Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. Based on a story by O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, it follows the crew of the commercial space tug Nostromo, who, after coming across a mysterious derelict spaceship on an uncharted planetoid, find themselves up against a deadly and aggressive extraterrestrial loose within their vessel. The film stars Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto. It was produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill through their company Brandywine Productions and was distributed by 20th Century-Fox. Giler and Hill revised and made additions to the script; Shusett was the executive producer. The Alien and its accompanying artifacts were designed by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, while concept artists Ron Cobb and Chris Foss designed the more human settings.
Alien premiered on May 25, 1979, as the opening night of the fourth Seattle International Film Festival, presented in 70 mm at midnight.[7][8][9] It received a wide release on June 22 and was released on September 6 in the United Kingdom. It was met with mixed reviews on release but was a box-office success, winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, three Saturn Awards (Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Cartwright), and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
Critical reassessment since then has resulted in Alien being widely considered one of the greatest and most influential science fiction and horror films of all time. In 2002, Alien was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2008, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre, and as the 33rd-greatest film of all time by Empire.
The commercial space tug Nostromo is returning to Earth with a seven-member crew in stasis: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, and engineers Parker and Brett. The ship's computer, Mother, detects a transmission from a nearby moon and awakens the crew. Following company policy to investigate "any systematised transmission indicating intelligent origin", they land on the moon and Dallas, Kane, and Lambert head out to investigate the signal's origin. The party discovers that it is from a derelict alien spaceship; inside, they find the remains of a large alien with a hole in its torso. Mother later deciphers part of the transmission, which Ripley determines is actually a warning message.
Kane discovers a chamber containing hundreds of large eggs. When he touches one, a spider-like creature springs out, penetrates his helmet, and attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. As the acting senior officer, Ripley refuses to let them aboard, citing quarantine regulations, but Ash overrides her decision and lets them inside. While Parker and Brett effect repairs on the Nostromo, Ash attempts to remove the creature from Kane's face, but stops when he discovers that its extremely corrosive acidic blood could hurt Kane and potentially damage the ship's hull. It eventually detaches itself and is found dead. After the crew return to space, Kane awakens with some memory loss but otherwise seems fine. During a final crew meal before returning to stasis, he suddenly chokes and convulses. A small alien creature then bursts from his chest, killing him, and escapes into the ship.
After ejecting Kane's body out of an airlock, the crew attempts to locate the creature with tracking devices and kill it. Brett follows the crew's pet cat, Jones, into a landing leg compartment,[10] where the now fully-grown alien attacks Brett and disappears with his body. The crew determines the alien must be in the air ducts. Dallas enters the ducts with a flamethrower, intending to force the monster into an airlock, but it ambushes and seemingly kills him. Lambert implores that they abandon ship and flee in an escape shuttle, but Ripley, now in command, explains it will not support four people and insists on continuing Dallas' plan of flushing out the alien.
Accessing Mother, Ripley discovers the company has secretly ordered Ash to return with the alien for study, and to consider the crew expendable. She confronts Ash, who tries to kill her, but Parker intervenes and clubs Ash, knocking his head loose and revealing him to be an android. The survivors reactivate Ash's head, who confirms the company's orders and states that the alien is unkillable, while expressing his admiration for it and taunting them about their chances for survival. Ripley shuts him down and Parker incinerates him.
The remaining crew decides to self-destruct the Nostromo and escape in the shuttle. However, Parker and Lambert are ambushed and killed by the alien while gathering supplies. Now on her own, Ripley initiates the self-destruct sequence but finds the alien blocking her path to the shuttle. She retreats, attempts unsuccessfully to abort the self-destruct, flees back to the shuttle with Jones, and narrowly escapes as the Nostromo explodes.
As Ripley prepares for stasis, she discovers that the alien is aboard, having stowed itself into a narrow compartment. She dons a spacesuit and flushes the creature out. It approaches Ripley, but before it can kill her, she opens an airlock door. The alien manages to hang on, but Ripley fires a grappling hook gun to push it out and then fires the engines, blasting it away into deep space. After recording her final log entry, she places Jones and herself into stasis for the trip back to Earth.
While studying cinema at the University of Southern California, Dan O'Bannon had made a science-fiction comedy film, Dark Star, with director John Carpenter and concept artist Ron Cobb, with production beginning in late 1970.[28] The film featured an alien (created by spray-painting a beach ball and adding rubber "claws"), which was played for the comedic effect. The experience left O'Bannon "really wanting to do an alien that looked real."[28][29] A "couple of years" later he began work on a similar story that would focus more on horror. "I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts", he later recalled, "Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy."[28] Ronald Shusett, meanwhile, was working on an early version of what would eventually become Total Recall.[28][29] Impressed by Dark Star, he contacted O'Bannon and the two agreed to collaborate on their projects, choosing to work on O'Bannon's film first, as they believed it would be less costly to produce.[28][29]
O'Bannon had written 29 pages of a script titled Memory, containing what would become the opening scenes of Alien: a crew of astronauts awakens to find that their voyage has been interrupted because they are receiving a signal from a mysterious planetoid. They investigate and their ship breaks down on the surface.[25][29] He did not yet have a clear idea as to what the alien antagonist of the story would be.[28]
O'Bannon soon accepted an offer to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Dune, a project that took him to Paris for six months.[28][30] Though the project ultimately fell through, it introduced him to several artists whose work gave him ideas for his science-fiction story including Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, and Jean "Moebius" Giraud.[25] O'Bannon was impressed by Foss's covers for science-fiction books, while he found Giger's work "disturbing":[28] "His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster."[25] After the Dune project collapsed, O'Bannon found himself homeless and broke, and returned to Los Angeles where he would borrow Shusett's couch. In need of money he decided to write a spec script the studios would buy,[31] and the two revived his Memory script. Shusett suggested that O'Bannon use one of his other film ideas, about gremlins infiltrating a B-17 bomber during World War II, and set it on the spaceship as the second half of the story.[25][30] The working title of the project was now Star Beast, but O'Bannon disliked this and changed it to Alien after noting the number of times that the word appeared in the script. Shusett and he liked the new title's simplicity and its double meaning as both a noun and an adjective.[25][28][32] Shusett came up with the idea that one of the crew members could be implanted with an alien embryo that would burst out of him; he thought this would be an interesting plot device by which the alien could get aboard the ship.[28][30]
Dan [O'Bannon] put his finger on the problem: what has to happen next is the creature has to get on the ship in an interesting way. I have no idea how, but if we could solve that, if it can't be that it just snuck in, then I think the whole movie will come into place. In the middle of the night, I woke up and I said, "Dan I think I have an idea: the alien screws one of them [...] it jumps on his face and plants its seed!" And Dan says, oh my god, we've got it, we've got the whole movie.
In writing the script, O'Bannon drew inspiration from many previous works of science fiction and horror. He later stated, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"[35] The Thing from Another World (1951) inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment.[35] Forbidden Planet (1956) gave O'Bannon the idea of a ship being warned not to land, and then the crew being killed one by one by a mysterious creature when they defy the warning.[35] Planet of the Vampires (1965) contains a scene in which the heroes discover a giant alien skeleton; this influenced the Nostromo crew's discovery of the alien creature in the derelict spacecraft.[35] O'Bannon has also noted the influence of "Junkyard" (1953), a short story by Clifford D. Simak in which a crew lands on an asteroid and discovers a chamber full of eggs.[29] He has also cited as influences Strange Relations by Philip Jos Farmer (1960), which covers alien reproduction and various EC Comics horror titles carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people.[29]
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