When you come from a crappy region like mine you tend to hold onto the merest sources of civic pride with a pronounced vigour and trumpet them for the world to hear. With such thoughts in mind it is my honour to announce that Ridley Scott was not only educated here but also drew inspiration for the stunning opening in ‘Blade Runner’ from the surrounding industries. Not much you might retort if you managed to get through an entire sitting of ‘G.I. Jane’, but you’d have to concede that for the awe-inspiring Alien we should at least have named a library after him or something similar.
Alien stands unrivalled in successfully combining science-fiction with horror, and it’s difficult to know which of the genres to slot it into. Scott isn’t content with staging a simple story of ‘death stalking innocent victims’ in space; the success of Alien comes from the fact that he utilises his premise to its utmost effect. From the opening shots of the crew of the Nostromo coming out of hibernation we are clearly intended to feel uneasy at how reliant our human heroes are on the technology that surrounds them. That technology has dated remarkably well considering the film is over 25 years old (compare it to Star Wars, released a couple of years before). Scott throws us into a cold and mechanical environment where the noises and whirrs of the Nostramo add to the claustrophobic anxiety that steadily accumulates as the film progresses.
This is accentuated by the captivating special effects that bombard the senses when the ship makes its ill-fated diversion to the home of the aliens (deservedly bagging the Oscar for Best Special Effects). Again we know that John Hurt’s descent into the pod field is a stupid thing to do but the world that we’re thrown into is as mesmerising as it is repellent. The alien itself quickly established itself as something of a horror icon which will surprise first-time viewers of the movie as it doesn’t appear that often. With his time-bomb in place Scott moves the focus of the film onto the human struggle for survival, as the perfect killing machine takes its relentless toll. Though they cannot help but play second fiddle to the effects none of the cast puts a foot wrong. Sigourney Weaver really grows into the character of Ripley, becoming the sole figure of strength as things collapse around her but clearly terrified ever step of the way. Ian Holm is excellent too, never batting an eyelid as his part in the unfolding tragedy is unmasked.
As the inevitable siege begins the scale of their helplessness becomes oppressive. It’s obviously true that ‘in space, no one can hear you scream’ but Alien is wonderfully effective at creating a sensation of watching something that’s actually unfolding in front of you. In part I think this has something to do with the fact that our heroes themselves don’t know what they’re up against. To all intents and purposes they’re simple miners returning from work and the fact that they’re on a spaceship is neither here not there. This is obviously the first time that they have come across aliens before and when the killing begins you genuinely feel for them. Now their technology counts for nothing, and it’s always liberating to see humans knocked off the top of the evolutionary table for a while. A lot of things are feeding into this – a non-too subtle critique of the heartlessness of big business, a human indifference/arrogance to the environment around them, the unsettled status of females in the gender wars of the 1970s – but at its heart Alien is a bloody scary take on the future. The sum total of this is beautiful and hypnotic, captivating and terrifying and without doubt one of the best science-fiction/horror films of the 1970s, if not ever. And we still haven’t built him a statue…..