The Alien Series

This series of films, begun in 1979, has been incredibly influential in science fiction, not least because of its central heroine, the redoubtable Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) who has battled her seemingly inexorable foe across three hundred years and four films. Four very different directors have offered their own spin on the basic "Jaws in space" concept of the original. The plot of each one is simple. There is a threat to an isolated community. That threat picks off members of that isolated community, one by one, until there is a final climactic showdown, led by Ripley, who kicks its ass. The end.
All around the edges we have the harsh, corporate world of the Company, the dissatisfied workers who find their personal safety compromised in the name of "bioweaponry", spaceships full of dull metal and fluorescent lighting, the relentless human colonisation of planets- a future that is mundane, harsh, unromantic and as far removed from the fantastical creatures of the Star Wars series as you can get. This is very much science fiction for adults. We are presented with two living species only - the aliens, and humans, and, as Ripley says in Aliens, "I don't know which species is worse. They don't fuck each other over for a percentage." The only other creature encountered is the fossilised one seen on the ship at the beginning of Alien. The humans we encounter are just as much Drones for their Queen, the Company, as the aliens are for theirs.

It happens, my dear, because that's what the Company wants to happen...Standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.

— Dallas in Alien

In additional contrast to Star Wars, the Alien saga is a creative property that has been passed very much from hand to hand, with very different teams working on each installment, and bringing their own identity to their entry. Ridley Scott and James Cameron are both primarily action directors - with Scott at his best when depicting hand to hand battle between underdogs (The Duellists, Gladiator, Thelma & Louise) and Cameron best at all-out special effects firepower. David Fincher likes to un-nerve audiences, denying them the happy endings they want (Se7en, The Game, Fight Club) and in his chapter works exclusively with his trademark rust-tinged palette. Jeunet's humour is dark, European, brutal yet cartoonish (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children). The one constant has been Weaver - who, despite being a fine actor with numerous and varied appearances under her belt, has never been more iconographic than as Ripley. Her vital screen presence is perhaps one reason why the excellent William Gibson script for the third installment was rejected - Ripley is in a coma throughout his version.

Stylistically, the films have done much to construct and develop genre paradigms, shaping what we understand to be the scenery of the future. Alien draws its mise-en-scene in equal measure from 2001:A Space Odyssey and Star Wars - Kubrick's sleeping pods, his omniscient, environment-controlling computer ("Mother", in this case, not HAL), walls of diodes etc are tempered by Lucas's representation of the future as "used". The Nostromo's landing ship's exterior owes much to the Millennium Falcon - shape, landing gear, perpetual need for repair - while the fluorescent-lit interiors are pure Kubrick.

It is testament to the creativity of the original idea that this simple formula has provided such a fertile ground for revision. A whole mythology, explored in the Alien vs. Predator computer games has sprung out of nowhere, and interest in the series continues to make it bankable. It is science fiction at its best - dramatic, human, perfectly realised and chillingly plausible to anyone who has had to contend with cockroaches.

(1979)

In space, no one can hear you scream

A horror film - that old haunted house trope - set on a spaceship. This chillingly simple idea was explored to great effect by Ridley Scott, in what was only his second major studio movie. The mining ship Nostromo - a nod to Conrad - is diverted from its homeward flight by a distress signal. They land on a seemingly deserted planet (known only as LV-426) to discover that the distress signal is coming from a ship that is very old, containing the fossilised remains of some alien race. Too late, Ripley deciphers the signal as a warning, not a distress call. This is a successful shift of the archetypal narrative paradigms of a traditional horror movie. A small group (the Nostromo's crew) are lost in the deep dark woods (space, and the atmosphere of LV-426) when their car (ship) breaks down. They go to the nearest sign of habitation, a seemingly deserted house (the crashed, fossilised spaceship), and, while the entire audience is screaming "Don't go in the basement" the most foolhardy member of the group (Kane) goes poking around where he oughtn't, and wakes The Sleeping Threat. Only the mise-en-scene have altered. Scooby Doo, where are you?

The first hour of the film is a slow build up of tension: the petty squabbling of the crew, the claustrophobia of the Nostromo, the bleak landscape of LV-426, the seemingly false alarm of the discovery of the face-hugger and its temporary attachment to Kane (John Hurt). Yet from the chest-bursting scene on (surely one of the most original and gory concepts in modern cinema? Rumour has it the cast were not told what was going to happen during shooing that day, so their shock is genuine) the movie is a demented chase sequence, with the speedy, horrific realisation of what they are up against dawning on us and the crew. Not only does this monster have acid blood ("your bullets cannot harm me!") it grows like a mushroom ring, quickly evolving from penis dentata to evil mofo with claws and a tail (NB I have never quite understood how the chestbursters - which are a foot long at most - can appear as drones just a short time later. Surely it takes quite a considerable time to grow limbs with joints? And an chitinous exoskeleton? And big bad teeth? It only takes around 4 hours, supposedly). The crew scream very loudly but no one can hear them. No one will help them. It is this last realisation that turns Ripley, a previously rather grumpy flight officer, into the finest hero space has ever known.

