Science fiction films traditionally offered us glimpses of a golden future age, all high tech gadgetry, silver domed cities, vast space ships and the promise of great things. Even films such as Star Wars for all its good verse evil struggle is an innocent pantomime set in a simplistically polarised, clean and clear cut world. The bad guys are bad through choice, the good guys serve a higher power and everything is easily divided into its camps. Then in 1979 a film came along that changed the way science fiction looked forever. With Aliens this naïve view of the future was replaced by a darker vision, a vision of a world no better or worse than the one we live in, technology may have moved on but at the same time the setting is familiar in many ways. Taking place total in one small part of a massive mining ship a long way from home, Alien offers us a futuristic world but with all the grime and dirt that you find in today's world. The ship Nostromo for all its futuristic nature is a factory ship, populated by people just doing their jobs for the required rate of pay. No light sabres, no vast ships saving the forests, no teleports and no psychic powers and no one boldly going anywhere, just a possible slice of future reality. The ship is dirty, wet and unpleasant as are the service corridors and gantries of all factories and there is much on show here that is not a million miles away from the familiar industrial decay and cold
metal of today's work place.
The plot is straight forward and like "The Thing" and even "Jaws" is about a small isolated group of people battling against a dangerous foe from a totally different world and battling for their very survival. Heading home from a routine mining expedition the ship picks up on a distress beacon, which according to company policy has to be investigated. Some of the crew investigate a wrecked space ship and when one of them is attacked, their trouble begins. Back on the ship the crewmember in question appears to make a full recovery, but in a scene that has become famous in cinema history, a creature bursts forth and escapes into the ship. The rest of the film is a cat and mouse game played out between the ever depleting crew and the rapidly growing adversary. It's a small story, a crew of seven, one ship, one alien and not forgetting a cat, but like all good films it's not the originality of the plot that immortalises it but the way it is presented to you. The film neatly combines slow burning suspense with action and its obvious that Ridley Scott fully understands Hitchcock's famous bomb under the table statement, (in short, if it goes off, that's action, if it doesn't, that's suspense). In an age where films seem to be high on action, special effects and a chance to show case the latest break through in film making, Alien slowly gathers pace, piling up suspense, atmosphere and anticipation in bucket loads, making the end of the film when we actually get up close and personal with the now fully grown beast all the more horrific.
Its difficult to know what genre the film sits more comfortably in. It is science fiction in that it is set in a future time, but as I said in the opening, it's a world that we would have no trouble buying into. Its also a horror but manages to do its work by playing on the fact that we don't see the creature in much detail for much of the film. Its not the creatures attacks that make for the horror, it's the waiting for the attacks to come. In order to have a worth while pay off you need to have a proper build up and a more modern film would probably run too quickly to deliver the goods, here though the pace and patients really pays dividends.
Having an enviable cast list obviously helps any film and here although none of them at the time would be regarded as really big names, they were all well respected and more than capable of the task at hand.. The lead role of no nonsense flight officer Ripley really put Sigourney Weaver on the map although it was the sequel "Aliens" that established her as the all action hero. Her she plays a more subdued role of just one of the team, though hints of her xenophobic obsession with the destruction of these alien killers is already clear. Having her as the main protagonist was a clever twist. The better-known Tom Skerritt had top billing and the audience of 1979 automatically expected him to be the focus of the film. Oddly enough although this film moved Weaver on to big things, I have to say that her acting her is probably the least impressive and least consistent, but that maybe because the standards being set around her are so high. Being that the number of actors is so small there is enough room to personalise the crew. Ian Holms clinical science officer seems to have ice in his veins, John Hurts plays his part with a gallows humour and the double act of dogs bodies Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto set up a real shop floor double act, grumbling about, bonuses, bosses and …well everything. Completing the line up is Veronica Cartwright as the highly-strung Navigator who represents how you and I would react to the growing terror, total hysteria. And if a good cast list were not enough Scott enlisted Michael Seymour and artist H.R. Giger to create the look of the film and it has never been bettered by any of the scores of copycats that have followed. Seymour's creation of a dark labyrinth of corridors funnel the tension and Giger's alien creation remain one of the most memorable and terrifying creations in film history.
The director's cut of the film varies very little from the original version and has mainly been to enable a digital cleaning and a re-mastering of the sound and amounts to more of a promotional tool than a re-working of the film. In its way Alien, which was only Ridley Scotts second film, was as influential as Star Wars which had caused a sensation a few years earlier and not only spawned three sequels but created an entire sub genre, one that Scott himself went on to make his own with the awesome Blade Runner a few years later. This is a fantastic and original film, it has stood the test of time and twenty-five years on it is still your worst nightmare.
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Production Year: 2007 - Science Fiction - Director: Francis Lawrence - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Dash Mihok, Will Smith, Salli Richardson, Willow Smith
By transplanting the classic haunted house scenario into space, Ridley Scott, together ... more
with screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, produced a work of genuinely original cinematic sci-fi withAlienthat, despite the passage of years and countless ...
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By transplanting the classic haunted house scenario into space, Ridley Scott, together ... more
with screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, produced a work of genuinely original cinematic sci-fi withAlienthat, despite the passage of years and countless ...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Alien is the first movie of one of the most popular sagas in science fiction history, and ... more
introduces Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the iron-willed woman destined to battle the galaxy's ultimate creature. The terror begin when the crew of the spaceship No...
Alien is the first movie of one of the most popular sagas in science fiction history and ... more
introduces Sigourney Weaver as Ripley the iron-willed woman destined to battle the galaxy's ultimate creature. The terror begins when the crew of the spaceship N...
Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: 3-5 working days
Advantages: Excellent presentation of the film itself in terms of both image and sound; comprehensive photo gallery; interesting interview with James Cameron. Disadvantages: No Director’s Commentary; only one trailer included; no music audio options — essentially, this is not an extras-lite DVD, but it simply has nowhere near as much content as the Alien DVD it follows.
![Alien [DVD] [1979]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78531320.jpg "Alien [DVD] [1979]")
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