Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 29, 2003, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I may be dating myself somewhat here, but 1979 was a hell of a year to start coming of age as a genre fan. At an age when I was way too young to see R-rated movies unaccompanied but saw them anyway thanks to gracious relatives and older friends, I witnessed a full-fledged horror explosion of Phantasm, Dawn of the Dead, the first Halloween rerelease and the biggest of them all, Alien, which went all the way to the cover of Newsweek heralding the fright-film revival. Most of that year’s most chilling stuff hailed from the independent world; the studio/big-ticket product was largely dreck like Prophecy, the Dracula remake, Nightwing and, sorry, The Amityville Horror. But Alien was different, a big-budget (for the time) feature that for all its hi-tech trappings went straight for the jugular, splattering blood and other fluids around with abandon.
In this age of elaborate CGI monsters, witnessing Alien’s organic monster creations again reminds just how much better live-action FX can look. No small part of the movie’s original success lay in the rare experience of seeing a creature (in several forms) that looked not only 100 percent convincing, but physically alive. Even the dead facehugger, its dissected organs glistening, seemed revoltingly real. And it remains so today in the Director’s Cut rerelease that couldn’t be better timed, given the recent trend toward recapturing the gritty feel of ’70s horror fare.
In addition to being spruced up visually (though it retains a grainy veneer that helps add texture to the futuristic settings), the movie has had a few moments added and (here’s the part they haven’t really publicized) various others subtracted. Director Ridley Scott has trimmed down the openings and closings of a number of scenes where he felt he initially lingered on the atmosphere too much; the result is that this cut actually plays about a minute shorter than the original release. The subtractions are barely perceptible, while of the additions, the most effective one is not what you might expect. It is cool to finally see the “cocoon” setpiece, in which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the barely alive Dallas (Tom Skerritt) immobilized on a wall, on the big screen—but watching it in context, it’s hard not to agree with the filmmakers’ initial feeling that it slows down the momentum of the overall climax.
More rewarding is a confrontation, following the facehuggered Kane (John Hurt) being brought onto the ship against Ripley’s wishes, between her and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright). This moment gives a bit of much-needed spine to the latter, who is otherwise recessive and mewling and a bit of a drag. Also slipped in is a neat shot preceding the death of Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), in which the heretofore unseen Alien can be spotted dangling amongst a tangle of chains, barely noticeable unless you know what you’re looking for.
The creature’s revolutionary biomechanical design remains striking today, as does the movie’s overall visual scheme. Even after 24 years of technological advancements, Alien remains a triumph of atmosphere and design, creating a palpable mood and environment for its horrific events to play out in. What it is not, before or seen afresh, is a triumph of storytelling. Alien was described by its creators at the time of its release as “a haunted house movie in space,” and while that simplicity is a virtue in some ways, it’s also a liability. All the visual and sound and FX trappings really do hide the fact that there’s very little to the plot, and while the presentation of its space travelers as blue-collar joes rather than larger-than-life heroes is a refreshing down-to-Earth touch, as people they largely have all the depth (and in a couple of cases the survival instincts) of slasher-film youths. In the dispute between fans of Scott’s film and devotees of James Cameron’s Aliens, I’m firmly in the latter camp; amongst all the riveting gunplay, Cameron also evoked well-wrought personalities, from the heroically maternal Ripley to the first brash, then cowardly but finally defiant Hudson.
Indeed, the most memorable character in Alien remains the Alien itself, and its skin-crawling, implacable presence is enough to keep the movie resonant even today. Its portrayal is hardly subtle (the chestburster death is one of horror’s all-time great in-your-face moments), but there’s a suggestive creepiness to its presentation that gets under your skin in a way that many of today’s CGI beasties don’t. This monster from outer space retains its frightening immediacy.