Ripley was a man in an early draft of the script. The decision to turn her into a woman - and to cast a relatively unknown stage actress in the part - has been one that has had 20th Century Fox laughing all the way to the bank ever since. Ripley begins as a cynical middle manager. She is not particularly to loyal to the Company who keeps her away from her daughter's birthday party, but she gets on with her job. She is one of those heroes who has greatness thrust upon her, as those further up the chain of command get chomped. Her cynicism is tempered with compassion, and she displays a gift for military strategy when under pressure. Ripley vs. Alien (in any form) is a perfect balance between protagonist and antagonist. She is as fierce as her foe, as lithe and graceful and sinewy, as intensively protective of her own, stronger mentally but weaker physically, as absolutely dedicated to her goal (interestingly, hers is destruction, theirs is reproduction). We love Ripley for many things - she is the only one seen cuddling the ship's cat, Jones for a start. She begins as a Company lackey, refusing to open the hatch when it appears that the Thing attached to Kane's face might contravene quarantine rules. When she is over-ruled by Ash, she protests, but is powerless to stop him from countermanding her order. He is the one with his finger on the "Open" button of the door, after all, and she is a woman. Yet it is when Ripley relinquishes the rules that she becomes a hero. She is the only character, throughout all four films, to consistently trust her instincts. Her instincts are the same as the audience's: "Let's get rid of it". What is most appealing about Ripley is her ability to reduce situations to simple binary opposition (live/die, friend/foe) and act accordingly. When there is ever any suggestion that it might be valuable to keep an Alien alive (and let's face it, there should tend to be at least SOME discussion over whether or not it is moral to blow another species entirely off the face of the universe) Ripley is unequivocal in her "No!" She despises what she sees as weak decision-making in the characters around her, especially when she has to pick up the pieces from some poor call made by a superior. Ripley is a kind of Everyworker, just doing her job, until the ridiculousness of corporate thinking causes meltdown. Ripley breaks free of the hierarchy to do things her way - in all 4 films she is never initially the 'official' leader of the group - and her way, stark and destructive though it is, is always the right way, indeed the only way, for survival.

Ripley's final confrontation with the alien on board the Nostromo shows her clad in a space suit (lessening that physical inferiority) and forcibly ejecting it through an airlock. She births it into a void, and watches it spinning away: brutal motherhood.

Ripley is not the only memorable character in the movie. Weaver has an extremely strong supporting cast of fine character actors - Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm et al. Their performances provide a chilling gravitas that lifts the movie out of the B-zone - they are not a bunch of nubiles alone in the woods whose one-by-one demise we whoop. They are rounded and real, effectively conveying boredom, anxiety, paranoia, bad habits (these people smoke at the dinner table! while others are eating!), vague undercurrents of sexual harrassment and stark staring fear. Very much like any present day workplace.

Stylistically, Ridley Scott draws heavily on 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly for the exterior shots of spaceships, and for the silence which accompanies some of the film's key moments. The sequence where Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) goes (alone - derrrrrrr!) to look for the ship's cat, Jones, is so slowly paced it is worthy of Kubrick. Brett pads from room to room, calling out "here Kitty!" through the rusted interior of the Nostromo. A series of close-ups give us his face, denying us what might be lurking in the surrounding shadows. As a savvy audience, we know he's going to get his, he has spilt off from the main crew and is wandering into the half-darkness. Every time the shot changes we expect to see an alien reaching for his jugular, especially after he finds a sloughed alien skin. However, like, Kubrick, Scott extends this sequence to its maximum time limit - Brett bumbles about, not mirroring our concern. He spends what seems like forever cooling his head and face underneath a water leak. The only sound is a diegetic throbbing - the mechanical heartbeat of the Nostromo. He's looking for a goddamn CAT. Only when our nerves are stretched to breaking point does Brett finally find Jones. Who hisses. Not at Brett, but at the gleaming, looming figure of the Alien, larger and more terrifying than before, appearing exactly where we have expected it to all along, over Brett's shoulder. Brett is taken, silently, his cries soon muffled, and we are left with a close up of the cat's impassive face, pupils contracted, one predator appreciating the hunting skills of another.

