ALIEN (1979) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

alien (1979) movie

Genre              |   Science Fiction

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   117 minutes

Released         |   25 May 1979 

cast

Sigourney Weaver ... Ripley
Tom Skerritt ... Dallas
Veronica Cartwright ... Lambert
Harry Dean Stanton ... Brett
John Hurt ... Kane
Ian Holm ... Ash
Yaphet Kotto ... Parker
Bolaji Badejo ... Alien
​Helen Horton ... Mother (voice)

director

Ridley Scott

writer

​Dan O'Bannon ... (screenplay by)
 
Dan O'Bannon ... (story by) and
Ronald Shusett ... (story by)

cinematographer

Derek Vanlint ... director of photography

music

Jerry Goldsmith

film editor

David Crowther ... (director's cut)
Terry Rawlings
Peter Weatherley

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box office result

Worldwide             $​​​​​​​106,497,869

Australia                 $​​​​​​3,494,292

North America       $​​​​​​​​​​81,765,459

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movie minutiae

​In the original script by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the names of the characters were Standard, Roby, Broussard, Melkonis, Hunter, and Faust (there was no Ash character). Walter Hill and David Giler hated the names, and changed them multiple times during revisions. They finally settled on Dallas, Ripley, Kane, Lambert, Parker, and Brett, and added Ash. The script by O'Bannon and Shusett also had a clause indicating that all of the characters are "unisex", meaning they could be cast with men or women. Consequently, all of the characters are only referred to by their last name (Dallas, Kane, Ripley, Ash, Lambert, Parker, and Brett), and the few gender-specific pronouns (he or she) were corrected after casting. However, Shusett and O'Bannon never thought of casting Ripley as a female character.

Extra scenes filmed but not included, due to pacing problems: The crew listens to the eerie signal from the planetoid. An additional discussion between Parker and Ripley over the comm, concerning the progress on the Nostromo's engines. A scene in which a furious Lambert hits Ripley for her earlier refusal to let her team back aboard the Nostromo. An additional conversation between Lambert and Ash, in which Lambert notices a dark patch over Kane's lungs on the scanner, foreshadowing Kane's fate. A discussion among the crew, immediately following Kane's death, on how to proceed further. Alternative death scene for Brett: Ripley and Parker witness Brett (still alive) being lifted from the ground. Ripley and Lambert discuss whether Ash has sex or not. An unfinished scene, in which Parker spots the Alien next to an airlock door. He asks Ripley and Lambert over the comm to open the airlock and flush the Alien into space. However, the alien is warned by a siren and escapes, but not before it gets injured by a door, and its blood creates a small hole, causing a short decompression. Ripley finds Dallas and Brett cocooned. Brett is dead, and covered in maggots; Dallas is alive and begs Ripley to kill him. She does so with a flamethrower. The mercy killing scene would eventually be recycled and used in ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997) when an alien/human-hybrid clone of Ripley begs the real Ripley to kill her, to which she does so with a flamethrower. Many of these scenes were included in the Director's Cut, which Ridley Scott made at the request of many fans who had seen those scenes as bonus material on the earlier DVD release.

Dan O'Bannon's idea for the movie came from his experiences on two other projects. He had worked as a writer and special effects supervisor on John Carpenter's DARK STAR (1974), a science fiction comedy that started out as a student project, but got turned into a feature film. Halfway during the production of the movie, O'Bannon thought the movie's premise would work much better as a horror movie, so he started work on a script called "Star Beast". DARK STAR was a commercial failure, but it was seen by Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who had acquired the rights to Frank Herbert's "Dune". Jodorowsky invited O'Bannon to help him with the book's ambitious adaptation, so O'Bannon sold all of his belongings and moved to Paris to work on the movie. While briefly working on the ill-fated project, he encountered influential artists such as Chris Foss, Ron Cobb, Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), H.R. Giger and their unique styles. When Jodorowsky's Dune fell through due to lack of funding, O'Bannon took the creative team and worked on his Star Beast movie (titled Alien at that time), using much of the designs already created for Dune. Ridley Scott, one of the few who had also seen and liked Dark Star, agreed to direct. It has since been said that Alien became the movie that "Jodorowsky's Dune" was supposed to be.

