Alien (1979)

Wow.  My shoulders hurt after watching Alien, having been tensed for about two whole hours.  I had never seen this science fiction classic; now I wish I could relive the first time watching it.  At least there’s a sequel out there for me, also on McKee’s list.  Obviously this post, like all of mine, contains complete plot spoilers.  However, I believe this is the first movie I’ve posted about where they would make a big difference.  I personally would recommend watching this beforehand so you can have that experience too, although if you’ve found your way here, you’ve probably already seen the movie anyway.

The crew of the commercial space towing vessel Nostromo responds to an unknown radio signal coming from a tiny planet along their return journey to Earth.  While on the planet, an alien creature latches onto the face of one of the exploration party members and he is brought back to the ship for treatment.  Long story short, he dies and an alien is let loose in the bowels of the ship, with the six remaining crew members to try to fight it or escape it.

Scene analysis

Act I

Sequence: Going to the planet

• The Nostromo coasts through deep space, towing a gigantic refinery facility and 20 million tons of mineral ore.  The ship moves on autopilot as its mere seven-person crew is held in sleep for the many months of the journey.  On the bridge, a computer screen blips to life, flashing red, as another one activates and begins scrolling strings of numbers.
• The artificial sleep process ends, and the crew emerges out of the sleep state.  Over breakfast, the two lowest workers, engineers Parker and Brett, bring up a grievance over their profit shares for the journey.  The captain of the trip, Dallas, breaks off and goes to the central computer interface, a console called “Mother.”  Meanwhile the navigators and pilots head up to the bridge to direct the ship in what they presume will be its approach to Earth.  They soon realize they are not in the solar system, but somewhere far out in the middle of space.  Dallas comes back from Mother and informs them that the ship awoke them when it received a radio transmission possibly signaling intelligent life, possibly a distress call.  Parker now protests the unscheduled and possibly dangerous stop, which he claims is not part of his contract; Ash, the science officer, informs him the contract contains a clause that requires the stop or a complete forfeiture of shares, which shuts Parker up.

Sequence: Alien attacks Kane

• They approach the tiny planet and have a hard landing, disabling their ship for 25 hours or so.  They have landed near the source of the signal, however, so Dallas, executive officer Kane, and navigator Lambert venture out in space suits to see what they can find.  In a misty, dark landscape, they soon reach the apparently ancient wreckage of a ship, not of human origin.  The inside is cavernous but empty; they explore several rooms and see what seems to be a large sarcophagus.  Back on the ship, warrant officer Ripley works on decoding the radio transmission, and finds it not to be a distress call, but a warning.  The adventurous Kane disregards her call to return, as they are already in the ship, and lowers himself into a giant room of eggs.  He touches one, which stirs a life form inside it, and the egg cracks open.  When he leans in for a close look at it, the creature quickly attacks him and breaks through his helmet.

Sequence: Alien gets on ship

• The exploration party returns to the Nostromo with Kane incapacitated, but Ripley, following procedure, refuses to allow them back in with an alien life form.  Dallas tries to command her to open the hatch, but she refuses to put the ship at risk with an alien life form.  Ash, waiting by the hatch door, finally opens the door and lets them in himself, contravening Ripley and the established rules.
• In the infirmary, Dallas and Ash remove Kane’s helmet and find a green creature attached to his face.  They discover it has a proboscis going into his mouth and down his throat, feeding him oxygen, and is latched on to his face too hard for them to remove.  Dallas tries to cut its chitinous shell, but the creature’s acidic blood splatters on the floor and begins dissolving it.  Worried the substance may eat through the hull, the crew rushes down a level, sees the blood coming through the ceiling and then dissolving the next floor.  They rush down one more level where it finally stops.  Parker remarks wryly that this makes for a great defense mechanism, as “you don’t dare kill it.”
• Everyone resumes work to leave the planet surface as soon as possible, a bit more worried about the creature they discovered.  Ripley confronts Ash about his choice to let them in, but he defensively blows her off and professes a cool, academic air about the situation.  Below deck, Parker and Brett have forgotten their contractual issues and are now motivated to just get the ship off ground as soon as possible.
• Ash soon discovers in the infirmary that the creature has disappeared Kane’s face, and he, Ripley, and Dallas search for it.  They soon find it dead, and Ripley suggests that they leave it on the planet, but Ash insists they bring it with them back to Earth for examination, and Dallas defers to him.  Then, with the ship not yet fully repaired, but able to fly, Dallas orders the crew to lift the ship off and head back home.

