Aired on October 20, 2019 (Episode #771)
Sounds of Cinema examined the themes and legacy of the 1979’s Alien. A review of the film can be found here.
Contents:
III. The Context of Alien
I. The Roots of Alien
Alien had a lot in it that was innovative and the movie has gone on to inspire many imitators but Alien didn’t spring from a vacuum. Like most movies, especially genre pictures, Alien grew out of other films that influenced its makers. Here is a look at some of the movies that set up Alien.
Alien owes quite a lot to the sci-fi monster pictures of the 1950s. Chief among them was 1955’s It! The Terror From Beyond Space. This film is about a crew of space travelers who check in on a mission to Mars and find everyone dead except one survivor. While escorting him back to Earth, it is discovered that an extraterrestrial has stowed away on board and is sneaking around the ventilation shaft, killing off the crew one at a time.
Science fiction and special effects took a major leap forward with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Pretty much every space drama that followed 2001 owes it a debt and the influence on Alien is quite severe. The look of the space ship, the kinds of shots—especially exterior images of the spaceship—and the quality of the work in Alien refer to the 1968 film.
One of the key creative individuals involved in Alien was Dan O’Bannon. He wrote the initial draft of the script but O’Bannon was also was responsible for nudging Ridley Scott and others in certain directions. According to Jason Zinoman’s book Shock Value, O’Bannon was instrumental in connecting the production with artist H.R. Giger whose designs were the basis for the xenomorph. Zinoman’s book also claims that O’Bannon persuaded Ridley Scott to watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher movie was formative for Scott and set the tone for Alien.
O’Bannon had also written and acted in a film that was a sort of dry run for Alien. 1974’s Dark Star was a comedic sci-fi movie about a crew traveling through deep space and blowing up unstable planets. They have an alien on board that gets loose and creates havoc. Dark Star was intended as a sendup of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and it does that but the movie foreshadows quite a bit of Alien. It was also the directorial debut of John Carpenter.
Another horror picture that Ridley Scott has cited as influential on Alien was 1973’s The Exorcist. This may initially seem less obvious because Alien is sci-fi horror whereas The Exorcist is supernatural terror. But what distinguished The Exorcist was its tone. The filmmakers took demonic possession seriously and made the audience take it seriously as well and there is a kinship between the credibility of The Exorcist and the style of Alien.
Finally, the influence of Star Wars is not to be ignored. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, virtually every sci-fi and space fantasy to come after Star Wars owes it some debt. In the case of Alien, the filmmakers borrowed the “used future” aesthetic of George Lucas’ space fantasy but then took it to the next degree. No work of art is ever wholly original. Craftsmen in every medium are influenced by the work of their predecessors and peers and judging material solely on whether it is original is to misunderstand the nature of creation. Instead, it is the job of artists to build upon what’s been done and make something better. That’s what the filmmakers of Alien did and in many respects their work has not yet been surpassed.
II. The Themes of Alien
Alien had one of the great taglines in movie marketing history: “In space no one can hear you scream.” That phrase sums up the theme of Alien and one of the keys to the movie’s power. Alien depicts a Darwinian nightmare in which humanity’s place in the hierarchy of the universe is uncertain.
The xenomorph of Alien is not a fluke of nature or a product of a mad scientist, at least not in the original film. As Ash, the Nostromo’s science officer, puts it the xenomorph is “the perfect organism” when perfection means most suitable for survival. The creature is able to acclimate to any environment and take it over. The soft and fragile bodies of human beings, by comparison, are not so suited to survival. To again quote the Nostromo’s science officer, the xenomorph is “a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Like the shark in Jaws, the xenomorph of Alien is a perfect biological engine whose motives are basic: kill and reproduce.
In the coldest and most objective sense, the Nostromo crew dies because they are inferior life forms. And that is one of the most subversive aspects of Alien. A lot of space exploration movies from Georges Méliès’ silent classic A Trip to the Moon to Stanley Kubrick’s cerebral 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ridley Scott’s populist entertainment The Martian are fundamentally optimistic. They portray human beings traveling to distant worlds and overcoming obstacles through ingenuity, hard work, and applied knowledge. If extraterrestrials are encountered they possess equivalent humanity (as in Star Trek) and if not human beings are reassured of their place as the superior life form, the almighty’s favored creature.
This is not the case in Alien. Everything about the story undermines the optimistic and hopeful conventions of Hollywood space dramas that were popular to this point. Rather than scientists and explorers, who represent the best and brightest of humanity, the crew of the Nostromo are blue collar workers. Their very bodies are coopted by the xenomorph and turned into a hatchery. When the ship is infiltrated by the alien, science is unable to save the crew; even the science officer is revealed to be on the side of the creature. The very structure of their ship becomes a prison trapping these space truckers with the xenomorph and the dark hallways become a threat where the creature lies in wait. During the space race, extraplanetary travel represented the culmination of human accomplishment, with the knowledge and progress rooted in the Enlightenment finally thrusting mankind into the stars. Alien suggests that path leads to a dead end.
