Alien (film)

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Alien is a culturally influential 1979 science-fiction horror film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver. The film's title references the main antagonist, a highly aggressive, unfamiliar extraterrestrial life-form. Reluctantly following a distress beacon in deep space, a crew member of the space-faring towing vehicle Nostromo encounters a young Alien that attacks and infects him. The creature soon comes aboard the ship, wreaking havoc and threatening the entire crew.

Alien garnered both critical acclaim and box-office success, spawning a Hollywood media franchise of literature, video games, merchandise, and three official sequels. The film effectively launched actress Sigourney Weaver's career as well. By featuring a strong heroine, Alien also proved unconventional (by Hollywood standards) for the action genre. While the Alien itself (referred to in spin-offs as a xenomorph) was a popular aspect of the film, the story of Ellen Ripley became the thematic thread that ran through the series. Together with the films of David Cronenberg from the 1970s^[1], Alien emerged as a central work in the development of the body-horror subgenre.^[2] Publicity for the film involved a tagline that became widely known: "In space no one can hear you scream."

Sequels to the film include: Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). The 21st century saw a possible end of the Alien franchise in favor of a crossover with the Predator series Alien vs. Predator (2004) and its sequel Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).^[3]

[edit] Plot

The Nostromo, an interstellar commercial towing-vehicle with a crew of seven, has set out from Thedus to Earth, hauling twenty-million tons of mineral ore. At the start of the film, the ship's computer MU-TH-R 182, simply called "Mother" by the crew, receives an apparently unidentifiable signal from a moon orbiting a nearby planet,^[4] while monitoring the ship's operations. "Mother" wakes the crew from stasis, so they can investigate the signal's origin. With the ore and mining facilities left in orbit, the tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the moon, suffering serious damage during the rough landing.

Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Kane (John Hurt) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) leave the ship to investigate the signal. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin. The group enters the craft, finding the pilot's desiccated remains. Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot, discovering thousands of leathery eggs protected by a forcefield. One of the eggs opens, a lifeform inside leaps out, burns through the visor of Kane's spacesuit and attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the commanding officer in Dallas's absence, refuses to let them back onboard, citing quarantine protocol. However, Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) disregards Ripley's decision and lets them in. In the ship's infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane's face, but they discover they cannot remove it by force without harming Kane. When they try to cut off one of its digits, the alien's highly acidic blood sprays on the floor and burns its way through several decks of the spaceship. Due to this lethal defense mechanism, the crew cease from further attempts at removal. Eventually the creature detaches from Kane's face on its own, and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed.

With the ship repaired, the crew leave the moon and have one last meal before re-entering hypersleep. During the meal Kane begins to choke and convulse until an alien creature bursts through his chest, killing him. The creature then scurries away. After ejecting Kane's body into space in a brief funeral, the crew splits up into two teams to capture it. Ash rigs together a tracking-device, while Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) assembles a weapon similar to a cattle-prod. Picking up a signal, Parker (Yaphet Kotto), Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover Jones, the crew's cat. Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett back to catch Jones. During his search Brett encounters the alien, now fully grown and enormous. The creature attacks him with its inner jaws and hauls the paralyzed crew member into an air-shaft.

The crew realizes that the alien has used the air-shafts to move through the ship. Dallas enters the network of air-shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out 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. His body disappears. Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that "The Company"^[5] had already detected the alien transmission, had decoded the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien lifeforms brought back — ostensibly for weapons-development — even at the expense of the crew. Ash, the Company's agent on board, attacks Ripley after she learns of the "Special Order 937", but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. 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 Narcissus. While Ripley preps the Narcissus for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle's life-support system. Ripley hears the screams of her colleagues over the ship's communication system and runs off to investigate. She arrives too late, discovering the alien has killed Parker and Lambert. Ripley activates the ship's self-destruct sequence and races to the shuttle, but sees the alien near the shuttle entrance. After an unsuccessful attempt at aborting the self-destruct sequence, Ripley escapes with Jones to the shuttle again, with the alien nowhere in sight this time. Ripley takes off in the Narcissus, and the Nostromo explodes. While preparing for hypersleep Ripley discovers that the alien has hidden itself inside the shuttle. Ripley manages to slip on a space-suit. She then blasts the alien out of the shuttle's airlock with a grappling-gun. When the Alien (still tethered to the grappling hook) climbs into one of the shuttle's engine nacelles, Ripley activates the engine and blasts it clear into space. The film ends as Ripley and the cat enter hypersleep.^[6]

[edit] Cast

[edit] Casting

Actor Jon Finch originally played the role of Kane, but as principal photography on Alien commenced, the crew soon noticed that he looked ill and rushed him to hospital, where doctors diagnosed a severe case of diabetes. John Hurt, in London and available at that time, subsequently replaced Finch.

