Alien (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1h 50, 1979)

 
The cinemas are closed. The reviews continue. With the world grinding to a standstill, and the cinemas closed, I carry on, and take this brief pause in the box office to fill in the gaps.

Alien is a film about fear. At its centre lies one of cinema's greatest monsters, the HR Giger-created titular creature, a nightmarish mix of alpha predator, uber-phallic sexual threat, and lingering "Other"ed terror, who, from its iconic entrance via John Hurt's stomach, to its final jettisoning into the blackness of space, leaves an indelible impact on the viewer, as it has done for forty years, whilst introducing one of action cinema's great heroines, in the form of Sigourney Weaver's equally iconic Ellen Ripley. But Alien's fear is more than just a simplistic reductive set of scares lined up, as the reductive jumpscare era of cinema have reduced horror to, more than simply the "Jaws in Space" pitch that got the film greenlit in the first place. Four decades on, Alien has lost none of its power, and remains as gripping and frightening as it always has been.

 Alien's mastery is in its simplicity. This, after all, a film with a small cast-the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, a bickering set of space truckers, from Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) to engineers Parker and Brett (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton) are not only a surprisingly representative group, from the audience surrogate, in the form of the terrified Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), who goes through much of the film clearly horrified and traumatised by the events unfolding around her, to Ian Holm's Ash, whose analytical wish to know more about the creature that the group encounter belies a darker motive, but a believable one.

Parker and Brett, stuck in the bowels of the ship for much of the opening act of the film are looked down on by the rest of the crew, paid less, and their pay dispute, taken up with both Dallas and Ripley, takes up a number of pre-alien scenes, whilst the film takes it time to flesh out each of the rest of the crew, from the hinted relationship between Lambert and Dallas, to the divide between the newly added Ash and the rest of the crew. Not only does this help us to empathise with the crew, from the hierarchy aboard ship to the things that drive them, including the curiosity that eventually gets the better of Kane, and leads to the ship's calamity.

With the Nostromo essentially crash-landing, so three of the crew set out to the source of the signal, and stumble across an eerie spaceship; and here, the film's secret weapon comes into view, in the form of HR Giger's design work. Without Giger's work-an ironic side-effect of the collapse of the aborted fourteen hour adaption of Dune, worked on both Giger and Alien screenwriter, Dan Bannon, Alien would be simply another science fiction film, much like Bannon's previous work, Dark Star. With Giger's disturbing, otherworldly and potent designs, a mixture of the organic and the mechanical, of the lethal and the erotic, the film becomes iconic, from his set design in the crashed ship, dominated by the unearthly figure of the "Space Jockey", a monolithic corpse that gives us the first hint of the terrifying cargo the ship hides, even before the creature itself makes an appearance.

What it does perfectly, as the now-iconic trailer for the original film did, is give us a sense of unease, of growing dread, as the film cuts back and forth between the trio and the Nostromo, as Ripley slowly begins to decode the message, not as a distress call, but a warning, as Kane delves deeper into the ship, until he comes face-to-face with a hidden chamber of eggs, and the facehugger that leaps onto his face, in a genuinely jolting scene. The facehugger is practically a set of allegories on its own, from a metaphor for rape-this, after all, is a creature that forces itself upon and impregnates its host-to a veritable Pandora's Box that, once opened, causes chaos and strife aboard the Nostromo. What it is, without a doubt, is a perfect piece of character design, a grasping and disturbing creature that only compounds the strength of the film's special effects.

With the injured Kane, Dallas and Lambert back aboard, despite Ripley's attempts to keep the quarantine, so the film begins to ramp up its tension once more, with the comatose Kane seemingly entrapped within the creature's grasp, with attempts to release him only revealing the creature has highly acidic blood that eats through the ship's hull. However, with the creature suddenly turning up dead, in the film's sole true jumpscare as its corpse drops from the ceiling and with Kane shortly after reappearing, seemingly unharmed, so the crew decide to return to hypersleep and continue to earth after one last meal. And it is here the film's masterstroke, arguably its single greatest scene, plays out, not only from Hurt's performance as he begins to thrash and scream, but from the pure, and entirely genuine terror, with the reveal of the chest-burster entirely hidden from the actors until it explodes out of Hurt's chest. Four decades on, it has lost none of its power, as it skitters out of sight off camera, to wreak havoc.