But there is an additional dimension to Alien’s struggle for survival. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is the secondary antagonist of the film. The company wants the extraterrestrial creature by whatever means necessary and deems the human crew to be expendable. While this certainly has economic implications, the corporation’s behavior also fits within this Darwinist understanding of the film. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is a kindred spirit with the alien. They both regard the crew as disposable organic tools for achieving their objectives and the xenomorph and the corporation go about their business in the same kind of detached amoral manner. There is also an organizational parallel. The creature on board the Nostromo is one of many, a representative for a larger and mostly unseen enterprise. Ash, the biomechanical science officer, is the company’s man nudging the crew toward the corporation’s goals. And even the interior of the Nostromo, presumably Weyland-Yutani’s property, has a design that resembles the xenomorph’s exoskeleton. The unmistakable parallels between the extraterrestrial creature and the human corporation suggest that the amoral survivalist ethos isn’t really all that alien. It is, in fact, the way of the universe, with everything preying upon everything else.
The one component of Alien that keeps the movie from becoming completely hopeless is the relationship between Ellen Ripley and her cat. The filmmakers don’t get cute about this but the cat of Alien is the other survivor of the Nostromo and Ripley goes out on a limb to save her pet. This has a practical storytelling function; one of the quickest ways to create (or destroy) sympathy for a character is to reveal how they interact with children or small animals and it makes Ripley heroic because she saves someone other than herself. But the cat-human relationship is also a counterpoint to the predatory relationships of nearly everything else in the movie. The power of Alien is partly in its cinematic craft and smart storytelling but it is also in the movie’s Darwinist subtext. The marriage of biological terror and corporate indifference suggests that the nature of living things and the nature of corporate power are one in the same. And we, like the crew of the Nostromo, are caught between the destructive forces of both nature and society in a fight for our own survival.
III. The Context of Alien
Alien, like any film, emerged out a specific context. The film was released at the end of the 1970s, a decade that was cinematically rich but was also culturally strained. Alien reflects both of those qualities, making it a signpost film of its day.
One of the defining qualities of the 1970s was moral ambiguity. This is especially true of movies of the time such as The French Connection and The Godfather which depicted morally dubious characters and films like Network and Chinatown took place in corrupt institutions. This ambiguity reflected a loss of faith in cultural institutions which was exemplified by the Watergate scandal that destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon. But Watergate wasn’t alone. It was the punctuation point of an era defined by social unrest at home and military failure abroad. Crime rates in major cities started climbing while the economy stagnated with the oil and steel crises that began the contraction of American manufacturing.
The 1970s was also the start of the corporate era in American life and in cinema. Corporations were not new in the 70s but it was at that time that corporate consolidation began in earnest, including in the entertainment industry with Gulf + Western taking control of Paramount and Coca-Cola acquiring Columbia Pictures. There was a growing awareness of the extent to which corporate power influenced our politics and dominated the everyday lives of individuals from the food we eat to the jobs we work to the entertainment we consume.
Alien reflects all of this. The crew of the Nostromo are blue collar workers who spend the early part of the film complaining about their contract and bonuses with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the interior of their spaceship is very factory-like. The crew eventually discovers that their corporate employer deems them expendable. But beyond that, Alien is shot through with the feeling of uncertainty and anxiety that was prevalent in the 1970s; it’s a feeling that is recognizable forty years later. From the opening of the film to its climax, the crew of the Nostromo experiences a systemic breakdown and everything from the science officer to the ship’s computer ultimately fails them. All the crew members can do is try to save themselves.
Alongside the cultural and sociological context, Alien is also a capsule of a particular era in movies. The film was released in 1979 toward the end of the New Hollywood era. In that time many new filmmakers emerged and created many great motion pictures that transformed the industry. This period also produced an impressive string of horror pictures. Many of them were independent titles like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween but this era also had a lot of high profile studio-produced horror films like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Omen, and Carrie; these were major studio productions with respectable casts that were nominated for Academy Awards. Alien was part of that trend of A-list studio horror. It was a trend that wouldn’t last much longer as the genre entered the slasher era and horror’s respectability plummeted.
Alien was also the end of a certain kind of science fiction film. Throughout the 1970s, a lot of sci-fi was bleak but also scientific. Logan’s Run, The Stepford Wives, Soylent Green, and Capricorn Once did not present hopeful visions of mankind’s future. That changed with the release of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Studio produced science fiction subsequently became fanciful and optimistic or militaristic as seen in 1986’s Aliens. There wasn’t much room in the studio system for the kind of slow burn sci-fi of Alien. In more recent years that has started to change as seen by Ad Astra, Arrival, and Interstellar. Those pictures are fundamentally optimistic but they are also slower and more thoughtful than a lot of space adventures. We can see Alien as both the beginning and the end of a certain kind of filmmaking. It sprang out of a particular moment and the obsessions and anxieties of the time seeped through it. Alien was also among the last gasps of a certain kind of film especially in sci-fi and horror while it created a template and a look that would be imitated for years to come. And that is part of the value of this film. Alien is an artifact of a particular moment and tells us something about the life and times in which it was made.