Sequence: Alien kills Kane

• After setting the ship back on autopilot, Ripley continues to bemoan Dallas and Ash’s decisions, as the whole crew will now be put under quarantine when they return to Earth.  Lambert informs them that they have about ten more months travel to get back to earth.
• They then get a message from Ash, and head to the infirmary to find that Kane is conscious again, and seemingly okay.  He does not remember any of the attack, but does have a dim recollection of being smothered.
• The crew celebrates Kane’s improvement and the continuance of their journey over dinner.  The mood is much more positive, until Kane starts gagging and choking.  He soon is writhing in pain on the table, as the others try to hold him down and control him.  Suddenly blood appears on his shirt, then his chest explodes and a small yellow creature comes out.  Parker moves in to kill it by hand, but Ash stops him.  The baby alien peers around at them, then quickly scuttles out of the room.
• The crew ejects Kane’s body out into space, then begins to formulate a plan for how to kill the alien: using an electric shock pole and a net, they plan to trap it and throw it out into space.  They break into two parties and begin searching.

Act II

Sequence: Alien kills Brett

• Ripley, Parker, and Brett are searching one section of the ship where the lights have gone off when the motion detector begins whirring.  Ripley zeroes in on a small storage locker, and the three take positions around it and prepare to get it.  Parker opens the door and the pet cat Jones jumps out and scampers away.  Realizing they don’t want the cat to get lost and taken by the alien, they send Brett by himself to go catch the cat.
• Brett searches fearfully for Jones.  He chases the cat behind a pieces of machinery, but hears a noise on the other side of the room, startling him, and scaring the cat away.  He then notices a slimy yellow object and the floor, and picks it up to see the alien has shed its skin.  He next wanders into a large room with jangling chains hanging from the ceiling and condensation water dripping down.  He stops for a while to let the water drip on his face, then spies Jones in the corner once again.  He moves in to trap the cat, and just when he is about the grab it, the cat begins hissing at something behind him.  Realizing it must be the alien, he turns, but the alien now is a sleek black color, taller than him, and has a ferocious, grotesque mouth, dripping with saliva and containing dozens of sharp teeth.  He screams, and Parker and Ripley come only to see the alien carrying him up the chains and away.

Sequence: Dallas dies

• Down to five, the crew reconvenes to figure a new way to deal with the alien.  Now knowing that it moves in the air ducts, they concoct a plan to force it toward an opening into space, and eject it that way.  Dallas volunteers to crawl through the ducts by himself, with the others monitoring his location on a scanner and controlling the vents.  Realizing their weapons from before will now be useless, Dallas goes in with a flamethrower, hoping the alien will at least be repelled by fire.
• In the air duct, Dallas searches for the alien, with guidance from Lambert.  Growing more scared as he moves, she finally tells him the scanner has picked up the alien, somewhere near the third junction.  He enters this area, and does not see it.  Lambert’s scanner starts malfunctioning, and she tells him to stay put.  She gets it working again, and panics to see the alien is moving in on him.  Dallas starts scrambling down the nearest ladder, but at the bottom, the alien jumps out of the darkness and takes him.  Parker goes and finds only his gun, no blood, no signs of Dallas.