Scott also looks to 2001 for his space machinery paradigms. The hi-tech parts of the Nostromo are direct echoes of what Kubrick decided a spaceship should look like - all gleaming white interiors with flashing lights. The dining room, the central computer room, the hibernation pods, are all straight outta 1968. But the Nostromo also has a dark side - a full manifestation of Lucas's concept of "used space". Beyond the central whitely lit areas (ie where the alien hides and crew must go to find it) the Nostromo rusts, drips, echoes, creaks, decays. Mother, the omnipresent computer entity that controls the ship, is probably a HAL 10000. Mother, like Hal, sees all, knows all, and acts strictly according to her programming. Mother and Ash between them represent the power of machinery over humans - especially when that machinery is owned and programmed by The Company and serves profit over human interests. When Dallas (Tom Skerrit) requests help with dealing with the alien from Mother, the response is negative ("Insufficient data"."Does not compute"). Ash, as Chief Science Officer and resident paranoid android, is similarly unhelpful. He too does not compute the humans' chances of survival - they are so minimal as to be negligible. Even with his last bubbling breath he cannot offer a secret key, any kind of get out clause to the crew.

Ripley: Ash, can you hear me? ASH!
Ash: Yes, I can hear you.
Ripley: What was your special order twenty-four?
Ash: You read it, I thought it was clear.
Ripley: What was it?
Ash: Return alien life form, all other priorities rescinded.
Parker: What about our lives, you son of a bitch?
Ash: I repeat, all other priorities rescinded.
Ripley: How do we kill it?
Ash: You can't.

So, despite being surrounded by hi-tech gadgetry, the crew are on their own, eventually resorting to the cave-dweller's favourite, fire, to battle their foe.

Academy Award Nominations: 2, including Best Art Direction.

Academy Awards: Best Visual Effects.

 

(1986)

This time, it's war.

Whereas Alien was a horror film set in space, Aliens is a Vietnam war movie thus transplanted. And it's also probably one of the best action films ever made. Cameron, ever conscious of his B-movie Roger Corman roots, cranks up the tension to a near-unbearable level and keeps it there. This movie has everything - a love story, a buddy set-up, a little girl lost, a very haunted house, serious weaponry and MORE aliens.

The crew of the Nostromo had a hard enough time battling one Xenomorph. When Ripley booted it into space, there was a nice sense of closure, and she and Jones the cat could sleep soundly all the way home. Her final hope is that she will float around in space for approximately six weeks before someone picks her up. Uh-huh. 57 years later her frozen ship is salvaged, and Ripley is returned to a life where all the people she knew and cared about are gone, and only The Company remains. It promptly takes her to court for blowing up the Nostromo, and she is stripped of her flying credentials. They claim not to believe her tale of deadly xenomorphs, and laugh at her claims that LV-426 is dangerous ("there have been people living there for twenty years"). In classic narrative terms, a Warning is being very clearly Defied. Oops. Ripley is also very subtly repositioned - her opposition to the Company is now overt and articulated. She is represented as the outcast, working down at the cargo docks, dispossessed of status, identity.

Cut to Burke, the company man, asking Ripley for help. The terraformers (in scenes replaced in the Special Edition) have found the alien nest (sent by The Company to investigate, natch) and all contact with the colony has been lost. He offers Ripley a job, reinstation. She has no option really to accept, or resign herself to a life operating forklift trucks. We see it in her eyes, she wants adventure, she wants authority. Like some haunted 'Nam vet, she is drawn to revisit the scene of her moment of adrenalin, and finds herself returning to LV-426, as an "advisor", on board a reconnaissance craft (the Sulaco), with a bunch of pumped up Space Marines. And lots of guns. Lots of guns.

The Sulaco itself looks like a huge gun, priapically probing its way through space. Its crew are no less phallic; upright, with lots of gadgetry attached to their heads. As with Alien, the crew, thanks to Cameron and some fine performances, emerge as individuals, rather than merely xenomorph fodder. This is contrary to the generic conventions of science fiction, or horror, yet it tallies with those of a war movie, where the buddies' identities become crucial to our understanding of the plot, and our predictions of the order of their ultimate demise.

Ideologically, the film prefigures the revisionist Vietnam movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The pumped up, technologically superior marines are no match, despite their sophisticated gadgetry, for a simple organism, frequently likened to an insect. Initially they are derisory about "another bug hunt". but their derision turns to fear (Hudson:"Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man... That's it man, game over man, game over, man! Game over!") and they are picked off, one by one. The generic conventions of a war movie are plundered, from the rookie lieutenant whose indecisiveness and inexperience costs lives, the cigar-chomping sergeant who waxes sarcastic about "another glorious day in the corps!" We see the soldiers succumbing to naked humanity, as they realise that none of their weapons, or their training, or their attitude can ever really prepare them for meeting death face on.

