Just the Ticket #139: Alien (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson, 

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

When I was originally deciding which movies to review in which months for the List Lookback, my only reasoning for reviewing Alien in April is that they start with the same letter. But with all of the references to the franchise that I made in my 65 review, and the obvious fertility bottomtext of the various stages of the Xenomorph life cycle (the most relevant being the eggs), April turned out to be a perfect fit.

In space, no one can hear me blog, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, send a beacon to the comments section at the bottom of this post because it's the only way to be sure my site doesn't get nuked from orbit, help out my ad revenue as you read to keep The Company happy, and use the air ducts to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can like what you see and receive the freshest Xenomorph eggs of news on my chest-busting content.

Aside from Pulp Fiction, Alien is perhaps the List Lookback selection that I have seen the most, and the movie I have the highest opinion of.

For those who haven't seen it yet, Alien is a 1979 sci-fi/horror film that follows the small crew of the Nostromo, a corporate-owned cargo vessel (property of an Earth-based commercial mega-entity, here referred to in passing as The Company) carrying two hundred million tons! of various metallic ore and fossil fuels through space on their way back to their landing point somewhere in Alaska. But a mandated detour to respond to an alert beacon on a desolate planet kicks off a series of events more terrifying than any of them (except for Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley and Ian Holm's science division officer, Ash, who has a few horrors of his own in store a bit later) could have ever imagined.

In addition to Ripley and Ash (whose secrets are both masterfully concealed for the benefit of first-time audiences and subtly foreshadowed for repeat viewers), the crew also includes captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt, Picket Fences), executive officer Kane (John Hurt, who would later star in Contact with Skerritt), navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright, who starred in Invasion Of the Body Snatchers the year before), and engineers Parker (Live And Let Die villain Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton, The Green Mile), and a cat named Jonesy (whom I spent most of the movie calling "Fuckin' Jonesy" because he is a cat--read: a living jumpscare and common sense detector--in a horror movie).

I won't spend too much more time on the plot itself because it's worth not spoiling if you haven't seen it, and an exercise in redundancy if you have.

Aside from having some of the most iconic creature designs in all of cinema and being one of the best horror movies ever made, Alien is a master class in visual storytelling. Like a lot of bad movies I've had to watch lately, it goes for long periods without dialogue (matching Bunnyman's six-plus minutes of introductory silence) and follows the cast as they spend much of the early runtime on idle chatter, runtime-padding menial labor, and genre-requisite bad decision-making. But unlike these lesser selections, Alien has no visual downtime. The disquieting austerity and retro-labrynthine, technological texture of the Nostromo's interior as the opening shot tracks through its white-paneled halls, H.R. Giger's contrastingly dark, wet, and organic-looking designs for the "Space Jockey" and his ship (which looks like a giant nipple ring from the outside and a massive intestinal tract in the inside), the way this thematic color scheme and atmosphere is used later to indicate shifts in threat level (including "Fuckin' Jonesy" getting his own, yellowish-themed room at around the Act II to Act III mark). The ship exteriors (done with convincing and intricate scale model miniatures) and the alien itself (also designed by Giger, and brought to life with a combination of animatronic puppetry and Bolaji Badejo's suit acting in his only screen credit before his death in 1992) are literally award-winning. The dialogue and menial labor give insight into the crew's personalities, the actors make them likeable, if not merely sympathetic. Even the stupid decisions they make (ignoring the implications of the Jockey's exploded chest, being curious about the egg of a foreign species, bringing an infected crew member on the ship and breaking protocol, splitting up to search for the creature, looking for Jonesy instead of the creature, etc.) have narrative justification beyond "this is a horror movie, so everyone needs to be stupid." They're blue collar grunts--essentially truck drivers in space--with their paycheck-to-paycheck livelihoods at the mercy of government protocol and corporate whims, so of course they would do whatever it took to ensure they got paid.

There are some continuity questions (where is the original Xenomorph Queen? How do seven people maintain and operate such a massive ship by themselves? Why can't Mother decide if she's a helpful A.I. with all the answers or a glorified Magic 8 Ball stuck on "Signs Unclear"?), and I have no doubt that if it were to come out today, it would be fodder for the incel shockers on YouTube because of its female protagonist and the Xenomorph's phallic design and penetrative killing style, causing them to scream about how it's "man-hating, sterilizing feminist propaganda" or some such bullshit. But these concerns and hypotheticals pale in significance to just how good of a franchise-starter Alien proved to be.

Maybe I'm gushing because of the trash I had to watch before this, but I love Alien, and if you haven't seen it yet, crawl out from under that two hundred million ton piece of deep coal you've been living in, and give it a watch.

A

Speaking of Alien being a franchise starter, when I was planning out the List Lookback, I told myself that I wasn't going to cover entire franchises because I was feeling lazy at the time, but there are four weeks in a month and four movies in the original series (not counting Prometheus or the AVP movies, which I already reviewed, or Alien: Covenant, which I saw one time but haven't reviewed yet), so come back next week for my review of Aliens.

Also, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, send a beacon to the comments section at the bottom of this post because it's the only way to be sure my site doesn't get nuked from orbit, help out my ad revenue as you read to keep The Company happy, and use the air ducts to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can like what you see and receive the freshest Xenomorph eggs of news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Looking back,

Bursting out.