Bug (it actually works if you think about it). The fact that the Xenomorph design came from HR Giger certainly helps take things in a rather Freudian, psychosexual direction - you can't look at the Xenomorph design, specifically its head, and not think, "Now there's a phallic symbol to end all phallic symbols." And that's not even going into the smaller set of jaws inside the Xenomorph's mouth that gets used to punch through people a lot. If you're paying attention, the sexual overtones can be found elsewhere in the film as well, with one character's attempt to choke another to death with a rolled-up porn magazine.
In the end though, the theme that we can't help but come back to is that of the slasher movie. Even though the Xenomorph doesn't appear until around 50 minutes into the film, once it's been born it acts very much like a Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, albeit one that's been drenched in KY Jelly. It stays in the shadows and dark corners of the Nostromo, lying in wait or stalking the various crew members as they inevitably head off on their own, despite at least trying not to. It also has a Final Girl in the form of Ripley, although the film does go to great lengths to portray its cast as gender-neutrally as possible, primarily by only referring to them all by their last names. But Ripley is clearly meant to be the Final Girl - she's the one who wants to obey the rules, putting pragmatism above emotion. The film's sole caveats to her femininity are her long hair and her protectiveness of Jones, but other than that she's as interchangeable as the male characters.
As we all know, this Alien film spawned a massive and popular franchise. Movies, books, comics, crossovers (both Batman and Superman have fought Xenomorphs, for example)... The list goes on and on. And of course, we'll be covering the big movie crossovers as we go along the timeline. But certainly, this first Alien film is a classic, not just in horror but in film in general. And unlike a good many other films, it hasn't lost any of its impact even 38 years later. Atmosphere and some truly original and disturbing art and visuals have made sure that this film will be remembered and lauded for a long time to come.
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