Alien
Its ambition was always apparent, but when the film first came out in 1979, many critics either failed to notice it or dismissed it as auteurist gloss on what was, in essence, just another glorified shocker, released during the same era as Halloween and Friday the 13th. Considering Alien's high-tech hardware (designed by H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb), gloppy special effects and Ten Little Indians plot, it's not the sort of film one normally thinks of as needing to be "understood"?at least, not in the same way that one struggles to understand La Jetée or Un Chien Andalou or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet after this most recent viewing, I feel I can truly say that I understand Alien in a way I never did before.
I'll get the superficial details out of the way first. This so-called "director's cut" is really a director's revision, supervised by Scott. It adds only one new scene?a sequence wherein Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) comes across the abducted and cocooned Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and mercy-kills him with a flamethrower. There are a few new shots, notably in the sequence where the alien stalks and kills the gruff techie Brett (Harry Dean Stanton). Beyond that, most of the changes are so subtle as to be nearly subliminal. While watching this new version, I remember thinking it seemed leaner and more exciting; it wasn't until I read the press notes later that I learned Scott had trimmed ten to 15 seconds from many scenes and sequences, mostly to eliminate needlessly protracted entrances and exits.
Beyond that, it's the same Alien, but better?not just because of Scott's tinkering, but because of this new version's somewhat depressing cinematic context, which includes a newer, bloodier, extra-stupid remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The intervening 24 years since Alien mostly failed to produce horror films that work equally well as entertainment and art. (An exception is Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who has directed three films that are classics of their type: Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and, unlikely as it might sound, Blade II.) Alien deserves favorable comparison to 2001 not just because of its astonishingly detailed production design (which, muppety chest-burster notwithstanding, has barely aged a day) but because, like Stanley Kubrick's classic, its slim narrative describes a metaphoric as well as physical journey?one with primal implications that are more resonant because they're not precisely sorted out and labeled.
To wit: The film opens with the crew of the deep-space hauling vessel Nostromo awakening from a deep sleep inside suspended animation chambers that suggest high-tech cousins of the glass case that hosted Sleeping Beauty in her slumber. This mass reawakening doubles as a de facto birth, overseen by the ship's all-knowing computer, which speaks in a female voice and is known as Mother. Mother sends her children on a mission to an unknown world (i.e., mother sends her children into the World) without fully explaining the dangers that await them. (When the shuttle detaches from the long, thin stem connecting it to the mother ship, the computer's voice declares, "umbilicus cleared.") The crew is temporarily marooned on a planet described by science officer Ash (Ian Holm) as "almost primordial" and investigates a wrecked spacecraft whose giant crew was murdered by a parasite that incubates in the belly and explodes outward?a child's nightmare of pregnancy.
Another crewmember, Kane (John Hurt) is similarly violated, impregnated by a facehugger that alternately resembles a spider, a crab and a mummified hand. (Amusing low-tech trivia note: In the shot where Kane peers into the translucent egg, the facehugger is played by a pair of gloved hands belonging to Ridley Scott?his version of a Hitchcock cameo, perhaps?) The facehugger detaches itself and dies; in an autopsy, the creature's interior resembles a dissected oyster, which in turn resembles you-know-what.
After Kane dies his now infamous death-by-chestburst at the dinner table, the traumatized crew bands together to capture and expel the alien, which sneaks through the ship's haunted house-like interior via air ducts with suspiciously sphincter-like openings. In its adult form, the creature is sexual paranoia personified: a silver-skinned goblin with a grinning, serrated mouth that opens, vagina-like, to reveal a second phallus with its own set of teeth, all bathed in a gush of milky fluid. The crew's panicked beast-hunt is intercut with Ripley's attempts to uncover the mystery of why they were sent to the planet. Turns out Mother lied to them, as mothers often do.
I've only panned the surface of this film's symbolic motherlode; for a more elaborate consideration, check out David Thomson's very good, book-length appreciation of the series, The Alien Quartet. But in passing, I'll note a couple of other, secondary interpretations: a glancing look at sex and class conflicts, and a meditation on the act of watching horror movies.
The former topic manifests itself in Scott's direction (note the extensive, documentary-style camerawork), in Dan O'Bannon's script and in the expert, very lifelike performances by one of the best ensemble casts in horror cinema. The alien hunt is sometimes complicated by an ongoing cold war between the ship's privileged, protected officers (Dallas spends time alone in the shuttle listening to classical music) and its working stiffs (Yaphet Kotto's Parker, who wants to discuss "the bonus situation," and Brett, who half-sarcastically answers each statement with one word: right).
O'Bannon's script also suggests that sex roles will always be with us, despite the crew's seemingly gender-neutral makeup. Much of the crew's tension is concentrated in relationships between Ripley and two other crewmembers. The first is the only other female, Lambert (Veronica Cartwright); the second is science officer Ash, a perfect company man who seems barely able to contain his hatred of women in general, Ripley in particular. (Perhaps their childbearing ability reminds him of his own nature?) Note the method by which Ash attempts to silence the inquisitive Ripley: in an oral rape/strangulation by rolled-up porn magazine, committed while Ripley is held down on a table ringed with pasted-up pictures of naked ladies.
On the movie-about-movies angle, consider that nearly all the major setpieces involve a separation of the crewmembers, some of whom are in jeopardy, others of whom are powerless to do anything but watch. When Lambert, Dallas and Kane investigate the shipwreck, the crew back on the shuttle watches via remote video feed. When Ash and Dallas examine the infected Kane, the other crewmembers watch from the other side of a plate glass window; Parker keeps asking why they don't just freeze him, and no one listens. When Dallas tracks the alien through the ship's underbelly, the others observe his progress on a tracker; before Dallas is killed, Lambert cries, "It's moving right towards you!" When Parker and Lambert are attacked, Ripley hears the whole thing over the ship's PA system, but arrives too late to prevent their deaths.
Alien was widely praised on first release for its elegant design and numerous effective shocks, but it is only now, with the passage of time, that we can look past (or through) those qualities and sense its essence. Ripley is a modern fairy tale heroine who survives not through luck, magic or the romantic attentions of a strong man, but through sheer resourcefulness and endurance. Scott grants her a fairy tale heroine's reward only in the film's final moments?a slow zoom into a closeup of Ripley in suspended animation (Sleeping Beauty in space), scored to a section of Howard Hanson's, "The Romantic Symphony."
This classic deserves another viewing in the theater, even if (especially if) you think you've already seen enough. Ash's description of the alien doubles as a summary of Alien: "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. I admire its purity."