Academy Award Nominations: Best Actress, Best Art Direction, best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound

Academy Awards: Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing

Alien3 (1992)

The bitch is back.

I cannot forgive this movie for stamping on the end of Aliens. Just when we thought that everyone had escaped and it was all fine, we find out that Hicks (no! no! that's SO unfair) and Newt are dead and that Ripley's escape pod has crash-landed on a prison colony planet populated entirely by baldheaded nutters, who, suspiciously, all speak with British accents. And she's brought an alien with her.

And yet... and yet. It is NOT a bad movie. It was incredibly disappointing when first released because it was not a gung-ho war movie, a reprise of Aliens with Corporal Hicks and Ripley leading yet another charge before sailing off into the sunset. However, it is a very brave piece of film-making, intertwining the conventions of a prison movie with those of science fiction, and killing off a major character in the process. It has Fincher's fingerprints all over it - unremitting gloom, orange hues, long, confusing parts, biblical undertones and a wilful determination to piss the audience off - just like in the wildly successful Se7en, Fight Club and now Panic Room. It has Weaver's most powerful performance to date. But audiences hated it. The box office figures speak for themselves - on a budget of $50M it only grossed $55M in the US, according to IMDb. Oops - who pays for the posters? Compare that to Aliens, with a domestic gross of $81M on a budget of $18.5M.

Yet, I repeat, Alien 3 is not a bad film. But there are some major issues...

 

Ripley

 

 Weaver gives her strongest performance yet. Her shaved head emphasises Ripley's vulnerability, her slow slide to the edge of the abyss. She is at once snarling and sexual, lurching from attempted rape to the arms of Charles Dance. No coy weapon-wiping. She is as intense and instinctive as ever, with her final sacrifice counting as one of the most moving moments of 90s sci-fi cinema. No worries here.
The Alien
 There's only one. D'oh!

It's mainly a rather clumsy CGI (it's the wrong colour - too green) rather than an acrobat in a suit. Therefore it moves funny and we don't believe in it

We keeping seeing it do the same things - ie whip very fast across the ceiling of a corridor and bite people's heads off. Jaws 3-D was more scary

The alien POV camera is good, however.
The Script

The story is OK, the dialogue absolutely sucks. This is what happens when the producers get to write the script.
The Editing
 Superb - apart from the CGI stuff - lots of mean and moody shots - candles being blown out, Newt's eyelash during the autopsy etc crank up the suspense - but the cuts back and forth do get confusing towards the end, simply because everywhere in the prison looks pretty much the same, as do the actors. We need some contrasts...
The Action
 I was never very clear what was going on - what exactly were they trying to do with the alien towards the end - why did it help to close the doors? We needed some key shots of a map, or those motion detector things from Aliens to let us know what was happening. You never know how far the alien is from having molten lead poured on it. Primary Directive of Action Cinema #38 - always explain your plan of action very carefully - to all characters and the audience. Everyone is confused during the final 20 minutes.
The supporting characters

Prisoners can make good, compelling characters. Yes. But not if they're seen trying to rape the female lead before being beaten back by one man and an iron bar. Nor if they all have British accents, but can't decide between them whether to go for the Brit or American pronounciation of "ass/arse". Consistency would really have helped.

Charles Dance is good, though.

There are some fabulous character actors amongst the prisoners (Postlethwaite, McGann) but they are wasted on the appalling dialogue. The fact that they all look exactly the same, especially when they have been sprayed with blood, adds to the confusion and our lack of concern for them as individuals.

There are truly great moments to the film - like the funeral, where the bodies of Hicks and Newt are committed to the furnace. Dillon's impassioned speech ( "For within each seed, there is a promise of a flower, and within each death, no matter how small, there is always a new life. A new beginning.") is given dark resonance by the cuts back and forth from the Rottweiler giving a new beginning to a chestburster. Great cinema. The autopsy of Newt is also harrowing, shots of bloodied surgical instruments in a bucket signifying the final violation of this poor child. The romance between Clemens (Dance) and Ripley is intriguing - but then he gets eaten. Boo!

  • Official Site
  • A critical review from Arrow in The Head
  • Positive, revisionist review from Inkpot.com
  • The Script (Hill/Giler version - the one that got made)
  • William Gibson's version of The Script. For some bizarre reason, rejected. It is much more in tune with the spirit of Aliens, but then... what do I know? I'm not a Fox executive. This one has Hicks (hooray) as the hero and deals superbly with the whole genetic engineering thing which is mishandled in Alien:Resurrection. Whyohwhyohwhy...

 

Alien:Resurrection

Witness the resurrection.

Don't.

 

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