My favorite crew member has always been Yaphet Kotto’s Parker, who is at first vulgar, surly, and perpetually mindful of his paycheck, all with a loaded grin, then proves to be the most capable when things get out of control. We get no background stories on any of them, which is fitting, although we get the feeling he’s probably been in more from-the-hip crises than anyone else. Tom Skerritt, as the captain, is more an exasperated shift manager than a leader, while second officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is tough, even ruthless, despite how often her authority is ignored. As science officer Ash, Ian Holm is an obvious beta male, yet constantly reminding the crew, through sighs and clipped, precise speech, what a burden his intelligence is around minds like theirs.
“Alien” owes an enormous debt to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” On its most basic level, “Alien” takes the lurking fear of the unknown which prowls the internal spaces of “2001” (and Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”) and gives it teeth, shape, and a lot of drool. To “Alien’s” enormous credit the explicitness of that shape is put off for as long as possible. Both movies feature grey spaceships coming on screen from the right and both movies give important roles to cold, omnipresent computers (“2001” has HAL, “Alien” has Mother). Both movies have a similar calm, chilling pace, and Jerry Goldsmith’s beautifully creepy score serves much the same purpose as Gyorgy Ligeti’s atmospheric music. The “Nostromo” shares many clean-white spaceship bits with the “Discovery,” with similar computer read-outs. Both movies set important scenes beneath the awesome, ominous shadow of giant ringed planets, and “Alien” even ends with a stargate sequence of sorts.
Both movies feature characters that are completely at home with technology that would overwhelm us, but in Scott’s movie so much of it is dirty and worn-out. Kubrick’s film is about technology absorbing people, while Scott’s features organisms indistinguishable from machines, so everything is messy, smoky, murky, leaky, slippery, and, if you don’t look carefully where you’re going, covered in goo. If in the “Terminator” movies we do battle with machines, people in “Alien” are so comfortable with them that they are birthed by one, call it Mother, and they run to her in time of need. There is one more machine, with whom the crew is quite intimate, and they don’t even know it (and I won’t say what that machine is). Capitalism is perhaps the largest machine of all, embodied by the monomaniacal company that owns the “Nostromo” and the lives of her crew, although the theme of capitalism squeezing the wonder out of space is explored more in James Cameron’s “Aliens.” (For more discussion of “Alien’s” themes, please read “Extra-Terrestrial Gender Bending and the Cosmic Catfight: ‘Alien’ and the Threat to the Nuclear Family.” Be warned: spoilers are included.)
Of course, “Alien” also owes a whole lot to the likes of “Jaws,” “Halloween,” and “Psycho,” in which stuff jumps out and scares us. Ridley Scott’s chief goal is to procrastinate this jumping as long as possible, to keep us on the edge of our seats and then smack us when we can’t take it anymore. At this, Scott is great. The appeal of horror movies cuts us too deep for my meager critical lens. I can’t answer questions like why should we like being scared, or why is Scott’s expert prolonging of the terror so satisfying and unsettling. A possible answer is provided by Bruce F. Kawin, a University of Colorado professor and author of “Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Films.” In his article “Children of the Light” he writes: “the horror film functions as a mirror or series of mirrors in which aspects of the self demand to be confronted.”
In a movie titled “Alien,” it’s hard to believe that any aspect of the self is the focus, but look closely (or, once again, read “Extra-Terrestrial Gender Bending and the Cosmic Catfight.”) The film is a maze of gender reversals, starring a crew/family led, even birthed, by a machine named Mother, only in danger because, as it turns out, a mammoth industrial complex prefers efficiency to humanity. The beast embodies that inhuman efficiency. The threats industrialization poses against the individual and the family is an old question, with no less than Charles Dickens as one of its earliest investigators. The beast in “Alien” is a kind of superworker, admired by machines and industry alike for its lack of inefficient human aspects, such as “delusions of morality.”
With big-budget, often visually splendid films like “Gladiator,” “Blade Runner,” and “Black Hawk Down,” Ridley Scott can be called commercial director, but this is no bad word. What are Hitchcock and Spielberg if not commercial directors? Scott is so amazingly good at it, and he shames the inelegant ilk of Bruckheimer and Bay. Halloween 2003 opened yet another Director’s Cut of “Alien,” I think the second one so far. Like most director’s cuts, the added bits provide interesting details, some necessary, some not, some distracting, some complimentary to the movie’s pace. Because “Aliens” has more to it, it might stand up to more repeat viewings than its predecessor. There are more characters to track, more crucial details, and considerably more visual business. “Alien’s” first viewing is its best. After seeing the other three movies, we’ve seen the beast in all its detail and we’ve literally seen it on the operating table. But, seeing “Alien” on Halloween night, and hearing the shrieks of that woman in the back of the theatre—that was supremely satisfying.
Finished November 13th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "Alien (2003 Director's Cut)" Back to home.
Extra-Terrestrial Gender Bending and the Cosmic Catfight:
“Alien” and the Threat to the Nuclear Family