In this post I’ll be reviewing the famous sci-fi/horror movie Alien directed by Ridley Scott. The plot of this classic movie from 1979 occurs when a commercial spaceship responds to an unknown transmission from a near by planet. The crew goes to investigate the signal, believing it may be a SOS, but when they arrive at the planet they find a strange and unnatural structure. While investigating the structure, one of the members of the crew is attacked by a strange alien that attaches itself to his face, putting him in a coma and feeding him oxygen to keep him alive. The crew brings him back into the ship, where eventually the alien detaches itself from his face and dies. All seems good until the crewmember who’d been attacked suddenly starts to seize and a small, disgusting alien bursts from his chest, running off into the enormous ship. This alien quickly grows and changes into a huge and terrifying beast that hunts down the entire crew, killing them. Only one crewmember survives, eventually blowing the alien out into space. Whether you like killer aliens, gigantic spaceships, flamethrowers, evil robots, or just Sigourney Weaver in her underwear, this movie has something for everyone.
Before reviewing the cinematic aspects of this movie, I’d first like to comment on the accuracy of the science behind the movie. I found that this movie did an excellent job of sticking to basic scientific principles, that many other movies ignore, and the imagination behind those things that science does not necessary apply to goes above and beyond.
The first thing that caught my eye was in the opening sequence. The movie opens with a sweeping shot of the huge space ship, showing the back of the space ship, where the thrusters are located. I was struck by the small fact that the thrusters were not pumping out fire or even lit up the way that you see in movies like Star wars. The simple truth of the matter, and I apologize to any diehard Star wars fans, is that there’s no need for thrusters on a spaceship once it’s left the atmosphere. There are no forces to act against a moving object in open space, and, as we know from Sir Isaac Newton, an object in motion will stay in motion, unless acted on by an outside force.
The second point that I thought was very scientific, if not simply logical, was the cryogenic freezing chambers that the crew awakens from when the ship detects the unknown transmission. Obviously one could make the argument that, with the theory of relativity, time would be experienced differently for the crewmembers in the fast moving spaceship. However, if the crewmembers were to be awake throughout the entire trip, they would require a large amount of food, which would cost a large amount of money. For all we know it could be more economic to provide the crew with cryogenic freezing chambers than to feed them on a long journey. Perhaps this bit of science was unnecessary, but I hardly felt it was not scientific or even illogical.
SPOILER ALERT! The next thing I’d like to comment on is a particular twist in the movie that no one could see coming. A little bit more than halfway through the movie, we discover that one of the crewmembers, the doctor, has been a robot the whole time. The robot doctor is covered in a very realistic rubber skin and appears to everyone to be human. His purpose on the ship, as it turns out, has been to direct the ship to this planet and discover the killer alien and bring it back to earth so that the company funding the voyage can use it as a weapon. Now it may seem unrealistic that a robot could programed to exhibit all the intricacies of human personality and decision-making. In order to reconcile with this fact, we must remember that this movie takes place in 2037. I personally believe it’s more than possible that by the year 2037 we could have robots capable of masquerading as human beings. Of course we do already have IPhones with the Siri program, capable of answering questions based on internet searches, and even responding to insults with witty retorts. While that’s a far cry from humanistic robots, I still believe it’s a good example of how close we’ve come already.
There are many other scientific aspects to this movie that I would love to comment on, but at this point I think I’ll move on to one of the most striking aspects of the movie: the creativity and believability of the Ridley Scott’s killer alien. This alien is like nothing that had been imagined before or anything imagined since. It’s not your typical humanoid alien with a big green head and skinny limbs, nor does it have any of the hallmark Star trek or Star Wars alien characteristics, i.e. a human being with scales and horns, or big floppy ears and a beak. No this alien is truly a one of a kind. In its original form, the form in which it attacks the host crewmember, it most closely resembles a squid with sharp insect legs. When the crew tries to cut through one of the legs in an effort to remove it from their friends face, a green acid pours out, burning through the floor and two more levels of the ship below it. The doctor also comments that its skin seems to be made of a strong silicon crystal structure that replaces itself periodically, making it nearly immune to any severe climate changes.
The next form the alien takes, when it burst from the host’s chest, is even more disgusting and terrifying that the original. It is a small, brown creature with no eyes and a strange bulbous forehead and unnatural skin. Most terrifying are the alien’s large sharp teeth and the eerie hissing noise it makes before darting off.
The aliens final form easily the most impressive. It is first seen after one of the crewmembers hunting finds an odd skin, apparently shed by the alien, like a snake. The new form is probably around 7 to 7 and half feet tall, blue, apparently bipedal, although it’s never really clear, eyeless, and covered in sharp spikes. It has the same bulbous forehead and huge claws. The signature of the killer alien though, is its mouth. At first it appears as though the alien has nothing more than a mouth of long sharp teeth, nothing new by sci-fi terms, but when the alien opens its mouth, we see that its tongue is in fact a long white tube with another mouth, also full of sharp teeth, at the end.
At its core, Alien is a horror movie. It taps into a deep, dark human fear: the fear of being hunted by someone, or something bigger, faster, stronger and extremely adept at killing mercilessly; it’s the fear of helplessness. In his last moments, the robot doctor tells the remaining crewmembers that the alien is “the perfect organism”, meaning of course that it cannot be killed. This is the moment when the feeling of helplessness truly sinks in for both the characters and the viewer. Trapped in a spaceship in deep space with a vicious alien that cannot be killed, the only answer seems to be death.
This is what makes Alien, to me, a true masterpiece. It accomplishes the two tasks of wowing us with sci-fi creativity, and simultaneously scaring our pants off, with complete seamlessness. This is what sets Alien apart from any other sci-fi movie, or even horror movie for that matter. 5 stars.
