- Director: Ridley Scott
- Writers: Dan O’Bannon
- Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3oA4M7y
This week, we’re looking at the Horror Guys’ all-time favorite horror films, where each of the guys pick his top two favorite well-known horror films. This one is Brian’s #2 all-time horror favorite.
Synopsis
After the slow, creepy title sequence, we are told that the story takes place aboard the “commercial towing vehicle ‘The Nostromo’ which is carrying 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore.
The camera walks through the empty ship. Suddenly, a control panel lights up and numbers appear on a screen. A computer has made a decision: it’s time to wake up the seven-person crew. After they have a meal and recover a bit, Captain goes through a process to talk to “Mother” their computer system. “Where’s Earth?” Asks Kane. They don’t know, but they’re clearly not anywhere near Earth. They’ve awakened early.
Brett and Parker are the workmen, and they’re always complaining about their shares and doing the grunt-work. Dallas explains that they stopped because Mother intercepted an unknown transmission, possibly non-human. Ash points out that if they don’t check it out, they all forfeit their shares. They pinpoint the signal to a very small planetoid (1200 km) and set a course. They launch their shuttle from the Nostromo and head down to the planet.
Three of them suit up and go outside into the stormy wasteland of the planetoid. They soon find a ship that turns out to be clearly alien. They find the pilot, clearly dead from decompression long ago. Kane finds a cargo hold full of eggs. Meanwhile, Ripley decodes the transmission: it’s not an SOS, it’s a warning. Kane watches one of the eggs open, and he gets a nasty surprise.
When the three return to the Nostromo’s launch, Ripley doesn’t want to let them in due to quarantine protocols, but Ash opens the door anyway. They cut the helmet off, and there’s a weird creature attached to Kane’s face. Ash warns that cutting it off may kill Kane, but Dallas insists. They make a slice, and quickly learn that it has acid for blood. The acid eats through three decks!
At some point in the night, the face-hugger releases Kane and crawls off to die. They are sure that it’s dead, so they take off and return to the Nostromo. Kane soon wakes up, and everything is good. The end.
That is until they sit down to dinner and a new alien pops out of his chest. It gets away, and then they all have to go and figure out where it went. Brett lets Jonesy the cat get away, so he goes after it; he finds the creature, which has gotten a lot bigger, and a lot hungrier.
Dallas gets a flame thrower and starts hunting through the (very large) air ducts. The others watch on their little motion detector screens as it takes him.
Ripley goes to talk to Mother. Special order 937 states that alien lifeforms must be retrieved– crew expendable. Suddenly Ash is there threatening her. She freaks out and hits Ash, who has some kind of murderous breakdown. He tries to kill her. She notices that he has white blood– he’s an android! Parker and Lambert intervene, and Ash really blows a circuit. They figure he wanted the alien for the weapons division, since Ash had been protecting the creature all along. They wake up his disconnected head, and he says they’re all doomed.
Ripley gets the shuttle ready while Parker and Lambert go off for some coolant. Ripley then goes after the cat, never a smart thing to do. She finds the cat, but the alien finds Parker and Lambert. Ripley then activates the most complicated-looking self destruct system ever shown on film, which gives her a ten-minute countdown.
On the way out, Ripley passes a nesting area for the alien, where she finds Brett and Dallas, still alive and impregnated with baby aliens. They’re grown into the walls, so they can’t escape. Dallas moans, “Kill me,” which she does. Then there’s a lot of running around in steamy corridors when she finds the alien is between her and the escape shuttle. She can’t turn off the self-destruct, so she has no other choice but to make a run for it.
She makes to the shuttle and gets everything ready to go, with one whole minute spare. She launches, but the huge explosion still almost gets her. Still, the Nostromo’s been destroyed, so everything must be safe now.
Except, of course, it’s never that simple. She soon finds out that the alien has stowed away on board the shuttle…
Commentary
In the first shot with the crew, Kevin immediately noticed how young everyone looked. All these actors became iconic after this film. The ones who are still alive are all really old today. The computer graphics on the controls are really dated looking, but you can’t argue that this would be built for heavy-duty durability, so it’s made for functionality, not necessarily the cutting edge. Other than the computer stuff, all the sci-fi elements look good and have aged well.
The setting really makes this one. The ship huge, yet the living area is fairly small. Even the launch they take to the planet is immense. Everything is dirty and well-used, while the technology is futuristic, but lived-in. The camera shows us that there could be danger around every creepy, dark corridor. The cast is small, and we quickly learn everyone’s names and their jobs, which also means that we can get invested in the characters, at least a little bit. We don’t really get to know much about these people, but we can easily tell them apart, and they all have distinctive personalities.
The chest-burster scene couldn’t be any more intense, largely due to John Hurt and Yaphet Kotto’s reactions. The battle with Ash is almost as good; one of those WTF moments in a film that no one saw coming. They run all over the ship with the flame thrower, but no one ever gets a shot off where it matters. Would it have even worked? We’ll never know.
The pacing, the rising tension, the sets, the creature design (all three of them), and the characters all make this one of the best horror films ever.