Alien (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article discusses the film Alien; for the video-games of the same name see Alien (video game) and Alien (Atari 2600).

Alien
Directed by	Ridley Scott
Produced by	Gordon Carroll David Giler Walter Hill
Written by	Story: Dan O'Bannon Ronald Shusett Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon David Giler (uncredited) Walter Hill (uncredited)
Starring	Sigourney Weaver Tom Skerritt Veronica Cartwright Harry Dean Stanton John Hurt Sir Ian Holm Yaphet Kotto
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	May 25, 1979 October 29, 2003 (director's cut)
Running time	theatrical: 117 min. director's cut: 116 min.
Language	English
Budget	$11,000,000
Followed by	Aliens
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Ridley Scott directed the 1979 science fiction / horror film Alien from an original story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The film's title refers to the main antagonist, a highly aggressive extraterrestrial which threatens the crew of the spaceship Nostromo after hatching from the body of one of the humans. Of the seven main crew members, the film stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas and Ian Holm as Ash.

Alien became both a critical and box-office success, spawning a successful Hollywood franchise of literature, video games, merchandise, and three official sequels. Along with launching the career of actress Sigourney Weaver, the film proved pioneering as the first action film to feature a strong female heroine. While the alien itself (referred to in spin-offs as a xenomorph) proved a popular aspect of the film, the story of Ellen Ripley provided the connecting thread of the series. Some observers believe that the film helped to popularize the body-horror subgenre. The film produced three sequels: Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), and Alien: Resurrection (1997), and the crossover Alien vs. Predator (2004). Publicity for the film used a tagline which became famous: "In space no one can hear you scream."

In 2002 the United States National Film Registry deemed the film "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and inducted it into its collection.

[edit] Synopsis

Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven and a computer the crew calls "Mother", which monitors the ship's operations. At the start of the film Mother receives an unidentified signal from a nearby planet and wakes the crew to investigate.

The Space Jockey from The Derelict

The Nostromo lands on the planet and Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin. After entering the ship, Kane descends into a cave beneath the "Space Jockey" pilot's fossilized remains, discovering thousands of leathery eggs. One of the eggs opens, the lifeform inside leaps out and attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo, where Ash studies the creature.

Kane examining an egg

Dallas and Ash attempt to remove it from Kane's face, but when they try to cut it off its acid blood burns a hole through several decks. Eventually, the life-form detaches from Kane's face and apparently dies. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal Kane begins to choke and convulse. An alien creature bursts through his chest, and scurries away before the stunned crew can react.

The crew split up into two groups in order to capture the creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle-prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew's cat, Jones. Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again, Parker sends Brett to catch it. During his search, Brett encounters the alien, now full-grown, and it hauls him into an air-duct.

The crew realizes the alien has used the airshafts to move around. Dallas enters the network of airshafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock to blow it into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien's signal moving toward Dallas. Attempting to escape, Dallas runs right into the creature. Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that the "Company" had known that the signal functioned as a warning, yet wanted one of the alien lifeforms brought back — even at the expense of the crew. Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Special Order, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can finish the job. Parker dislodges Ash's head with a fire-extinguisher, revealing Ash as an android. The three remaining crew members decide to destroy the Nostromo and escape in the shuttle.

While Ripley preps the shuttle for take-off, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle's life-support system. Ripley hears the screams of her colleagues echoing from the bowels of the ship and she runs off to investigate. She arrives too late, discovering that the alien has killed Parker and Lambert. Ripley activates the ship's self-destruct and races to the shuttle. She takes off and the Nostromo self-destructs. As she prepares for hypersleep, Ripley discovers the alien has boarded the shuttle with her. She succeeds in blasting the alien outside the ship with a grappling gun and blowing it into space using the ship's engines. The film ends as Ripley enters hypersleep.

[edit] Early versions

According to the book "The Book of Alien" (Titan Books © 1979), a very early draft of the script envisaged the eggs housed in a completely separate architectural structure, shaped in the form of a massive pyramid. The British illustrator and science-fiction artist Chris Foss drew these illustrations of the discarded sequence.

Dan O'Bannon (who had collaborated with John Carpenter on the cult sci-fi film Dark Star) wrote the original screenplay as a script titled Star Beast, a revision of some earlier ideas of O'Bannon's (one of which dated from some years before) about gremlins getting loose aboard a World War II bomber and wreaking havoc with the crew (the B-17 segment of the movie Heavy Metal used a significantly altered version of this original story).

