Alien is a film that has been
analyzed in every conceivable way by every person to have ever
believed themselves to be worthy of analyzing movies. And the usual
interpretations are that it’s either a story about the horror of
rape, or a haunted house film in which the audience has an answer to
“why don’t they get out of the house?” (It’s space, so
there’s nowhere to go.)
I certainly don’t claim either of
these interpretations to be wrong. They both have perfectly valid
logic behind them. However, I’ve found myself connecting to the
film on a slightly different level, by focusing on what comes after
the rape; a horrifying, painful pregnancy and a “child” who is
destructive and dangerous. To me, this is fundamentally a story
about the horror of bad pregnancy and a bad offspring. Now go and
watch Prometheus with the assumption that it’s an inversion
of the Alien formula, and is about a repressive parent... it
just improved a lot, didn’t it?
The film is surprisingly realistic by
the standards of horror films, which all too often function only
because people in them are idiots. Instead, this film has people
making mistakes that seem logical, at least for a fairly
undisciplined cargo crew. It’s true the entire plot is set off
because they ignored quarantine procedures, but they only did so
because they feared for the life of one of their shipmates (John
Hurt) who’d been attacked by an alien organism.
As it turns out, the thing that
assaulted him had also impregnated him with yet another alien
organism which eventually bursts out of his chest and begins growing
and attempting to kill the crew. It’s a very simple premise, and
it works mainly because the film is so well directed, acted and
designed.
The main complication that happens
later in the film is the revelation that the company the crew works
for set up the entire scenario to capture an alien specimen for
research, and that their science officer, Ash (Ian Holm) is an
android sent to make sure that this is exactly what happens. This is
clearly a terrifying realization to the crew, but I’m not sure how
much it really affects the film for the audience. The idea of evil
Mega Corporations sacrificing people for profits is an old cliché,
although perhaps not as old when the film was made. Ash is
dispatched quite quickly, with his parting words wishing them luck.
In a more modern film, he likely would have been kept alive to
provide a secondary threat to the crew, and I’m torn on whether
this would have been preferable.
Eventually, the crew is whittled down
to just Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Any modern viewer will know this
because of Ripley’s now-legendary status as an unstoppable badass
movie heroine developed in later movies. Here though, she’s at
best presented as slightly smarter than the other members of the
crew, and her survival seems to be largely a matter of luck. She
spent most of the movie as one member of an ensemble.
The final showdown is a let-down.
There’s no denying that. Ripley blows up the ship, but makes it
out in an escape pod, not realizing the alien made it in there as
well. The Xenomorph costume is just too cheesy when we finally get a
good look at it, and the film might have been better off without a
final shock. However, that’s a fairly minor criticism for a movie
that’s otherwise truly amazing.