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related movies

ALIENS (1986)

ALIEN (1979) MOVIE IMAGES

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ALIEN (1979) STORY SYNOPSIS

​The crew of a spacecraft, Nostromo, intercept a distress signal from a planet and set out to investigate it. However, to their horror, they are attacked by an alien which later invades their ship.

ALIEN (1979) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 25 May 2016

​​Pop Movee Rating

This review examines the relationship between the 1979 theatrical release and the 2003 Director's Cut of the film sprinkled with some first-person reflections...

Ridley Scott's ALIEN is a benchmark movie not for one genre, but two. The film's science fiction setting became the yard-stick by which all other films thereafter (with the possible exception of Scott's own BLADE RUNNER) came to measured for creative authenticity. The film's alien killer allowed Scott to ratchet the suspense to maximum levels, with the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo picked off one-at-a-time by the universe's most single-minded serial killer. The film heralded the introduction of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver; one of the greatest characters of modern-day science fiction cinemas.

At some time in the early 1980s, I mustered up the courage to watch Ridley Scott's ALIEN...

I'd known about the film since its release, but was too scared to watch it because I'd heard how frightening it was. Remember, I wasn't even 10 years old at this point, so the idea of deliberately putting myself into a situation where I'd be scared out of my wits was not really appealing.

I finally mustered the courage after we'd been to a family friend's - the Broughtons - place for dinner. Their son, Andrew, was a few years older and he was into films and film making. To entertain my brother and me, Andrew gave us unrestricted access to his film magazine collection, which included the likes of Starlog, Cinefantastique, Fantastic Films plus a host of 'Making Of' books about heaps of different films. One of these books was the ALIEN 'Movie Novel', which, in reality, is a photo novel of the film. I took the plunge and decided to see what was so frightening about ALIEN. I remember studying the images one page at a time, taking in the key moments from the film - albeit as still photographs! There's no doubt in my mind that studying this book so intently prepared me for the actual movie, so the "shocks" and the general sense of unease created by the film were diminished because, when I finally saw the film, I knew what was coming.

With the "fright & shock" element removed, ALIEN was not as daunting a film as what I had made it out to be in my head. I remember thinking that it was quite a slow-moving affair compared to STAR WARS (1977). ( Of course, at this time, everything was slow compared to STAR WARS ...)

Over the years, I have watched Alien a handful of times and I've come to appreciate the 1979 version of this film. Apart the the chest-burster scene, the film is restrained in its use of "horror" to uses suspense by way of reaction-shots so the story can be build to its conclusion. The biggest question I always ask myself is whether Alien is science fiction blended with horror or whether its horror blended with science fiction?

Science fiction is a hard genre to define, but I do like Robert A. Heinlein's definition from his 1959 article 'Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues' ...

realistic specultion about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of scientific method.

The story is set in the future aboard a space tug responsible for bringing cargo back to Earth. I believe this to be a plausible future event, so I'd give it a tick in favour of science fiction.
​
The story involves the discovery of an extra-terrestrial life-form, which current scientific method suggests is not a case of 'if', but 'when' humans discover they are not alone in the universe. So, it's a tick on that one.

The story concludes with the viewer safe in the knowledge that humanity's tenacity and adaptability helps us prevail in the face of adversity, so it makes for compelling drama; something that, I believe, good science fiction aspires to achieve.

Horror, on the other hand, is about tapping into people's fears and playing on them. By the nature of its content, the horror genre's finishing point tends to end on a more downbeat note than science fiction.

Everytime I think about the pros and cons of ALIEN, I end up, in my own mind at least, concluding that it is science fiction with a terrifying antagonist.