In the role of Ripley in Alien, Sigourney Weaver won her first motion-picture lead after a brief appearance in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall (1977).

[edit] Principal characters

In several interviews, supporting actress Veronica Cartwright reported that the film-crew kept details of the "chestbursting" scene secret from all actors except John Hurt.^[7] Over the years this became a famous piece of Alien lore. However, on the 2007 "Alien Quadrilogy" DVD boxed set, actor Tom Skerrit debunks this legend and reports that he witnessed John Hurt setting the scene up with the film crew. He states that the principal cast had all read the script and basically knew the whole scene, but had not anticipated the intensity of the special effects, especially Cartwright, who had not expected to be sprayed with blood, and who did not act her reaction to the chestburster, but gave a genuine display of shock, disgust and horror. John Hurt reprised his famous death-scene from Alien as a parody in the film Spaceballs, groaning in despair: "Oh no! Not again!". In Spaceballs the chestburster emerges and begins to dance and sing a musical number to the song Hello! Ma Baby.

[edit] Other-character crew

[edit] Inspirations

Some 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 science-fiction horror films.^[8][9][10] Dan O'Bannon has over the years expressed clear views on the exact sources.^[11] He has even gone as far as saying: "A lot of people speculated as to where I stole it from. The truth is I stole it from everywhere."^[12]

Admitted inspirations include:

• The Thing from Another World (1951), featuring the hunting of professional men (soldiers in this case) through closely confined areas.
• Forbidden Planet (1956) in which a ship lands despite warnings and an invisible creature hunts them down one by one.
• It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) where a spaceship crew bring a murderous alien onboard who then hunts them down. Ivor Powell, the associate producer, has also highlighted the influences.
• Planet of the Vampires (1965), in which humans discover the remains of a large alien sitting at the controls of its spaceship.
• "Junkyard", a short-story by Clifford D. Simak: humans find deserted spaceships on an asteroid and the crew stumble across an egg-chamber.
• Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer which deals with extraterrestrial reproduction.
• Various stories from Weird Tales in which monsters eat people from the inside.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey which inspired some scenes in Aliens. One is the similarity between HAL 9000 "HAL" and MU-TH-R 182 "MOTHER" as the ships' central computers that make the decisions for humans when they are in cryogenic hibernation; the computers also hide ulterior motives not known to the crew.

O'Bannon denies influence on the part of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which features aliens laying eggs in people which then hatch and eat their way out. However, a lawsuit brought by A. E. van Vogt ended with a settlement out of court.^[13] Philip French suggests another non-science-fiction parallel: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.^[14]

[edit] Production

[edit] History and early versions

After completing Dark Star (1974), Dan O'Bannon wanted to take some of the ideas (such as where an alien hunts a crew through a ship) and make them into a science-fiction horror film, at that time provisionally called Memory. He also worked on Gremlins (released in 1984), which features a story about gremlins getting loose aboard a World War II bomber and wreaking havoc with the crew (the B-17 segment of the film Heavy Metal (1981) used a significantly altered version of this original story). Screenwriter Ronald Shusett contacted O'Bannon about collaborating on projects. Although Shusett wanted input on a script that would later become Total Recall, they decided to focus on the lower-budget Memory. However, O'Bannon got drafted in to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. Although this came to nothing, he did meet H.R. Giger, Chris Foss and Moebius on set and a lot of their work together led to later developments when production of Alien started in earnest.^[11] For Giger's well-recognized influence see below. Foss' spaceship designs remained unused (some later appeared in some of his books) but Mœbius's designs for the Nostromo spacesuits made it into the final film.^[11]

When O'Bannon returned to America, broke, after the Dune film project collapsed, he ended up sharing a flat with Shusett. Shusett suggested mixing in elements of Gremlins and how the alien got on board. He said: "It screws one of the crew. Something jumps up at his face, grabs hold of him and shoves its seed down his throat, then later it bursts out." Ron Cobb had worked on the designs for Dark Star (and would later provide the bulk of the designs for Alien); he offered the idea of the creature's acid blood stopping the crew from simply blowing it up. These various ideas came together in the O'Bannon and Shusett script Star Beast.^[11] At this stage the title loomed as the main problem. Casting around for a better name, O'Bannon noticed the number of times the word "alien" occurred in the script, and so he adopted this for the film's title.^[11]