O'Bannon's original script bears many resemblances to the film as actually produced, yet with significant differences. The spaceship — designed with a low-budget production in mind — originated as a small craft called the Snark. In the original script, the ship has an all-male crew, including the Ripley character (though the script's "Cast of Characters" section explicitly states that "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women"). Actor Tom Skerritt originally won the role of Ripley, but in the course of developing the script, character re-casting made Ripley a woman, reportedly at the insistence of producer Alan Ladd, Jr.. This decision proved crucial to the film's success.

After responding to the intercepted alien message, the crew discover the derelict alien craft and its dead pilot. Ominously the pilot in its death throes had scratched a triangle on its control console. The crew members go outside and see the remains of an ancient pyramid. They lower Kane into the structure, where he finds a chamber with a breathable atmosphere. An altar-like structure houses the alien embryo-eggs, and a hieroglyph depicts the alien's lifecycle. This concept survived for a long time, and preliminary H.R. Giger pyramid drawings intended for Alien exist, but eventually the producers went with the idea of combining the wrecked derelict ship with the egg-chamber (also designed by Giger), although the ideas of the pyramid, the altar and the hieroglyphs re-surfaced in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator. The subplot of Ash as an android and the betrayal of the crew came in later in the script-development process. The production dropped a scene in which Ripley and Dallas have sex — in order to secure a lower censorship-rating.

Substantial excerpts of O'Bannon's original script appeared as bonus materials on the 1992 laserdisc boxed set of Alien (though the 1999 Alien Legacy DVD box omitted these). The complete O'Bannon script appears in the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set as a bonus feature.

Some early concept art came from Chris Foss and from Jean Giraud, better known as the comic-book artist Mœbius. Mœbius's designs for the Nostromo spacesuits made it into the final film.

[edit] Sources

Many reviewers have noted that the basic plot of Alien — the pitting of a small group of humans against a relentless alien creature in a remote location — derives from earlier sci-fi movies such as the 1958 movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space directed by Edward L. Cahn, Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965). ^{[1] [2] [3]} Other non-science-fiction stories such as Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None have been referenced as likely inspirations. ^[4]

[edit] Production

[edit] Script

O'Bannon wrote the original treatment in 1976 while staying with Ronald Shusett after the collapse of a projected film version of Dune, on which he had worked and which Alejandro Jodorowsky would have directed. Artist Ron Cobb, who had worked with O'Bannon on Dark Star and Star Wars, produced a series of conceptual designs that defined the gritty realism of the film. O'Bannon and Shusett sold the script to the Brandywine company of David Giler, Gordon Carroll, and Walter Hill who had a production-deal with Twentieth Century Fox with Hill attached to direct.

Hill and Giler re-wrote the script, discarding superfluous elements, making it more action-oriented, adding the character of Ash, and rewriting much of the dialogue — giving the characters more distinct personalities. These changes caused tensions between O'Bannon and the other production members that lasted through the making of the film. O'Bannon invited other artists who had worked on the Dune project to work on the film, including Foss, Mœbius, and Giger. At this stage, a hiatus occurred in the production, as the studio expressed alarm at the prospect of committing to a new science-fiction film when it feared the as-yet-unreleased Star Wars would flop.

When Star Wars became a box-office hit, Fox gave the film the go-ahead with an $8 million budget — much higher than the writers had originally hoped. During the production hiatus, Ridley Scott replaced and revised many of the design-elements before principal photography started at Shepperton Studios in England. Giger, brought in from Zürich, set up at the studios along with Ron Cobb as a type of artist-in-residence. (Giger kept a diary through the production which became the basis for his book Giger's Alien). ^[5]

[edit] The Alien

Original illustration of Swiss painter and sculptor H. R. Giger’s design of the alien creature's adult form

Swiss painter and sculptor H. R. Giger designed the alien creature's adult form and the alien architecture. The designs feature the creative use of bones in the architecture (the set-constructors used real bones in making the interior of the alien ship). Giger received an Academy Award for his work on the original film.

The adult alien appears predominantly black in color, similar in cast to heavily tarnished silver. In keeping with Giger's blending of biological and mechanical life-forms, some shots reveal a metallic patina. It has an elongated shiny head with no eyes. (Some production stills reveal a human skull used in the sculpture beneath its translucent anterior shell). Below, the gruesome jaw holds the razor-sharp metal teeth. The mouth houses a tongue-like body-part with a second mouth on the end. On the alien's back stand four curved black pipes (Giger designed these for the purpose of breaking-up the back), each as long as a short sword. Apart from this, the alien has basically an anthropomorphic form, with two legs and two arms, its hands each armed with six long, black, razor-sharp claws. The "blood" of the creature, a powerful acid, also serves as a natural defense-mechanism.