So, when the opportunity presented itself to upgrade the 'Alien Quadroligy' from DVD to Blu-ray for a mere $35, I jumped at the chance. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake ...
​
With my new Blu-ray disc in hand, I decided to watch the 2003 Director's Cut of ALIEN. I had read about the insertion of scenes that had been excised from the original film, so I was curious to see whether this changed the story or any of the characters in any way.

So, what did I make of the 2003 Director's Cut of Alien?

The film and its story are the same as the 1979 version. Unlike BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT, this Ridley Scott Director's Cut reinstates a couple of scenes that had been removed because they slowed the film's pace at important moments. All of things that made the 1979 version of the film an important piece of cinematic science fiction at that time are left in tact. As with all Scott film's, the design is incredibly detailed. Unlike many of Scott's films, however, the acting ensemble make the story believable. 

ALIEN boasts a unique mix of American and British acting talent and was the film that introduced audiences to Sigourney Weaver. Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm & Veronica Cartwright rounded out the crew of the Nostromo and the rapport that's established between them in the first 40 minutes of the film is what really makes you care what happens to them once the Alien is loose aboard the ship.

While ALIEN was a landmark role for Weaver, I've always liked Ian Holm's Ash, Yaphet Kotto's Parker and Harry Dean Stanton's Brett. Holm, arguably, had the hardest job - acting as an android that is meant to act like a human. While Kotto and Stanton's characters provide a blue-collar element that makes you feel sorry for these two guys who just want to be paid for doing their job, only to wind-up being terrorised and killed by an 8ft Alien!

So, the film's intensity remains, but the Blu-ray format exposes flaws that aren't as obvious in other formats because of the 1080p resolution. The most obvious flaw is the Alien itself. Where the murky nature of 35mm film on the big screen and lower-resolution transfers to DVD provide the xenomorph with inadvertent camouflage, the restored 1080p high-resolution transfer exposes the creature as an actor in a rubber suit. This is most obvious towards the end of the film when the Alien attacks Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright). The higher-resolution makes the alien look like a man in a suit who's struggling to get any forward momentum; kind of like the lumbering Frankenstein-monster of the 1931 Boris Karloff film. Ridley Scott did take the opportunity to insert several scenes of note back into the Director's Cut.

The insertion of previously deleted scenes don't really do much for the film either. The key scene to be re-inserted is where Ripley finds Dallas and Brett still alive but cocooned by the Alien; suggesting that they may be turned into alien larvae, face-huggers or maybe even just digested as food by the alien at some time in the future. It's not really clear why they've been cocooned and doesn't really add anything meaningful to the story. By this stage of the film, the viewer knows that Ripley is the only crew member left, not including Jones the cat, and it's a matter of how she escapes from the xenomorph.

The other scene to be re-inserted occurs earlier in the film, when Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) arrive back at the Nostromo with the face-hugger attached to Kane (John Hurt). Ripley refuses to let them back on the ship, but is over-ridden by Ash (Ian Holm). Once back inside, both Dallas and Lambert give Ripley a serve of verbal and physical abuse at her determination to not let Kane back on the ship. The scene positions Ripley as central to the story much earlier than the theatrical version.

Would I recommend this version over the original?

The short answer is: no.

The 1979 version remains an excellent piece of film-making and there was no real need to alter it. The fact that footage that was originally excised from the film still existed was fortunate and a good opportunity to create a "Director's Cut" of the original film to compliment the "Director's Cuts" that had been included for the other three films in the "Quadroligy" Blu-ray release.

ALIEN is one science fiction film best viewed in its 1979 version on the big screen with all the murkiness of the original 35mm format that made audiences the world over truly believe that "In space, no one can hear you scream".

ALIEN (1979) USEFUL LINKS

Alien (film) - Wikipedia
​Alien (1979) - IMDb
​Alien (1979) - Rotten Tomatoes

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