The 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, initially a galactic coastguard-like ship and then a commercial vessel, called the Snark.^[11] 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").^[11] Actor Tom Skerritt originally won the role of Ripley, but later, in the course of developing the script, character re-casting made Ripley a woman, because producer Alan Ladd, Jr., and script-doctors Walter Hill and David Giler had heard rumors of Fox working on other titles with strong female leads.^[11]

The script recounted how, 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 life-cycle.^[11] 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 Aliens vs. Predator computer game and in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator.

Apart from the disappearance of the pyramid, the final script changed the story's pacing. The impregnation occurred around the mid-point in the film, with a long, slow build up of tension reminiscent of the atmosphere generated in At the Mountains of Madness. It also ended with an Alien egg seen clinging to the bottom of the escaping shuttle, a detail that survived various drafts and disappeared only in the final version dated June 1978.^[11]

The original cut of the film also included a scene where, after the attacks on all her fellow crew-members, Ripley heads towards the shuttle, then stumbles across a room where she finds Dallas — barely alive — and Brett (Dallas and Brett, the first two crew-members to fall victim to the Alien, had disappeared). Dallas and Brett, cocooned in mucus, have apparently started mutating into alien eggs. Dallas begs Ripley to kill him, and she does so by using her flamethrower device. Although editing removed this scene from the final theatrical cut, the idea emerged later in scenes in Aliens, Alien Resurrection, and Aliens vs. Predator.

[edit] Pre-production

O'Bannon and Shusett almost completed the sale of the film to Roger Corman. However, at the last minute, their friend Michael Haggerty said he could get them a better deal; and thus they 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.^[11] A single tagline promoted the script to studio executives: "Jaws in space".^[15]

Hill and Giler re-wrote the script, making it more action-oriented, adding the character of Ash, and rewriting much of the dialogue. They also introduced a motherhood theme, though the detail of Ripley going back for the cat originated in the period of the male Ripley-character.^[11] These changes caused tension between O'Bannon and the other production members that lasted through the making of the film. Parts of O'Bannon's scripts appear on various DVD releases, with the full early version presented on the Alien Quadrilogy.

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 in the pre-Star Wars era when such films remained a rarity.^[16]

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 (Switzerland), 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).^[17]

[edit] The alien

For more details on this character, see Xenomorph (Alien).

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 design of the creature with strong Freudian sexual undertones and multiple phallic symbols, while simultaneously presenting an overall feminine figure, provided a compelling androgynous image, conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines.^[18]

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 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). Apart from this, the alien has 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.

The slime of the costume would eat through the paint, so it needed repainting every day.^[19]

[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 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.

Some shots outside the Nostromo on the surface use children in spacesuits (specifically Ridley Scott's and the cameraman's children) as stand-ins in order to make the spaceship's landing-legs 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..."^[20]

Ridley Scott re-used the Nostromo's and the shuttle's computer-graphics, specifically the PURGE-screen, for the computer-screens inside the Spinner hover-cars in his film Blade Runner.

Other filming has re-used the set. In particular, 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. These appear most prominently in the scenes set onboard the Vogon Constructor Fleet.^[11] When the BBC science-fiction 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

Ridley Scott's vision of the film came under the influence of Isao Tomita's synthesizer-arrangement of Holst's The Planets, especially of the movement "Mars: Bringer of War", and at one point in pre-production Tomita appeared a serious candidate to write the original score for the film.^[21] With the dropping of these plans, however, Jerry Goldsmith came to compose the film music. Instead of aiming at a typical 1970s science-fiction score utilizing synthesizers,^[22] the composer's music reflects the film's underlying horror-film genre with its use of bleak orchestrations, most notably in the higher woodwinds, oscillating string-textures and bizarre, sometimes savage sounds, especially from the brass-section, which his orchestrator Arthur Morton built from the orchestral palette with various modern compositional techniques. Goldsmith also composed a main theme in the romantic style that barely appears in the finished film. A short passage from Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also plays as source music during the scene in which Dallas spends some time alone relaxing in the shuttle Narcissus.

