Here’s something to consider: Jamie Lee Curtis had her feature film debut in 1978’s Halloween while Sigourney Weaver, some small roles aside, made hers a year later in Alien. Both films are rightfully considered classics of both the decade and the horror genre, and both led to hordes or rip-offs and cash-ins. And while both Curtis and Weaver have had long and successful careers, it is interesting to note that Curtis spent a number of years in her youth as a “scream queen” sort of actress where, as near as I can make out, Weaver made more of a career out of playing formidable women that you’d be best off just not messing with. Both actresses have played a wide range of roles, but Weaver seemed to break out of the possibility of typecasting much sooner. I mean, has Weaver ever played a damsel-in-distress type?
Probably not, and I think it says as much about Alien and her performance in it that can lead someone to see why.
If I were to carry the comparison of the opening paragraph out a bit more, about the only things Halloween and Alien truly have in common is both feature an implacable killer that doesn’t seem to have any sort of motivation beyond killing anyone he or it comes across over the course of the film’s runtime, and both spawned their own franchise. Halloween is set on present-day Earth, and while Michael Myers is about as alien a killer as it is possible for a human being to be, the scares in John Carpenter”s classic have as much to do with an unwanted presence in the supposedly safe suburbs; there’s nothing of that in Alien. Alien is set in the future, on both an alien world and on a very dark spaceship carrying ore back for processing. Myers seemed inclined to hunt teenagers. The alien, later called the xenomorph somewhere (I have no idea where), hunts adult professionals who do just about everything right and still end up mostly dead.
And yet, for all that, Alien is often rightfully referred to as a haunted house movie in space. If we the audience see the xenomorph as basically a ghost of some kind, then the dark and damp Nostromo would certainly count as a haunted house.
Still, it’s Alien, not Halloween that made it to the Stacker list, and while there’s nothing wrong with Halloween–numerous sequels and remakes are another story–Alien is a far superior film, starting with a cast full of if not famous names than at least familiar faces. Most horror films show characters behaving stupidly. That’s not for a bad reason, mind. People make dumb decisions when they’re scared, and the characters in the film don’t always have as much information as the audience does. But in Alien, it’s hard to fault the decisions the characters made. If anything, the main problem is many of the smarter decisions they make are undermined by the science officer Ash (Ian Holm), the one who turns on the others in part because he’s an android programmed to let the others die so the company can get what it wants. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) consults the onboard computer for help before making a dangerous and ultimately fatal trip through the bowels of the ship. Ripley (Weaver) along with the engineers Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) come up with some pretty intelligent ways to deal with the alien invader, their only downsides being a high level of understandable ignorance for what they’re dealing with. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) may be on the verge of panic for much of the film, but she holds it together well enough to help out when she has to. And Kane (John Hurt) is at least smart enough to keep his helmet on before peering into an alien egg, something I can’t say other explorers in this franchise were intelligent enough to do.
It doesn’t much matter. The alien is just too much of an unknown factor, and Ash’s sabotage certainly didn’t help any. It’s hard to say how intelligent the xenomorph is. It’s mostly just strong and stealthy, a threat that only appears onscreen sporadically, and the closest I would argue the crew come to doing dumb things is usually when someone goes looking for the ship’s mascot, Jones the cat, and even then, Ripley manages to get away unscathed with Jones in a cat crate when she does it.
I’d say Jones is one lucky cat, but as a cat owner…yeah, those guys would totally sell out a human to stay alive. One of my favorite shots in the film is Jones’s passively watching while the xenomorph rips Brett to shreds off-screen. That Jones is, along with Ripley, one of the only survivors of the film doesn’t really surprise me any.
Still, while I often find director Ridley Scott to be hit-or-miss, this one is a definite hit. There’s a cramped look to the film, and like Spielberg and his shark, the less the audience sees of the alien, the scarier it is. It’s probably not a coincidence that future films in the franchise, even the good ones, are less frightening because so much more is known about the antagonists. Even as good as James Cameron’s Aliens is in its own right, the colonial marines are brought down more by sheer numbers than anything else. The one in this film is nearly unbeatable, perhaps due to a lack of real weapons, or perhaps due to the fact these guys are blue collar workers, not military. It doesn’t much matter. But knowing where the franchise would go is as much as factor for me when I see it. Weaver has some shots of Ripley in her underwear, and that just seems wrong to me somehow. Ripley is a tough woman, the script even written in a gender-blind way where Ripley could just as easily been cast as a male actor. And while Weaver has had plenty of sexy roles, Ripley never feels like she should be one of them.
But that’s the thing about coming to a film like Alien where the creatures and the main character have both entered the greater culture. I have often wondered how shocking the shower scene in Psycho can be for a modern audience that, on some level, must know is coming. The same can be said for the chestburster scene in Alien, a moment where most of the cast reactions are genuine because only John Hurt knew exactly what was going to happen. Today? Don’t most people know about that scene even if they haven’t seen the film? I mean, Mel Brooks parodied that scene with John Hurt in his sci-fi parody film Spaceballs. The original comes at around the halfway point in the film, and while the audience had already seen the facehugger, the next part was something they weren’t expecting. And like I said, neither did most of the cast. Veronica Cartwright might have almost passed out herself while filming that moment according to online lore.
It is all worth it in the end. Alien is intense, frightening, cramped, and full of good acting and a really bizarre creature designed by artist H.R. Giger. Like many classic horror films that spawned too many sequels, there’s a damn good reason this one managed to get even one made. It innovated a monster in a setting where many films had gone before but few as elegantly as this one did.
NEXT: It looks like the Coen Brothers’ first and only representation on the Stacker list is up next. Be back soon for 2007’s No Country for Old Men.
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