More than this, it is a perfect encapsulation of how the film shoots its horror scenes; the meal is shot largely in passive mid shots, characters out of focus as others are focused upon, cutting back and forth, the conversation jokey as it has been for good stretches of the film, of people simply going about their job, wanting to get home. And then Hurt pauses. Something is clearly wrong, and the film holds a frame over Hurt's back, with the majority of shots from now on either on the collapsed Kane, or the chaos exploding around him, as he thrashes uncontrollably. And then, with a shriek, the titular alien finally emerges-the chest bursting scene itself is a deliberately chaotic moment, a crack, a splatter of blood, of spectacularly verité reactions. And finally we see it, a horrifying mass of teeth and fleshy matter, as it rises from the death-spasming Kane-the camera holds on it, as it twists to turn to look at the remaining crew of the Nostromo. Another closeup, and it crashes across the table, and we are left, as the Nostromo's crew is, shocked and disturbed.

The alien, in its fleeting appearances-the creature is on screen for a stunningly short 4 minutes out of the film's two hour runtime, and much like the equally shy shark of Jaws, a brutally effective exercise in cinematic economy-is a perfect design, a genuinely horrifying looking beast that skulks from the shadows, only coming fully into view, without flickering light, shadow, or close cutting to hide its true appearance in the last ten minute, as Ripley attempts to escape the doomed Nostromo. When it finally looms into view behind the hapless Dallas, in search of ship's cat, Jonesy, it is a beast of nightmare, a half-seen thing that we don't get a good look at, movement in the darkness, a triggering of our primal fears about the unknown and the darkness. The Nostromo itself only adds to this, a maze of tunnels and flickering lights, not to mention the grungy futurism of the ship, and its screens, with many scenes only lit by computer light often reflected upon character's faces

The actor inside, towering Bolaji Badejo, is undeniably the unsung (and uncredited) hero of the film, giving the creature a balletic, poised movement.  But if the creature in general is nightmarish, in close-up, it is the stuff of legend-we rarely see the creature in the open, and often in close-ups on its maw, where the most obviously phallic and psychosexual elements of the creature come to the fore, at once masculine and emasculating. Even more so, the film does an impressive amount without the creature on screen, most notably the nail-biting (and oft-homage) scene in which the Alien stalks Dallas through the air vents the crew believe it to be hiding in, as the crew helplessly watch on as it approaches him on the scanner, before appearing, for barely a few frames, in the darkness behind him, and the film masterfully cutting away to the reactions of the crew.

But if the film would not be the same without the titular creature, it would not be the same without Weaver's performance as Ripley. Throughout the film, she transforms slowly from the stickler for rules, the one that tries to stop the infected Kane coming abroad, vainly, the warrant officer who keeps the rebellious crew in check, to the sole survivor of the Nostromo, as her crewmates are brutally whittled down, and she finally defeats the creature in a harrowing, claustrophobic encounter. There is, as with the alien itself, an efficiency to Ripley as a character, not only as audience surrogate, the single survivor simply because she is lucky, or determined enough to win through, despite her panic and close calls with the creature, but because she does so as a survivor.

 It's easy to equate the alien with the serial killers of slasher films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, and certainly what it shares in common is that emphasis on violence with a sexual tone, where male villains kill female victims and either ends the film triumphant or is finally bested by one of his would be victims. Where Alien starkly differs is that this uber sexualised violence is meted out upon men and women alike, a shock, clearly, for its majority male audience at the turn of the 1980s, though it remains shocking even now, and indeed Ripley's survival runs against the typical for genre cinema at this point, and whilst the larger-scale 1986 sequel, Aliens sees the culmination of the transformation from terrified victim to no-nonsense action hero, the film closes with Ripley simply surviving, bruised and horrified by her encounter, but alive.

Though the xenomorph may have been diluted by its overuse by Scott, whilst Ripley's returns in recent outings feel more like that of a hired hand in a once great group, permanently on tour, one only needs to go back to the film that made Scott, Weaver and the Alien, to recapture what made all of them stars. But moreover, Alien is still frightening, still plays on the primal fears of humanity, still feels fresh, from taut suspense to horrifying violence, with two towering performances cementing both the alien and Weaver as mainstays of the genre. Four decades and five movies of variable quality on, Alien has lost none of its power; a terrifying goliath that still looms over science-fiction and horror cinema,

 Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)