Director Ridley Scott and editor Terry Rawlings became quite attached to several of the pre-existing cues that they had used for the temporary score while editing the film. As a result Scott and music editor Robert Hathaway moved around much of Goldsmith's score, re-edited cues and re-scored several sequences. In some parts of the film the temp score remained in place:^[23] segments of four monaural cues from Goldsmith's 1962 score for Freud – The Secret Passion appear in the film,^[24] and the final minutes of the first movement of Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2 "Romantic" replaced Goldsmith's music for the concluding moments of the film's showdown, as well as the complete music for 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.

As an additional feature the initial 20th Anniversary Edition DVD of Alien included both an isolated music-only soundtrack that restored the cue-order originally envisioned by the composer, resynchronizing the cues to their appropriate places, as well as a second isolated film-music soundtrack with the re-scored and re-arranged cues from the official 20th Century Fox release of the film, while the full production soundtrack played between music cues. In the final DVD release most of the scenes showing the Nostromo exterior and all of the sequences from Howard Hanson's second symphony ("Romantic"), some of which went along with them, have disappeared for reasons unknown.

The original film score by Jerry Goldsmith played under the conductor's baton of Lionel Newman, who also received main-title credits, a practice that had become unusual by the time of the film's release. The National Philharmonic Orchestra played the music. The soundtrack CD of Alien has now gone out-of-print. Over the years several bootlegged copies of Goldsmith's score appeared on the market, among them a Spanish two-CD release with all used and unused cues, including the retained temp score, and an archive bootleg that also included alternate takes from the recording sessions.

On November 15, 2007, Intrada Records released the complete score to the film with additional alternate score tracks and the original LP-program in a 2-CD set. This release first published Jerry Goldsmith's complete score remixed and remastered from the original 1" master tapes.

In 1980 Jerry Goldsmith's film music for Alien received nominations for the Golden Globe Award (Best Original Film Score), the Grammy Awards (Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special) and the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music.

[edit] Official soundtrack releases

1. Original soundtrack (Fox Music, 1979; LP; 10 tracks)
2. Re-issue of the original soundtrack (Silva Screen Records, 1987; CD; 10 tracks)
3. The Alien Trilogy (Colosseum, 1996; CD; 13 tracks, incl. 7 tracks from the original Alien soundtrack)
4. 20th Anniversary Edition DVD containing two isolated music tracks: a) the original score and b) the alternate music track (Fox Home Entertainment, 2000)
5. Alien Complete Score 2-CD set, released on Intrada Records, November 15, 2007 with complete score with several alternate tracks and the original LP program.

In addition several compilation re-issues and re-recordings of some of Goldsmith's music for Alien have appeared.^[25]

[edit] Bootleg releases

1. "Limited library archival pressing" (Soundtrack Library, 1999; CD-R; 32 tracks; allegedly including alternate takes from the recording sessions)
2. Alien: First Release of the Complete Score from the Stereo Master Tapes (Total Sound, 2000; CD-R; 21 tracks; assembled from the production of the 20th Anniversary Edition DVD)
3. Alien: Banda Sonora Original del Film y Temas Rechazados (Memory Records, 2001; 2-CD release; 25 + 21 tracks; including rejected cues, temp score cues and bonus material)
4. "Director's Cut bootleg" (Nostromo Enterprises, 2006; 2-CD release; 30 + 25 tracks; in most parts a re-assembly of preceding bootlegs and official releases and compilations, including re-masters from the production of the Alien special edition DVD and the soundtrack for Iwerk's Aliens: Ride at the Speed of Fright by composer Richard Band)

[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.^[10] Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "almost every horror film since Alien has ripped it off in some way, but most of the imitations have focused on details."^[26]

In his previous movie guides, film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film two and a half out of four stars. After the 2003 re-release, he gave it three and a half out of four stars.

In 1980, Italian director Ciro Ippolito made an unauthorized sequel called Alien 2 sulla Terra.

Commentators point to Alien, along with The Brood and other films (see above), as launching the body-horror sub-genre of horror film. Also, the film's cramped, claustrophobic sets have become the de facto norm for many science-fiction films and horror films set in space, which also changed visual aesthetics in otherwise slick science-fiction franchises such as Star Trek, e.g. in the depiction of the Borg environment. Alien'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 (or "space jockeys") rather than as highly-empowered agents of a military-styled entity (such as in Star Trek or Star Wars). (A hint of this also appeared in earlier films such as Silent Running (1971) and John Carpenter's 1974 film Dark Star.) Apart from the dark aesthetics the film Outland (1981) borrows much of this premise, as did the British TV science-fiction comedy Red Dwarf (which also appropriated a good deal of the aesthetics), and across the genre the aesthetic of Alien for future technology became the norm in the following decade.^[27]

The parody film, Spaceballs by Mel brooks lampoons the chestburster scene, using John Hurt himself as the victim. (in the film, the character Hurt plays exclaims "Oh no. Not again!") However this alien, unlike the Xenomorphs, simply does a showtune and dances itself out of the scene.

Hulk Hogan's sci-fi comedy film Suburban Commando features the character Shep Ramsey asking for assignments after defeating the primary antaognist of the film in an early battle, and after being told there was nothing going on, utters the line "Okay, how about a bug hunt with creatures that bleed acid?" This was a direct reference to the Xenomorphs, which have been referred to as 'bugs' in the comics.

Shrek 2 features a sequence where Puss in Boots attackas Shrek and gets inside his shirt, coming out of his belly, in similar fashion to the Alien's birth.

[edit] On television

On the DVD commentary for The End, the first episode of the British science fiction series Red Dwarf, Doug Naylor, Rob Grant, and Ed Bye cite Alien as an inspiration for the show.

On an episode of The Simpsons, "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song", Principal Skinner watches Groundskeeper Willie track Santa's Little Helper in the air ducts in a similar fashion to the way in which the Alien chases Dallas.

In Stargate: Atlantis in the episode " Doppelganger", Drs. Keller and McKay, along with Teyla and Ronon, discuss their experiences seeing the movie. Also Keller gets a nightmare in which Teyla gets severe stomach pains and an alien insect bursts out of her stomach, similar to the scene in the movie where an alien burst out of John Hurt's character.

In an episode of American Dad! called "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man", when force-fed too much, Roger the alien says "kill me" in the style of Dallas when cocooned alive.

In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Carl attempts to scrape off a sample of some eggs resembling those in in Alien, comes under attack from a facehugger and later gives birth to a jelly-fish-like alien from his butt.

In an episode of Mind of Mencia, an illegal immigrant (an "alien") emerges from the president's chest.

[edit] On video games

Metroid contains a key boss-character called Ridley, a nod to director Ridley Scott. The game parallels other elements from the movie as well, including climactic self-destruct countdowns, egg-hatching extraterrestrials, a main antagonist named after Alien's "Mother" computer (Mother Brain), and a female-lead character (in possible reverence to Alien's Ripley) called Samus Aran.^[28]

The creatures in the Contra series greatly resemble the Alien. Also, one of the bosses in the first installment of the series bears a close likeness to the Space Jockey.

The arcade game Xenophobe features enemies very similar to those in the Alien universe, including an acid blood-filled creature greatly resembling a Facehugger.

The game Duke Nukem 3D includes several references to Alien, including resin-encased humans who whisper "Kill me," and eggs from which face-sucking creatures emerge.

The game Starcraft features creatures called Hydralisks whose skulls resemble the Alien's. Furthermore, Starcraft's Terran dropship pilot borrows a few of her spoken lines from the dropship pilot in Alien's sequel, Aliens, and also bears a physical likeness. One Terran Marine's line, "How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?", is taken directly from Aliens.

Fallout 2 contains creatures called "Wannamingos" with heads nearly identical to that of the Alien, and other very similar features. Enemies usually have a logical place in the Fallout game universe; however, these "Wannamingoes" do not. They form a tribute to the Alien film series, likely intended as a joke^{[original research?]}.

The 2002 Half-Life modification Natural Selection features many aspects similar to the Alien universe. For example, the soldiers in the game resemble the United States Colonial Marines from Aliens; enemies named "Xenoforms" appear; and several in-game maps resemble those from the film franchise. Furthermore, the headcrabs in Half-Life largely resemble Facehuggers.

[edit] Gender-politics

Analysts have examined the film's gender-politics and its influence on the subsequent development of the leading heroine in Hollywood film,^[29] also noting that the film's narrative broke with the prominent custom of repressing female roles in science-fiction films, since the woman, representing nature, biology and sexuality, normally functioned as an antagonistic, ridiculing signifier of science and technology.^[30] Some critics see the non-traditional re-interpretation of the female lead in Alien as a necessity, since only a female, (i.e. "natural") entity can successfully fight the anti-technological, biologically reproducing and overly sexualized xenomorph in a science-fiction environment.

