Alien

Director: Ridley Scott (UK, USA). Year of Release: 1979

Space, the inside of a huge metal spaceship. We are langourously taken through a series of deserted rooms, all metal walls and seriously old-looking computer interfaces. Just as it is starting to look like the whole ship is empty, we come to the sleeping quarters. Seven members of the crew lie in a circle in a deep sleep. One by one, they slowly get up, presuming that they must be finally close to home.

No such luck. They have been wakened by “mother”, the computer which runs the ship (shades of HAL in 2001), who has received a distress signal. They must send a mission to the surface of a nearby planet to track down whoever sent the signal. The crew respond with different amounts of excitement, largely based on their commitment to scientific discovery rather than having to work for a living. Basically put, those who are paid the least are more keen on just going home.

As the plot develops, we are slowly introduced to the crew members, and the obvious class differences between them. Brett and Parker have menial jobs and are on a different pay scale to the others. Parker is also Black, and played by the great Yaphet Kotto who would later play Commander Al Giardello on Homicide; Life on the Street. Here, he is only interested in his next pay packet, and needs to be told that he won’t be paid unless they go and investigate.

Captain Dallas is in charge, but tries to rule by charm rather than coercion. Lambert is the navigator. As one of two women in the crew, her job is mainly to look scared when things get difficult. Kane is inquisitive. He is the first person to volunteer to go down to the planet. Ash is the cold science officer, who speaks with an English accent, which shows that he must be sinister. Despite their different ranks, they are all workers, carrying out the orders of a faceless corporation.

And then there’s Warrent Officer Ripley. You may have heard of her. A break-out part for Sigourney Weaver, Ripley trod new paths within sci-fi, not least as a leading figure who is an actual woman (although she only gets second billing on the opening credits). Unlike Lambert, Ripley is brave and adventurous, and while she’s certainly not ugly, neither is she a simpering pretty blonde heroine. She resents the men who patronise her, and is at the very least their equal.

On the planet’s surface, the delegation finds a crashed space ship, full of large eggs. Kane bends down to examine one, and a creature jumps at him, smashes his helmet and attaches himself to his face, rendering him unconscious. Kane is taken back onto the space ship, despite Ripley pleading that this breaks all quarantine rules. She appeals to Dallas, but he evades responsibility, passing the decision onto science officer Ash.

Ash’s curiosity towards the alien is more pathological than mere scientific interest. He calls it a “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility … I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” It’s hard to ignore the film’s underlying anti-science attitude. The main representative of scientific discovery is an emotionless proto-Nazi.

We know what’s coming next, most importantly That scene, which surely everyone knows, even if they’ve never seen Alien. Suddenly the ship is occupied by a dangerous alien, and the 6 remaining crew members set off on a cat and mouse hunt, trying to track it down. One of the strangths of the film is that nothing happens for excrutiatingly long periods of time. As we wait for the anticipated Big Showdown, we mainly watch people wandering through the spaceship as tension mounts.

To the surprize of no-one, Ash turns out to be duplicitous, his masters’ servant. We learn that the faceless corporation has invoked Special Order 24, which means that bringing the alien back to Earth was of primary importance – more so than protecting the lives of crew members. At first this order is only known by Ash (and the taciturn “Mother”) until Ripley overrides computer access rights, and confronts Ash, provoking an important Plot Spoiler which we won’t mention here.

Alien was released 2 years after Star Wars, and it is arguable whether it would have found an audience without its predecessor. But it contains none of Spielberg’s childlike optimism, nor the need to be loved. Whereas Star Wars consists mainly of car chases in space (apparently – I’ve still never seen it), Alien is full of moody pauses, where nothing seems to happen, but that’s only because everything is happening.

There are, of course, criticisms to be made, many of which I heard from my companion at this evening’s showing. After following protocol for most of the film, at the end Ripley risks herself by trying to save the ship’s cat Jonesy (though there are those who would argue that this just shows an understanding of who is worth saving). A scene towards the end really doesn’t need to show Ripley in underwear. And Ash’s porn collection is a little bemusing once you know the Plot Spoiler.

There are also serious questions about the film’s politics. Now a film can be Right Wing and good, as On the Watefront proves, But, notwithstanding the anti-corporatism, Alien is a little too keen to preserve “our” way of life. In Cold War films, aliens traditionally stood for Russians or socialists. Progressive films tried to understand them, reactionary films tried to blow them out of the water. In Alien, the rarely seen creature is viewed as a threat which must be destroyed.

I am not Alien’s core audience. There is a little too much technology porn for me – slow-mo scenes of space vehicles taking off and landing never did much for me. But to judge it as merely a sci-fi film, or a horror film for that matter, is to do it an injustice. And all the better that this is not a film about superheroes, but about ordinary people, struggling to get their job done so they can blow their pay packet. It’s extraodiniriness lies in its ordinariness.