Alien: Director's Cut

I remember when Alien came out, in the magical void after Star Wars but before Empire Strikes Back, a space inhabited by Superman and Mad Max and Saturn 3. (No-one could hear me scream.) I was 14 and not allowed to see it, although being tall for my height I could probably have got into the Barnet Odeon if I had really wanted to. Other kids in my class did. Scary movies in those days were given a provocative "X" certificate rather than a clinical 18.

I was technically too young for Aliens-with-an-S as well. The first X-cert horror film I ever saw was actually The Fog. I don't think I have ever seen a properly dirty movie at a cinema. I eventually saw Alien at an RPG convention in Hamburg. (This must be true because no-one would bother to make it up.) That is also where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it suffered from the same problem. I already knew all the jokes.

We should be careful of using the word Iconic: it too easily slips into meaning "a good example of" or merely "a picture you may have seen before somewhere". You have certainly seen Alien before somewhere and Alien certainly is a good example of a movie of a particular type. It was a key text for the SFTTRPG community in the 1980s, and not only because it was the first scary movie lots of us had seen. It defined the sci-fi role-play aesthetic; at least until West End Games gave George Lucas a much needed kick up the franchise in 1987. Big, clunky, grungy space ships; the atmosphere of an oil rig or a military base; about as far as you could get from one of Chris Godfrey's test-flights or Captain Kirk's command chair. It's a bit of a throwback; less the first movie of a new era than the final hurrah of the previous one; it looks back at 2001 and Silent Running and the now de-cultified but then indispensable Dark Star much more than it looks forward to the Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner. The first shot, of the almost infinitely long Nostromo passing overhead seems to quote Lucas, but Lucas was quoting Kubrick. (Mel Brooks was very late to the party when he spoofed it in Space Balls; Lucas had delivered the punch line twenty years earlier.) 

The film evokes a very specific atmosphere; of a blue collar crew who go about in fatigues, moan about their pay and regard the discovery of an a extraterrestrial life-form as a rather tedious additional chore: you can see the same thing in Blakes Seven, Doctor Who (say, in the opening minutes of Invisible Enemy) and even Red Dwarf. My taste runs to the shiny and the mythic, Star Wars first, Star Trek second, everything else third; but I nevertheless find the industrial aesthetic quite appealing. I felt it while watching the first season of the interminable Expanse: I would quite like to be the film noir detective on the asteroid base who flollops into a dry-ice-smoke-filled bar and says something cryptic to someone mysterious while something foreign plays on a holo-screen behind him. Which is to say, I would quite like to role-play that player character, if role-playing games were still a possibility. But after not very long I find it boring to watch. I have never loved Blade Runner as Blade Runner deserves to be loved; and I read Ulysses for light relief after struggling through Neuromancer.

Alien aspires to be a documentary; it is desperately in love with machinery. The opening sections; the first descent to the moon which seems to go on for slightly longer than forever, is an endless montage of gears clanking and airlocks unlocking and landing rigs landing. The movie begins with a camera panning around empty cabins and corridors for seventeen or eighteen hours. Star Wars showed us technology out of the corners of our eyes: we wished we could have had a better look at the Millennium Falcon. But that's an illusion; once you've had a good look at a big machine it stops being a cool idea and just becomes a lump of metal. The same, of course, is true of hostile alien life-forms. 

Alien equivocates, wildly, about its setting. This tends to confirm my feeling that we are watching a game of Traveller, modern people with modern attitudes playing at being spacemen in the Far Future TM. There are those little blotting paper cocktail ducks on the mess dining table; one of the crewmen has cuttings from a soft-porn magazine in his locker; everyone talks modern slang. They say "robot" rather than droid or replicant. The one thing that all science fiction has always agreed on is that whether you are on Arakis or the flagship of the Galactic Patrol or an alternate timeline where Hitler won, people will always drink coffee. There is not the faintest hint about anyone having a life apart from the ship; even in the face of certain death no-one mentions wives or girlfriends or kids.

Space travel, and implicitly space mining and therefore space colonisation is commonplace: computers fill whole rooms but still have green Amstrad displays; and robots are common enough that you can live with them for months and not realise they are not humans. The question of how Ash works is not explicated: does he eat and shit and sweat and if you prick him does he not bleed? (The crew seem to be reasonably okay about taking most of their clothes off in front of each other.) I don't think we're in a galactic empire; I think everyone lives on earth but there are a few mining colonies on other worlds, close enough to access in slower-than-light-space-craft with cryogenically frozen crew. The implication is that they've been frozen for months; not centuries; there is no danger of them returning to earth and finding that the monkeys have taken over.

