ALIEN

   Film (1979). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Ridley SCOTT, starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright. Alien design H.R.GIGER. Screenplay Dan O'Bannon, from a story by O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, with uncredited input from prods Walter Hill and David Giler. 117 mins. Colour.

   One of the most influential sf films ever made, A is actually much closer to HORROR in its adherence to genre conventions. The merchant spaceship Nostromo, on a routine voyage, visits a planet where one of the crew is attacked by a crablike creature in an abandoned ALIEN spacecraft. Back aboard the Nostromo this metamorphoses, partly inside the crewman's body, into an almost invulnerable, rapidly growing, intelligent carnivore. Science officer Ash (Holm), who unknown to the crew is a ROBOT instructed to keep the alien alive for possible commercial exploitation, attacks Ripley (Weaver); he is messily dismantled. The alien picks off, piecemeal, all the remaining crew but Ripley. There is a fine music score by Jerry Goldsmith. Giger's powerful alien design, inorganic sleekness blended with curved, phallic, organic forms, renders the horror sequences extremely vivid, but for all their force they are plotted along deeply conventional lines. Considerably more original is the sense - achieved through design, terse dialogue and excellent direction - that this is a real working spaceship with a real, blue-collar, working crew, the future unglamorized and taken for granted. Also good sf are the scenes on the alien spacecraft (Giger's design again) which project a genuine sense of otherness. Tough, pragmatic Ripley (contrasted with the womanly ineffectiveness of Cartwright as Lambert) is the first sf movie heroine to reflect cultural changes in the real world, where by 1979 FEMINISM was causing some men and many women to think again about the claustrophobia of traditional female roles. A, which was made in the UK, was a huge success. It had precursors. Many viewers noticed plot similarities with IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958) and with A.E.VAN VOGT's Discord in Scarlet (1939); a legal case about the latter resemblance was settled out of court for $50,000. The sequels were ALIENS (1986) and ALIEN(3) (1992). The novelization is Alien (1979) by Alan Dean FOSTER.

   See also: CINEMA; HUGO; MONSTER MOVIES; TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO.