Alien 45th Anniversary Review: Still a Masterpiece of Slow-Burning Dread and Terror

I have seen the first Alien on various home media formats — VHS, VCD, DVD and currently, online streaming. But I wasn’t born yet when Alien made its theatrical debut in 1979. This year’s 45th anniversary finally gives me the opportunity to watch Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic as it is meant to be seen on the big screen. And boy, it sure feels like the first time watching the movie in a cinema with a crisp-looking picture from its 4K remaster.

Alien may have been over four decades old. But even after countless movies trying to evoke the same look and feel with varying degrees of success, Ridley Scott’s seminal classic remains a genre masterpiece. The movie immediately captured my attention right from the beginning — the deliberate opening credits that slowly reveal each five alphabets of its title with Jerry Goldsmith’s ominous score playing in the background.

Scott takes his time to establish his movie as he tracks the camera slowly in a painstaking manner. We see the Nostromo commercial towing vehicle flying across space before the camera shows the interiors, all the dark and sparsely-lit corridors, the control room, the computer and finally, the cryo chambers that house a seven-member crew lying in deep sleep in the enclosed capsules. I love the casual approach of how these small-scale characters are introduced — the no-nonsense Captain Dallas (Tom Skeritt), executive officer Kane (John Hurt), warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), chief engineer Parker (Yaphet Kotto), engineering technician Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and science officer Ash (Ian Holm) — as Scott, working from Dan O’Bannon screenplay, showing their mundane routines. They are like blue-collar workers except they work in space.

The story proper only begins when they receive a distress signal that requires them to investigate its origin. What follows next is a slow-burning dread and after one of the crew discovers hundreds of mysterious eggs within the deserted alien spaceship. It’s the beginning of the end with the appearance of an alien creature reminiscent of a spider-and-scorpion hybrid a.k.a. the facehugger, which feeds on a human being like a parasite.

Alien is essentially a movie about survival and how an ordinary crew deals with the fear of the unknown. That’s what made the movie scary and at times, genuinely disturbing (the iconic chest-bursting scene quickly comes to mind). Graphic violence and gore effects don’t come in spades but rather sparsely as Scott prefers to emphasise a heavy sense of unease and atmospheric mood than in-your-face visuals. This might sound like a turn-off, particularly for impatient viewers or those with short attention spans. It’s certainly a different beast from what we see in James Cameron’s action-packed sequel Aliens seven years later.

But that’s the beauty of the first Alien. It may have been Scott’s only second feature after The Duellists two years earlier but he already proved his worth as an ace visual stylist. Watching the elaborate practical sets of the Nostromo ship and his brilliant use of noir-style lighting and shadows on the big screen remains a technical marvel even today. The H.R. Giger-designed elongated alien a.k.a. the Xenomorph is an iconic movie monster that we only catch a few glimpses of this otherworldly creature. Scott uses this less-is-more approach to generate effective suspense and terror as the Xenomorph turns out to be an intelligent alien that sneaks around and attacks its human victims at the right time.

Alien also made its mark for the way Scott subverts our expectations of who survives and who dies at the time of its release. Casting the then-unknown Sigourney Weaver is a risky but ultimately, rewarding choice. Her character as Ripley may have been vulnerable but she also happens to be an intelligent and level-headed crew member on the ship. The dread-inducing final third act is where the movie showcases her survival instinct in outsmarting the alien. The sight of a last-standing female survivor/hero may have been a common sight in today’s gender-equality Hollywood. But it was the polar opposite in 1979 as such a character was practically unheard of at the time.

With Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus currently slated for August this year, it was the right timing to revisit Alien and more so, on the big screen to commemorate its 45th anniversary.