Sequence: Ash revealed

• The remaining crew members once more reconsider their dire situation.  Parker wants to just go kill the motherfucker, while Lambert is growing more and more horrified, pleading that they just abandon the ship and take the shuttle the rest of the way.  Ripley is now the highest-ranking crew member, though, and she counsels that they continue Dallas’ plan to trap and eject the alien; the small shuttle can’t take four people the rest of the way anyway.  She remonstrates Ash for causing this all once more, then goes to see if she can get more information from Mother, as she is now the ranking official.
• Mother says that she can’t reveal more about where they are, but Ripley overrides the block and finds out that the ship’s coordinates were secretly altered, and the mission changed to collecting an alien life form and returning it to Earth, “crew expendable.”  Ash, suddenly standing in the room next to her, tells her there is a very good reason for the change.  Ripley reacts in horror as it seems he knew about the change, and was perhaps even there to ensure the alien came on board.  She tries to escape him, but he traps her in a hallway and starts physically attacking her with superhuman strength.  Parker and Lambert come to her rescue and fight Ash off, who then starts wildly flailing and buzzing.  Parker bashes his head with a heavy object, which knocks Ash’s head off from the neck up, exposing circuits and wires inside, revealing him to be a kind of robot.  Ash grapples with Parker some more, but Parker finally manages to subdue and destroy Ash.

Act III

Sequence: Alien kills Lambert, Parker

• Thinking he may have more information for them, the three remaining crew members reactivate Ash’s head and ask him how to kill the alien.  He tells them it’s impossible, that the alien is a perfect organism, unhindered with conscience, remorse, or reality.  He says they won’t succeed, but they have his sympathy.
• They decide now to abandon the ship and travel in the shuttle.  Ripley heads to the bridge to start the automatic self-destruct process, while Parker and Lambert go to fetch some necessary supplies.  While they are stocking a cart, the alien appears, and savagely kills both of them.  Ripley hears their yells and runs to find them.  Their yells stop, however, and she thinks better of going to help them, and runs back by herself to the bridge.

Sequence: Ripley flees the ship

• She calmly begins the self-destruct process.  The operation has a 10-minute timer, with only five minutes in which the process can be reversed.  As she turns the switches, alarms start going off and steam starts coming out of pipes in all the corridors, somewhat impeding her escape.
• Ripley makes her way all the way to the shuttle, carrying Jones with her.  She reaches the last corridor, but finds the alien waiting right around the corner.  Completely panicked, she gives up the hope of escaping on the shuttle, and runs back to the bridge.
• With about 30 seconds left to reverse the self-destruct process, she starts flipping off the switches.  She deactivates them, then hears the countdown come and go: “The option to abort the self-destruct procedure has passed.  The ship will detonate in T-minus five minutes.”  Disbelieving this turn, she runs back to the shuttle.
• When she reaches the shuttle, the alien is gone from the corridor.  Cautiously, she enters the shuttle, then with about a minute to go, hurriedly starts ejecting the shuttle from the Nostromo.  The shuttle Narcissus finally detaches, and she collapses in the pilot’s chair as the Nostromo detonates in a huge explosion.  In her exhaustion, she can only whisper to herself “I got you, you son of a bitch.”

Sequence: Ripley kills alien

• She rises from the chair to set the shuttle on the rest of its course back to earth.  She then begins disrobing, preparing for the sleep on the journey back home.  As she’s flipping a control panel of switches, a black, scaly hand suddenly slams down and tries to grab her.  The alien is on the shuttle.
• Ripley yells then stumbles back into her only possible safe space: the airtight, closed off space suit chamber.  She closes the door and withers in fear.  Peeking out, she sees the alien again climbing back into the dark crevice above the control panel.  Ripley improvises her last plan, beginning to slip into the space suit and quietly zip up.
• She puts on the helmet, then opens the lock.  Almost petrified with fear, she steps back over to another switch near the alien.  Singing to herself for comfort, she sits and steels herself for the rush.  She flips the switch, and the shuttle’s external door flies open, sucking all the air and anything loose out into space.  The alien is surprised and jerked near the door, but then begins to move toward Ripley.  She grabs a grappling gun on her space suit and shoots the alien with it, knocking it out into space, but still tethered to her by the gun.  She throws the gun toward the door and hits the button to shut it.  The hatch closes with the gun stuck in it, and the alien starts crawling in toward the shuttle.  It swings around and begins climbing into an idle engine exhaust.  Finally, Ripley slams the throttle of the ship, blasting the rocket and sending the alien out into space once and for all.
• Before going into space sleep, Ripley dictates a record for the ship’s log.  She recounts the alien life form discovered, and the other six crew members lost.  Finishing her dictation, she strokes the cat and smiles.