Apart from the appearance of the alien (called a "Xenomorph" in the sequels), other characteristics resembled the alien Ixtl entity in A. E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle — so much so as to prompt a lawsuit. Van Vogt sued 20th Century Fox for plagiarism. The parties settled the suit out of court.

[edit] Set-design and construction

Michael Seymour worked as the film's production-designer. John Mollo supervised the costumes (including the distinctive spacesuits) and Carlo Rambaldi produced the crucial mechanical effects for the title alien's head. The team of Brian Johnson and Nick Allder — who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999 — headed up special effects. Scott turned to a computer-animation pioneer Bernard Lodge from his old college — the Royal College of Art in London — to produce the film's influential green-line computer displays. The thin layer of mist that "notified the eggs" came from smoke and a pulsating laser, which the film-crew borrowed from the band The Who.

According to the behind-the-scenes documentary The Beast Within: The Making of 'Alien', the film-crew built the spaceship set in one piece. To move around the set, actors had to navigate through the hallways of the ship. Toward the end of the shoot, many members of the cast and crew recalled walking inside the set alone as a very unnerving experience. Some maintain that such emotions come across on the screen.

According to the DVD behind-the-scenes commentary, the film-crew kept details of the scene where the Chestburster emerges secret from all actors except John Hurt (Kane). The rest of the crew entered the scene with Kane already on the table and all cameras set. Veronica Cartwright later recalled feeling suspicious at finding all the movie-equipment covered with protective sheets. None of the other actors knew what they would witness, and as a result produced genuine reactions of shock, horror, and disgust.

Some shots outside the Nostromo on the planet use children in spacesuits (specifically Ridley Scott's and the cameraman's children) as stand-ins in order to make the seem larger. Ridley Scott says in the director's commentary on the DVD, "This shot here, actually is three children made in miniature spacesuits ... who were my two sons and the cameraman's son.... I had small costumes made for them so the landing legs looked bigger...." ^[6]

Other filming has re-used the set: the BBC One series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy re-used some of the Nostromo hallways, as well as other parts of the set. When the BBC sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf moved production to Shepperton Studios it used some surviving Nostromo hallway sets from Alien in Series 5, most notably in the episode "DNA" (as revealed on the DVD commentary).

[edit] Music

Jerry Goldsmith composed the original score for the film. Despite the film's futuristic setting, the composer's score reflects the film's underlying horror-film genre with its use of oscillating string textures and bizarre sounds. Goldsmith composed a main theme in the romantic style that barely appears in the finished film.

Director Ridley Scott and editor Terry Rawlings became quite attached to several of the cues they used for the temporary track while cutting the movie. As a result they moved around much of Goldsmith's score and had many sequences rescored. (Interviews on the "Quadrilogy" DVD release of this film document the viewpoints of Goldsmith, Rawlings and Scott in regard to this situation and why it occurred.) Two cues from Goldsmith's earlier score for Freud appear in the film, and a section of Howard Hanson's second symphony, "The Romantic" replaced the end credits. As a result, Goldsmith's original soundtrack LP represented more the original score he wrote than what ended up appearing in the film.

The initial DVD release (the 20th Anniversary edition) of Alien included an isolated score track that synched the original music up to where it would have appeared in the film, as well as an additional track with the re-scored tracks (the production audio plays when the music does not appear). The soundtrack CD has gone out of print, however. In the final DVD release, most of the scenes showing the Nostromo exterior, and all of the sequences from Howard Hanson's 2nd Symphony ("Romantic"), some of which went along with them, have disappeared, for reasons unknown.

[edit] Cast

• Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley. Ripley serves as an officer on board the Nostromo. She has a strong distrust of her fellow crewmate Ash after he disobeys her order not to let the infected Kane back on the ship. Eventually, she becomes the only survivor of the crew's encounter with the alien.

• Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas. Dallas, the laid-back captain of the Nostromo, has sole access to "Mother", the ship's on-board computer.

• John Hurt as Executive Officer Kane. Kane operates as the second-in-command aboard the Nostromo. During his investigation of the derelict space ship, an unknown life-form attaches itself to his face and (unknown to him and to the crew) impregnates him with an alien creature. The creature unexpectedly bursts through his chest and kills him during the crew's dinner. (Jon Finch, was originally cast for the role of Kane, had to drop out of the film after falling ill during the first day of shooting.)

• Veronica Cartwright as Navigator Lambert. Lambert, the only other female on the ship save for Ripley, pilots the Nostromo.

• Harry Dean Stanton as Engineering Technician Brett. Brett, a lazy engineer on the Nostromo (along with his friend Parker) becomes the first member of the crew to encounter the creature in its fully mature form.

