Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

AT THE MOVIES Alien Seduced by fear By Lisa Jensen Just when I thought it was safe to go back into space, when Close Encounters Of The Third Kind had reassured us that extraterrestrial beings were really just friendly little guys, along comes Alien. Conceived and written by Dan O'Bannon (collaborator with John Carpenter on the cultish low-budget space farce Dark Star) and directed by Ridley Scott (the meticulous Englishman whose first feature was the ravishing The Duellists), this futuristic adult thriller has been sniffingly dismissed by many critics as a gratuituous shock-monger with no redeeming social importance, a trashy Bmovie with expensive pretentions. In fact, Alien proudly acknowledges its debt to the low-budget sci-fi/horror genre out of which it so logically and obviously evolves. O'Bannon and Scott also fully understand that the B-movies often have the most direct and provocative impact on our imaginations. Alien is similar in structure to It: The Terror From Beyond Space, in which a handful of humans aboard a spacecraft travelling toward earth are menaced by a murderous alien being that can’t be killed. And, like Howard Hawks’ classic The Thing which, with its wry dialogue and coherent character development, was an uncommonly intelligent example of the breed, Alien is a most uncommon shocker that leaves the scare tactics of shark operas and demonic children far behind. It’s certainly an exercise in the genre, but one that shrewdly takes the standard monster movie format to its most emotionally draining and technologically sophisticated extremes while bringing the art of visual cinema into a new realm of impressionistic imagination. In some undisclosed future time, the civilian space tanker Nostromo heads toward Earth, hauling an immense oil refinery through deep silent space from some remote outpost. With the five-man, two-woman crew frozen in suspended animation during the long voyage home, the ship is run by its humming central computer, Matrix, called “Mother.” When Mother picks up a weak signal that might be an SOS from a nearby unex-plored planet, the crew is automatically alerted. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), executive officer Kane (John Hurt) and 8 TAKE ONE Can you spot the android in this picture? navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright | of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers fame), investigate the forboding storm-tossed | planetary surface. Within the fossilized remains of an enormous derelict spacecraft belonging to some unknown race, they discover a pulsating breeding ground of ominous alien pods, one of which suddenly hatches a weird, amorphous creature that attaches itself parasitically to one of the astronauts. Back on the ship the murderous being gets loose and the film develops into a gruesome and deadly game of cat-and-mouse with hopeless odds: when wounded, the alien bleeds acid strong enough to dissolve the entire ship and it seems to grow stronger and bigger with each human victim. Designed by Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger, the alien is a constantly | evolving, always half-glimpsed nightmare of teeth, tentacles and claws, a bizarre distillation of the things we find most creepy in daily life—spiders, snakes, | eels, jellyfish. Piercing the silence of space with the sinister rasp of an insect in dry grass, the creature may appear as small as a crab or as big as a man and, although it evidently exists to destroy (a horror movie convention we must accept for its . own sake since, unfortunately, the’ motives and origin of the alien are never developed), it’s no “mindless eating machine.” Its strategies are on the contrary quite diabolically clever. In stark contrast, there’s the remarkable ordinariness of the Nostromo crew (including Sigourney Weaver as communications officer Ripley, Ian Holm as scientist Ash, and Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto as maintenance engineers Brett and Parker). These people are a far cry from your typical swashbuckling space heroes. When they wake up, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed from their deep-freeze nap, groping for coffee and mumbling banal small talk, they look like the people you meet every day at the office or on the assembly line. The meandering ebb and flow of the dialogue has a natural unrehearsed effect, and when these very familiar people are threatened by the inconceivable alien terror, we feel personally violated. Having so carefully set the stage, Scott and O'Bannon throw in enough tricks to keep us off balance, playing ruthlessly on our nerves and expectations. Some of the most unsettling plot twists depend for their effects on our comfortable