Alien (1979) Review

Alien (1979) Review

You might be thinking, didn’t I already review Alien last summer, before the release of Alien: Covenant? Technically I did it as part of my Favourite Films Series, in which I focus on my own personal history with a movie and discuss it in an analytical, in-depth way. There’s a chance that, if you’re reading this, you never read what I wrote then, so I’ll do my best to 1) not repeat myself, and 2) review it in a more conventional manner. 

Alien is debated as being either primarily a sci-fi movie or a horror movie. Either works. To me, it’s both. It’s sort of like a “haunted house in space”, but I have trouble with that oversimplification. A haunted house is designed to scare someone, and Alien is certainly designed to do that, but the movie accomplishes so much more, and a haunted house is nothing but surface level scares. Pull back the curtain, and there’s nothing else to it. Pull back the curtain on Alien, and you find a far-reaching mythos. Director Ridley Scott was heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Star Wars. It’s a used-looking future, with tech that looks like it was reverse-engineered from stuff in the late 70’s (done on purpose), and the effects were more than up-to-par for the time. 

The story is well streamlined. A distress signal is picked up, and the crew of the Nostromo (which is basically just a tug boat in space) is tasked with checking it out, even though they aren’t really equipped to handle this kind of work, but a large bonus is enough to convince them. How fitting: the whole reason the events in the movie take place and everyone becomes doomed is because of money. What they find is a hostile alien species with more than a few tricks up its sleeve, and soon they’re fighting for their lives. 

To look at Alien in the context of the franchise it so successfully launched, it’s extremely unique. When the movie kicks off, everyone sort of has equal footing. It’s not as if you sit back and go “that guy’s gonna die first, she’s gonna die next, etc.” No character falls into an easy archetype. They are all unique. In a standard monster movie, characters usually are there for cannon fodder, with the exception of maybe one or two who you know will live to the end. Alien isn’t a standard monster movie. In fact, it isn’t really a monster movie at all for nearly half of its runtime. There isn’t a monster to speak of that’s terrorizing the crew until we’ve spent a good amount of time with them and seen them go through a few different trials and tribulations. That’s what makes the later events in the movie so effectively terrifying. 

Another aspect of Alien that makes it so scary is not really seeing or knowing what’s going on. There isn’t some scientist character present to explain “well actually the creature starts out in this form then progresses to this form and has this ability and this weakness...” that would have ruined all the mystery and suspense. Instead, we see a group of characters who are established as a worker class go down to a planet to explore an extraterrestrial craft that they know nothing about, with evidence that something bad happened aboard long ago, but we never find out what happened, exactly, and there are all these eggs, laid by something, and one of the eggs hatches and attacks a crew member, but they don’t know what the creature is doing, or what it is, or what it’s capable of, and the more bits of information they learn (it has acid for blood, it has a complex and horrific life cycle) the scarier it gets. 

If I haven’t convinced you that Alien is one of the greatest sci-fi-horror films ever made by now, I don’t think I can. For a movie with such a simple story, it’s incredibly complex and imaginative once you delve into it, so it’s no wonder it spawned so many more movies. 

If you want to read more of my thoughts on the original Alien, here’s a link, and for more reviews, stayed tuned, because I’m just getting started!

Related: Alien (Favourite Films Series): http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/04/alien-1979-favourite-films-series.html