One of the great things about Alien, which others such as Roger Ebert have also commented on, is the movie’s pacing.  There is a gradual overall rise in action — horror sequences become longer, encounters with the alien become more frequent — but it’s all punctuated by moments of calm, times where the crew takes stock of its situation anew, and makes their new plan.  The movie takes its time building suspense, creating fear around the creature.  The planet exploration scenes take plenty of time, as the three explorers trek through the misty darkness, through the alien spacecraft, and finally in the egg chamber.  By the time the egg explodes and the alien jumps out, you are wound tight as a drum.  We feel the same when first Brett is taken, then Dallas.

Indeed, the feel of the movie is quite different from the start to the end.  The opening scenes strongly reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the opening scene with tracking shots of an empty space ship, with no dialog for six minutes.  By the end, you think you’re in some Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, as Ripley fights off the monster with a giant flamethrower amidst exploding pipes and alarm lights and sirens going off everywhere.  Of course, Alien handles these action sequences much more moderately and eloquently than your typical action movie fare.

Accompanying the shift in genre feel (if I may term it such) is the shift in story focus.  The story shifts protagonists as it progresses, transferring from the crew as a whole down to Ripley herself as the crew diminishes.  Ripley is in fact a relatively unimportant character early in the movie.  The most interesting crew member early in the film is probably Parker, whose fixation on money disputes divides the crew between him and Brett, and everyone else.  However, once the alien is on board and it is clear they have a problem (Act II), the crew as a single unit is in this together.  There are no individual interests at this point: they know they either all die or all (hopefully live).  There are no splinter groups; there are no people refusing to fight.

This dynamic changes as the antagonism between Ash and Ripley grows.  Ash seems to make every wrong choice, flub every chance for action, and yet refuses to accept blame or defer responsibility.  One begins to question if Ash is sincerely just this inept, or has secret motives to help the alien.  The latter is revealed to be the case when he turns out to be a robot plant, placed there by the company to ensure that the alien made it onto the spacecraft and survived.  (This is a great example of insight in a story, where a revelation illuminates prior actions, and makes the story make sense in a new light.)  Ripley commands the three-man crew, which doesn’t last very long, until it truly is just her vs. the alien.

The biggest and most surprising difficulty I find in diagramming the story is in identifying the exact inciting incident, normally a relatively automatic step.  The inciting incident is supposed to be the single event or moment that throws the protagonist’s life out of order, that throws a conflict at them that must be resolved, that gives them an object of desire they must irrevocably pursue.  When exactly does this happen in Alien?  Is it when the ship wakes them up at the start?  When Kane gets attacked by the alien hatchling?  Or when the “chestburster” alien explodes out of his chest and escapes into the ship?

There could be arguments for any of the three.  The central plot, indeed the only plot thread of the film, is that of removing the alien.  The climax is undoubtedly the moment when the alien is shot into space once and for all.  So when exactly does this action to fight the alien initiate?  Their lives are first thrown out of order when they are woken up out in the middle of space, and have to investigate the distress signal.  This obviously leads directly to their conflict with the alien.  It could also be when the alien is brought on board attached to Kane.  A crucial moment is when the ship lifts off the planet with the alien on board.  The audience knows that up until then, they weren’t really trapped.  Kane was obviously screwed, but they could have still gotten rid of the alien by simply throwing it and him out the door.