• Ian Holm as Science Officer Ash. Ash serves as the on-board science-officer and technician. Unknown to the crew, "The Company" placed him on the Nostromo in order to ensure the delivery of the alien specimen discovered on the derelict ship. After he attacks Ripley his crewmates unmask him as an android.

• Yaphet Kotto as Chief Engineer Parker. Parker works as an engineer on board the ship, along with his friend Brett.

• Bolaji Badejo as The Alien.

[edit] Influence

[edit] In film

Roger Ebert called Alien (and John Carpenter's Halloween) "the most influential of modern action pictures". He went on to say that many of "the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking", including the re-make of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. ^[3] As Andrew O'Hehir puts it, "almost every horror film since "Alien" has ripped it off in some way, but most of the imitations have focused on details." ^[7]

Commentators point to Alien, along with The Brood, as launching the body-horror sub-genre of horror film. Also, the film's cramped, claustrophobic sets have become the de facto norm for horror movies set in space.^{[citation needed]} The film's representation of the ship's crew has also had a huge influence. For the first time, a blockbuster science-fiction film depicted space-travelers as blue-collar company-employees rather than as highly-empowered agents of a quasi-military structure (such as in Star Trek). (A hint of this also appears in the earlier Silent Running.) The film Outland borrows much of this premise (as well as a good deal of aesthetics), and across the genre the aesthetic of Alien for future technology became the norm in the following decade. ^[8]

[edit] Gender politics

Many analysts have examined the film's gender politics, and some have linked it to wider cultural idioms such as the experience of abjection as presented by French poststructuralist Julia Kristeva.

[edit] Merchandising

Polish film poster

Alien became the first R-rated film to have a merchandising line aimed at children. The children's products released included various toys and models based on the creature and on its egg, jigsaw puzzles, a board game, a Viewmaster-style movie reel, and even a storybook, all of which rate as collectible today. Most notably, Kenner Products released an 18-inch Alien figure, impressively made (for its time) with articulated parts including a retractable jaw and a glow-in-the-dark cranium. However, the toy did not sell well, probably because its target demographic failed to recognize it and parents deemed the toy too frightening for children. ^[9]

Toy-lines for R-rated films would not become common until the 1990s. Some claim that the more ready accessibility to younger viewers of certain films (such as the Alien sequels) has caused this phenomenon, but others believe that a toy-market has developed that has adults as the target buyers (as has likely occurred with the popular McFarlane toys). At the time, Kenner's decision to do a toy-line based on Alien came while the movie remained in production. Due to their success with the other 20th Century Fox film, Star Wars, Kenner Products admittedly acted on the assumption that Fox would produce another space-adventure movie: their research failed to ascertain that the horror-oriented Alien would target adults.

[edit] Popular culture

For a list of references to Alien in popular culture, see List of cultural references to Alien.

[edit] Special Edition

October 29, 2003 saw the re-release of Alien in cinemas as a Ridley Scott Director's Cut. It restored many — but not all — of the deleted scenes that had already appeared as bonus materials on previous VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases of the film, and made some deletions to the original. However, unlike the Star Wars "Special Editions", it did not digitally enhance the film's original special-effects footage (though the original negative did undergo some digital cleanup and restoration). The new release did however add some minor effects to the film: a shot of the sunrise on the planetoid; and lights on the helmets of Dallas, Lambert and Kane move under a natural arc on the left side of the screen. Also, when Nostromo aligns itself with the planetoid, a field of stars appears in the background.

Ridley Scott commented that he did not really think that Alien required this tweaking, and drew attention to the use of the term "Director's Cut" for marketing reasons only (and inconsistently as well). In the Alien Quadrilogy materials, he goes out of his way to state his preference for the original: "rest easy, the original 1979 theatrical version isn't going anywhere". He recut the film himself, but only after viewing the studio's attempt to do so; he characterized the studio's version as "too long" and felt that it ruined the film's pacing.

The Alien Quadrilogy boxed set released on December 2, 2003 includes both the Special Edition and the original theatrical version. Due to the scenes cut from the original release to accommodate the new footage in the "Director's Cut", the "Director's Cut" actually runs a full minute shorter in time than the original theatrical release.

[edit] Spin-offs

Spin-offs include comics, novels, and computer games. The Aliens have also appeared in numerous crossovers featuring Predators, Superman, Batman, WildC.A.T.s, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and many others.

Note also the novelization by Alan Dean Foster.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Alien (film)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Alien at the Internet Movie Database
• Alien at Filmsite.org
• Executive producer Ron Shusett on making Alien - video interviews and transcript
• Alien Review at b-movies.gr (Greek)