I think that this probably works in the movie's favour. Star Wars, after all, gave us Old Republic and Evil Empire and Good Rebellion and left us to fill in the details: Alien gives us people on a spaceship who refer obliquely to something called The Company. The dialogue, such as it is, is sufficiently naturalistic that we feel we are getting to know the characters, just a bit -- not quite identifying with them, but voyeuristically looking in on their day-job and their meal-times. We watch them coming to messy ends. We don't feel that the scary shit is happening to us. Ripley is sufficiently individualised that she doesn't tend to function as an audience avatar.

We're told that on first night screenings, audiences screamed and fainted and ran out of the cinema; that they covered their eyes because they thought the steam train was going to crash through the screen. The trailer pointedly showed you nothing but a giant egg and scary music. My local cinema showed a photo-cartoon-strip of the first 20 minutes, up to the finding of the egg, and then added "There follows a twist so unexpected that it will have you glued to your seats with horror." It is fashionable, and completely untrue, to say that spoilers don't make any difference or that a film which can be spoiled wasn't worth seeing in the first place. Star Wars doesn't depend on your not knowing that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father; although the impact of Empire Strikes Back was greater when we didn't know. But almost the whole horror of Alien depends on the Alien's life cycle being a surprise: what the hell is that thing stuck to John Hurt's face; why the hell has it fallen off him; and what the hell was wrong with those noodles that gave him such bad chest pains. The two big visual body-scare moments lose their impact once you know they are coming: the baby Alien emerging from Kane's body, and Ash being dismembered but turning out to be a machine. The special effects in the chest-burst scene now seem dated; god forgive me, the creature that emerges seems cute; and moves like a BBC rat in Victorian London. The android scene stands up much better, but is not particularly horrific once you take away the initial shock impact. There is some Hitchcockian tension as everyone crawls around the space ship getting picked off by the monster; but I struggled to be scared. Even if you had never seen the film before, it would be pretty clear that everyone is going to die and that Sigourney Weaver will be left making an heroic last stand in her underpants. Were first night audience's really tricked by the false ending?

I believe that the Ripley character was envisaged as a male in the original script; and certainly her role isn't particularly strongly gendered. The creature that emerges from John Hurt is comedically phallic; but the chest-burst scene could be regarded as a grotesque parody of childbirth. The glimpses we catch of the adult creature is mainly teeth. You could say that the film is full of imagery of rape and penetration, of birth and violation and toothed vaginas. But you could equally say that it isn't.

I understand that the director's cut differs from the theatrical cut in only quite minor respects, and that Ridley Scott now prefers the originally released version. One scene is reinstated that was cut from the 1979 release: the section in which part of the ship has morphed into an Alien environment, and we see two semi-dead crew members trussed up like Hobbits in a spider-lair, begging for death. In the end, all the sequels to Alien, and jeebers there have been a heck of a lot of them, ultimately derive from this lost scene. If you are a fan of Alien, it is the Giger/Mobius aesthetic that you are a fan of, weird curly gothic shapes like fossils and cathedrals and seashells cast in jet. No nerdish 1980s coffee table was complete without a copy of the Giger's Alien art-book, with a clear picture of the full-grown beastie staring weirdly from the cover. But rather the point of the movie is that we don't see the creature, just fragmented images of teeth and odd shaped heads and maybe a tentacle and a claw. The sequels -- and the comics and the roleplaying game and the action figures -- necessarily de-fang the movie. The partly glimpsed nightmare becomes a dangerous predator. It might kill you, but so might a Klingon or a bad case of food poisoning.

So I think I feel in the sofa lounge of the Bristol Everyman the same way I did in the video lounge of the games convention.The scariest movie ever made? Yeah; right.

Someone once said that there were basically only two kinds of sci-fi movie. The ones in which aliens (or a comet, or a plague) attack the earth and everybody dies; and the ones in which aliens (or a comet, or a plague) attack the earth and nearly everybody dies. So: an alien attacks a spaceship and kills nearly everyone. The one survivor makes a log entry and puts herself in cold storage and goes home. Was that, you know, it?

Seven friends and cat all try find egg demon before spaceship go home but is hardworking. Who will life to escaping? Who is bad milk blood robot? Scream not working because space make deaf.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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