But I think all of this is information that builds to the chestburster scene, which is the true inciting incident.  Knowing that the alien has acid blood, knowing that its skin turns into a very hard silicon material, knowing that they are out in space again, and essentially knowing that they are on board with an alien creature they know nothing about, all make the moment when the young alien explodes out of Kane’s stomach the pivotal moment: they were all somewhat disturbed about the alien beforehand, but now it cannot be ignored.  Now it is the problem facing them.  This inciting incident does come very late, time-wise, in the story, but the first thirty minutes of the film do not drag; Scott keeps the audience involved with a sense of growing dread, the poor group dynamics of the crew, and the putative plot thread of having to investigate the distress call.  I do not believe this early action counts as a subplot, but I could be argued down on that.  What are others’ views?

If the main plot is that of killing or removing the alien, then what is the story’s controlling idea?  This is not definite, but I think it must be something like “The rational, calm decision-maker prevails.”  A contrast is drawn throughout the film between Ripley and the other leaders of the crew, Dallas, Kane, and Ash.  Ripley, in the face of hostility from the other crew members, refuses to allow Dallas, Lambert and Kane back onto the ship when Kane is stricken with the alien.  It is a violation of policy, and clearly unsafe for the other crew members to allow the alien life form back on board, but wouldn’t most people bend that rule when faced with that situation, and your superior yelling at you to open the door?  She is overruled by the seemingly bumbling, inept Ash.  Everything Ash does seems to betray ineptitude and hubris on his part: opening the hatch, stopping Parker from killing the chestburster alien, and not freezing Kane when he is first brought on board.  He overrules Ripley because he feels his position as science officer, and perhaps as a male, gives him superiority to her.  (This is how he would be described before he is revealed to be a robot.)  Finally, the adventuresome Kane rashly leads a crew out onto the planet’s surface, and can’t help himself from looking up close at one of the alien’s eggs, which is how he gets attacked.  Ripley’s value system and decision-making contradicts all three of these, and it is what saves her.

This film also demonstrates, for the first time in this blog I think, that the controlling idea is not to be thought of as the moral of the story.  Certainly Alien does not have a moral.  When Ripley escapes, she has not really triumphed over evil, or won vindication for herself.  She has simply been the only one to survive the encounter with this horrible space creature.  The controlling idea expresses why she was the one to live.  It informs every major incident along the way, every major decision taken by characters, and their consequences.  We can imagine the writers of Alien using this controlling idea statement to work out the story, building the plot turns around it to demonstrate its truth.  The controlling idea is not the moral, but it unifies the story, gives it a single direction.

Alien really does belong in the canon of great sci-fi films that can be enjoyed by the wider culture (not true of all science fiction).  This film, in my mind, also illuminates a connection between science fiction and Westerns, which is the hostility of space itself.  In Westerns, the unsettled land between towns always represents danger.  It is a hot, barren desert, offering no protection, no nourishment, and on top of that, plenty of things that could hurt you, like rattlesnakes, scorpions, and bandits.  Any time a character troops out into the desert, they are putting themselves at risk.  What if you get robbed?  What if your horse dies, or breaks its leg?  What if you drop your canteen and it breaks on the ground?  Once out in the desert, a character has no one to turn to but himself for protection.  Similarly, the Nostromo is ten months away from earth in deep space.  It was diverted from its course, so now is not even on a normal shipping route traveled by humans.  The crew is so remote from help that radio contact with other humans is not even possible.  They are trapped in the cold, dark void of space, with no one but themselves to deal with the alien.

Such isolation helps focus the story down to just the characters themselves.  With minimal tools to work with, and only their brains in their heads and each other, they must figure a way to beat this alien.  This is why the story of Alien works so well.