Alien

A movie with a poster like this is enough to get me to the theatre and watch it. It has a single premise for what we should expect "In space no one can hear you scream" and a lot of people screamed because of this movie. This movie took a generic tittle and made it so iconic that this movie or this "Alien" is the one thing that we associate with that generic term of alien. With that said we can only assume that this is a masterpiece that everyone should watch but if you don't believe me, watch the teaser.

But, before I analyse the movie, I'll give some trivia about it:

• The director, Riddley Scott, said about the movie that Star Wars is a fairy story while this (Alien) is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Science Fiction.
• It has only 7 actors plus the voice of Mother and a young african student that was picked by Riddley Scott from a bar to be inside the Alien suit.
• Sigourney Weaver's cast was done so late that she made it in the real scenarios that were used on the movie.
• John Hurt was a replacement actor. When the original actor began filming he became so ill that had to be dismissed. Riddley went on the middle of the night to Hurt's home, pitched the movie and, without reading the script, Hurt accepted the role and on the next morning he was on the studio to shoot.
• The script was considered weak and had to be rewritten several times and almost nothing was left from the original one.
• The movie was only greenlighted due to the success of Star Wars, Alien was the only thing the studios had to produce in a short time to capitalize that success.
• The Egyptian Theater made a 48 hours marathon of the movie and there was a line of people to see it during all that time.
• Many directors were approached to direct the movie but rejeted it. When the movie was finally greenlighted and the producers were desperate, they invited a Riddley Scott because they had saw his first movie (The Duelists) at the Cannes International Film Festival and he accepted the job.

The distressed ship

In many ways, to talk about this movie is to talk about Riddley himself because of how much of him is in this movie. This was Riddley's second movie and he took the job very seriously since the moment he saw the script. He was in London when he was approached to make the movie, the next day he was in Los Angeles where he accepted the job and in the day after that he was back to the United Kingdom. In the next three weeks he drawed the whole storyboard and returned to Los Angeles to show it, he got to double the 4 million dollars of budget to 8 million. So it is fair to say that Riddley Scott had a glimpse and saw what the movie could be from the start while many didn't.

The casting responsable in the UK said that when the castings started, Riddley asked for actors who could take care of themselves to be able to focus on the visual side of the movie and with that info we enter in the review of the visual part of the movie. We all know that this movie relies on the animatronics and puppets, they had to be perfect and believable otherwise the movie would be a B-series flop.

Here's a fact that demonstrates the importance of the visual aspect of the movie; Riddley spent 400-500 thousand dollars of the 8 million budget to make the "Space Jockey" set that was only used once. Eventually that scene was crucial to the "Prometheus" plot so I guess it was money well spent.

The inspiration for the alien came from the painting "Necronom #4" by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger. Riddley Scott had to fly to Zurich to talk to him because he was afraid of flying. Riddley put him in charge of designing the "face-hugger", the "chest-burster" and all that had to do with the "Alien", including the spaceship were they were found while Michael Seymour and his team were in charge to make everything else of Riddley's vision real. In the end it was Roger Dickin who finished the "face-huggers" and the "chest-burster".

The half-million dollar "Space Jockey".
Riddley used his kids to shoot this scene and make it look bigger.

H. R. Giger's "Necronom #4"

They also had to be inventive to make it look real when everything else failed...it would be impossible to use animatronics at the time to show the inside of the egg, so they used cow's stomach and the "face-hugger" was actually Riddley Scott's hands in rubber gloves. With that much work on the details it is no wonder that the final product is more of a art work than a movie. It is really a masterpiece. The sets created offer the viewer a sense of claustrophobia due to the narrow corridors that seem to go nowhere and the ilumination is superb, either it makes us fear every dark corner of the screen or it has so many lights flashing that makes us paranoid.

For that paranoia it greatly contributes the directing, we almost never see the alien until the last scene and the slow pace of the movie keeps us waiting for something really bad to happen that only gets worse with the progress of the movie and the details that are focused. The performances are so convincing that at some time we really think we are inside the ship Nostromo. Another fun fact about the performances is that contrary to popular belief, the cast knew that the "chest-burster" scene was going to happen, after all they had read the script, what they did not know was that there was going to be blood exploding from Kane's chest...real (cow) blood...everywhere. In the first take the "chest-burster" did not ripped the t-shirt but it was kept in the movie anyway.

The "egg-chamber"

Sigourney Weaver is a real badass in what was his first main role in a movie, but it is not the best performance. Still today I don't trust people called Ash due to Ian Holmes performance, it is one of the best "android" performances ever, by the end of the movie I really hate Ash but I still prefer Fassbender in Prometheus and the duo Harrison Ford/Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. The rest of the crew made their job really well, specially Tom Skerritt as Dallas, the captain of the ship.

As said before, the script was rewritten several times but the final product is something to be proud of. There is not much about it but the twists and turns of the movie make it special and the thing that makes it great is...Riddley Scott who took the best out of it. A cargo ship stops because of a distress call, they stop only to find an "abandoned" ship. "Abandoned" because it was filled with eggs from an "Alien" origin. One of those eggs hatches and hugs the face of a crew member who is taken back to the ship, later the Alien bursts of the chest of the crew member and starts to hunt everyone on the ship which is on his way to Earth. The crew reataliates and the hunter becomes the prey. We all know that it ends well because it is a movie but I'm not spoiling anything else for those who have not seen the movie.

Kane among the eggs

The soundtrack is a classic orchestrated score which gives a sense of epicness to it. And to talk about the sound effects I can resume it to a story. The first test screening of the movie was a flop because the sound of the theatre wasn't that good. When they've screened it in a better movie theatre in Dallas, people fainted and tried to run off the movie theatre during the movie. It's that good!

When I was growing up there were two movies that managed to keep me out of sleep for a couple nights. Alien was one of them, Jurassic Park was the other one. Still today I am not able to enjoy the truly glorious sound of the movie with the volume almost all the way up, it's always much lower than usual. That's how horrific and magnificent this movie is to me.

Plot - 4/5

Visual - 5/5

Sound - 5/5

Performances - 4/5

Final Score - 18/20