With a ticketty, tic, tac sound and a splash of digital copy on a computer screen, the ship Nostromo comes back to life. But for the ship’s guidance systems, everything onboard was supposed to stay inert, stay quiet, stay frozen in suspended animation.
But that has changed.
When the ship’s pilot, Ripley, crawls out of her stasis pod and makes her way to the meal station with the other crew members, her thoughts are simple: First she’ll feed her appetite. Then she’ll feed her curiosity. How close to home are they?
Earth and a long space-flight payday is pretty much all that any of the seven commercial towing crew members care about. With 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore in their cargo hold, the pay will be sweet. Well worth the months of sleep.
But once they’re done eating and chatting, this diverse group comes to an unpleasant revelation. They’re not anywhere near Earth. They’re not even in the correct solar system. It seems that Mother, the ship’s computer, picked up a distress call. And space protocol dictates that any ship in the vicinity must investigate. Even if it’s a cargo vessel.
So the crew of Nostromo grouses a bit (well, a lot, actually) before nudging their vessel toward the planet with the signal. It’s a swirling mass of storms and noxious gas. But they set their lander down with a thump, woosh, crunch. Breaking a suspension joint in the process.
While the two mechanics start repairs, another small group sets out for a nearby downed alien ship. It’s exotic, huge. Any occupants that might have been there are now dead and fossilized. So who are they rescuing?
Well, it turns out that the signal wasn’t a distress call after all, but a warning. A warning to stay away.
It’s right about then that the ship’s executive officer, Kane, stumbles upon a strange room in the deserted ship. It appears to be chock full of large, egg-shaped things. And when he approaches one, it slowly opens at the top. Something membranous shifts around inside. And Kane leans over the top to take a look.
The creature leaps.
It burns through Kane’s helmet with its acid secretion, and it wraps its crab-like legs around his face.
Then it jams a mucus-covered probe down his throat. In one quick moment, the crew of the Nostromo are ushered into a nightmare.
The crew members all put their lives on the line to help one another survive a deadly threat. In fact, it’s that self-sacrificial concern that causes several of them to break protocol and bring Kane back onboard after he’s attacked. (Though that turns out to be a poor choice.) Ripley, especially, proves to be a ferociously determined heroine who refuses to let fear or the xenomorph who stalks her have the last word.
The crew has a cat on their ship. And when things get deadly, they make several efforts to rescue the animal and protect it.
When one of their number dies, Dallas, the captain, asks if anyone wants to say a few words over the body before they eject it into space. But no one speaks up.
When the crew starts waking from hibernation, we only see the men. They’re dressed in diaper-like underwear. Later, when Ripley strips down to get back into the pod, she walks around in very brief panties and a bra. One of the male crew members makes a sexual quip toward one of the women.
During a struggle with a male crew member, Ripley falls into a sleeping compartment that sports centerfold-like photos of women with bared breasts taped to its walls. Then her assailant grabs a girly magazine and rolls it up to use as a weapon.
When the small team of crew members heads out to explore the crashed alien ship, they must fight their way through a violently swirling storm. They then find the fossilized remains of an alien spaceman with a huge hole in its chest. Another fallen alien appears to have lost its head.
The initial phase of the creature (called a facehugger) has some kind of molecular acid running through its veins. It uses the acid to quickly eat through Kane’s helmet. And then when Ash, the science officer, cuts the creature its powerful acid squirts and eats through several decks of the ship.
The facehugger also has a flexible tail that it wraps around its victim’s neck. And it tightens that strangulation grip if anyone attempts to remove it. Later, the camera looks closely as Ash cuts into the loose tissue of the creature’s underbelly.
The facehugger implants an embryo into its victim, and that internally planted creature (a snakelike thing with razor shape teeth) eventually bursts out through its victim’s chest in a painful and blood-gushing manner. It later grows into a large bipedal figure with long claws and an extendable double jaw with huge, razor-sharp teeth. One by one the creature stalks and kills its screaming human victims in bloody ways. In some cases, we see the torn flesh and spurting blood. In others, the rending is just off camera and left to our imagination. Blood drips from living and dead victim’s wounds.
In response, the humans create electric probes and a flamethrower-like incinerator.
Elsewhere, Ripley fights with a man who throws her around violently. He then tries to choke her by jamming a magazine down her throat. He’s stopped when someone hits him with a large, heavy object.
A human-looking android is destroyed, and it spurts a white, oily substance. Then its internal tubes and wires spill out like goopy veins. This android is hit with a flamethrower blast that melts its skin off.
The ship self-destructs in three large, nuclear blasts.
Four f-words and three s-words are joined in the dialogue by multiple uses each of “a–,” “d–n,” “b–ch” and “h—.”
God’s and Jesus’ names are both misused a total of 15 times (10 of those combining God with “d–n”).
Most everyone in the crew smokes a cigarette at some point. And several of them drink what appear to be cans of beer.
Ash notes that when the crab-like creature put its probe down Kane’s throat, it also secreted a chemical that keeps him in a coma-like state.
Crew members discover that they were purposely put in harms way for a malevolent reason.
Director Ridley Scott’s Alien did not aim to be a great influential piece of cinematic art back when it came out in 1979. It had nice, slick production values, but the truth is it was just supposed to be something of a horror movie in outer space.
However, this stylish little film has had quite an impact on Hollywood moviemaking.
For one thing, it ushered in a new generation of horror movie monster in the form of its sleek, shadow-crawling xenomorph—a fancy scientific name for the film’s titular alien. For another, it featured a strong, creeper-kicking female lead that movies hadn’t seen before. And it showcased a nearly improvised, Hitchcockian shock scene that had audiences leaping out of their seats.
Wrap all that up in Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger’s art design and you’ve got a film that, to this day, still coveys the isolated, incredibly creepy and quiet terror of deep space like few other films before or since.
(The only thing that arguably betrays this pic’s age is its computer tech; looking like something out of an ‘80s video game displayed on ship screens the size of a toaster.)
All of that said, however, first timers slipping into the dripping, tight corridors and shadowed airducts of the spaceship Nostromo, should be aware of what they’re crawling into.
Alien’s xenomorph creature, with its pharyngeal, telescoping razor jaws, is a gore-making machine. A lot of the true gruesomeness is kept just off screen by Scott’s seasoned camera work, but it’s still a bloody jump-scare parade.
Add that mess to all the foul language that the heavily sweating crew spits out and you’ve got a film that earns its R-rating, just as much as it has earned its movie-history stripes.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