IV. The Legacy of Alien
Alien is one of the most influential sci-fi and horror movies of the past half a century. The movie has been referenced, parodied, or simply ripped off by a wide range of movies and television shows as well as inspiring its own franchise.
The first sequel, Aliens, didn’t arrive until 1986. In the seven years between the two films a lot of movies had already exploited the success of Alien. The solution by writer-director James Cameron and cowriters David Giler and Walter Hill and producer Gale Anne Hurd was to make a fundamentally different story. Whereas Alien was a cerebral, slow burn slasher picture, Aliens was an action oriented mix of horror and war movies. The sequel retained the central appeals of the 1979 movie and it was still germane to the original concept but it also expanded the universe of the Alien series and set the groundwork for much of what would come later. It also fleshed out the role of Ellen Ripley. James Cameron has an adroit sense of what works for populist audiences and Aliens made Ripley and this series emotionally warmer and more accessible than the original picture. Aliens is now regarded as one of the best sequels ever made and it solidified the reputations of Cameron and Hurd who went on to have impressive careers.
Alien 3 followed in 1992. This film was besieged by problems, not the least of which being that the production was rushed. Alien 3 was the feature film debut of David Fincher who has since gone on to great success with Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, and Mindhunter. But at the time Fincher was just a music video director who had been hired to work on a major franchise for a Hollywood studio and by most accounts Fincher was second guessed and undercut by executives and producers. The final result wasn’t a bad movie. It is in many respects quite soulful and deserves credit for making bold choices. But Alien 3 suffered from a script that undermined the conclusion of the previous film.
The first four Alien movies have extended and alternate cuts available on home video. Most of the differences between cuts are minor but the secondary version of Alien 3 is dramatically different from its theatrical counterpart. It’s not really a director’s cut because Fincher had nothing to do with its assembly but this cut of Alien 3 makes for an interesting alternate version.
An attempt was made to revive the series with 1997’s Alien: Resurrection. Taking place two hundred years after Alien 3, Ripley is brought back to life through cloning. This movie has some wild visuals courtesy of filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also helmed Delicatessen and Amélie. Alien: Resurrection was also an early screenwriting effort by Joss Whedon. The movie was ambitious but didn’t quite come together. Resurrection is so far departed from the tone of the original picture that it doesn’t feel much like an Alien film.
Between Aliens and Alien 3, Dark Horse Comics got the license to make Alien comic books. Since the xenomorph is incapable of speech or other empathetic qualities, the comic book storytellers explored new avenues for Alien universe. One of their major creative decisions was to cross over the Alien franchise with the interstellar hunters of the Predator film series, which was also licensed to Dark Horse Comics by 20th Century Fox. Dark Horse’s Alien vs. Predator stories merged the franchises quite well and the initial Alien vs. Predator comic was an excellent story.
Alien vs. Predator should have been a logical event movie. Done right, it would have been gold. But Alien vs. Predator languished in development hell for years before coming to the screen in a 2004 film directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The movie was a compromise that raided some of the key ingredients from Dark Horse Comic’s original story while adding stupid ideas that were antithetical to the themes of the Alien series. A sequel followed in 2007 that only served to bury the concept.
Filmmaker Ridley Scott returned to the Alien series with 2012’s Prometheus. A prequel to Alien, the movie retconned and ultimately erased the Alien vs. Predator films from the series’ continuity and attempted to explain the origins of the xenomorph. Prometheus had wonderful production design and some ambitious ideas but it was also hamstrung by stupid and illogical storytelling decisions.
When Prometheus was released it was quite controversial among the fans. The follow up, 2017’s Alien: Covenant, overcorrected. The prequel sequel didn’t really fix the problems of Prometheus and actually undermined some of the things it did right. Ignoring the key strength of the original picture, Covenant overexposed the creature and mostly rehashed familiar Alien scenarios. But Covenant’s most grievous offense was the way it simplified the genesis of the xenomorph. Part of the enigma of the creature in the original film was the way it was a product of evolution. The xenomorph’s violence and ugliness was a reflection of nature. To make it a biological weapon concocted in a lab robbed the creature of its mystery.
Forty years on, the Alien franchise continues. New editions of the existing films continue to sell on home video and Ridley Scott has promised to make another installment of his prequel series. A New Jersey high school recently staged the original film as a theatrical production. Comics and spinoff novels and video games are still being published and toys and collectables are available for fans. The cat of the original Alien is the star of a children’s book and the face hugger is now a cuddly plush doll.
What has happened to the xenomorph is what has happened to every cinematic villain. Dracula began as a terrifying vampire and now he is a puppet that teaches mathematics to children on Sesame Street. Freddy Krueger was a child murderer who haunted the dreams of teenagers. He recently appeared on a primetime sitcom. The xenomorph is now a corporate trademark owned by, of all things, the Walt Disney Company, meaning an Alien theme park is a distinct possibility. Has the xenomorph lost its edge? Yes. It probably lost its edge two decades ago when an Alien cartoon aimed at children nearly went forward. (The cartoon didn’t materialize but the merchandise did.) But whatever may come to this franchise, the original film remains. And like all the great horror stories it still has the ability to unsettle, to shock, and to entertain.