The film received some academic attention and commentators linked it to wider cultural idioms, especially those popular in the 1970s and 1980s such as abjection.^[31] James Kavanaugh criticized the film's "internally overdetermined and contradictory construction" in disguising humanist ideologies as feminism.^[32] Film-critic Kathleen Murphy called Kavanaugh's analysis an assaulting, "academically approved gobbledygook".^[33] Several academic theses on the film, which matured over the following years, appeared in print in the book Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema.^[34]

James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens revived academic interest in the Alien film series, because he had deviated from the individual and progressive 1970s model of the film heroine and had presented a conservative, maternal and familial interpretation of the character Ripley, while simultaneously and consequently mirroring this development with the introduction of the maternal alien queen as an adequate opponent.

[edit] Merchandising

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 the retractable jaw and 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.^[35] No models of the Nostromo space-vessel reached the market.

Toy-lines for R-rated films would not become common until the 1990s.^[36] At the time, Kenner's decision to do a toy-line based on Alien came before the release of the film. 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 film: their research failed to ascertain that the horror-oriented Alien would target adults.

[edit] Awards and accolades

Alien won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and also received a nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.^[37] The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA named it the Best Science Fiction Film of the year and Ridley Scott Best Director, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.^[38] In 2002, the United States National Film Registry deemed the film "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and inducted it into its collection.^[39]

In 2007 Empire Magazine named the "chestburster" scene in Alien the greatest 18-rated movie moment ever as part of its 18th birthday issue.^[40]

[edit] Special Edition (2003)

October 29 2003 saw the re-release of Alien in cinemas as a Ridley Scott Director's Cut. This release restored many but not all of the deleted scenes, which had already appeared as bonus materials on previous VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases of the film, and made unobtrusive deletions to the original. The new release also added some minor visual effects to the film: a shot of the sunrise on the moon, lights on the helmets of Dallas, Lambert and Kane moving under a natural arc on the alien moon as well as a field of stars in the background, when the Nostromo synchronizes its orbit around the moon.

Ridley Scott stated that Alien didn't require 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 DVD 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 re-edited the film himself, but only after viewing the studio's attempt to do so. He has characterized the studio's initial 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. Because the new version slightly shortened many of the scenes and shots from the original release and edited them with discreet acceleration to pander to modern film-audiences' viewing habits,^[41] the Special Edition actually runs forty seconds shorter than the original 1979 theatrical release,^[42] despite the addition of almost six minutes of new material.^[43]

[edit] Spin-offs

The novelization by Alan Dean Foster appeared in 1979. It includes dramatizations of most scenes, also the scenes found in the Special Edition (but notably excluding the "Space Jockey" scene) as well as scenes scripted but never filmed, or filmed but never included in any release version of the film. Notably, the novelization includes the discovery of the radio-transmitter aboard the derelict, a moment when the surviving crew-members contemplate taking suicide pills and the detection of the alien as it searches for food in one of the Nostromo's storage-chambers. One of the most infamous episodes however, and one which the crew only partially filmed, involved a failed attempt to blow the alien out of an airlock, which does not succeed because — as Foster implies — the character Ash intervenes by sounding the ship's alarm to scare the alien away from the airlock. In addition, the characters Ripley and Dallas become suspicious of Ash's intentions after this incident. For many years Foster's novelization provided fans and others with the only known source for the "missing cocoon scene from Alien" (see also above).

Subsequent spin-offs include comics, novels, and computer games. Alien itself received a comic-book adaptation by writer Archie Goodwin and artist Walter Simonson called Alien: The Illustrated Story, published by the Heavy Metal magazine, promptly followed by Alien: The Movie Novel, a photographic film-novel as well as a miscellaneous behind-the-scenes book called The Book of Alien. However, the franchise failed to soar before the release of Cameron's sequel and the subsequent adaptations by Dark Horse Comics in the late 1980s. The Aliens have since also appeared in numerous comic-book crossovers featuring Predators, Superman, Batman, WildC.A.T.s, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and others.

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] General references

• Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, New York / London 1990, ISBN 0-860919-93-5
• Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone 2: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, London 1999, ISBN 1-859847-46-3
• David A. McIntee, Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films, Telos Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-903889-94-4
• Paul Scanlon & Michael Gross, The Book of "Alien", Titan Books, 1979/2003, ISBN 1-852864-83-4

[edit] External links

• Alien at the Internet Movie Database
• Alien at Filmsite.org

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