Vamps (Amy Heckerling, 2012)

A lightweight vampire parody that mercifully pokes at the deeper lore rather than just taking potshots at Twilight, Vamps starts rough and ends an unexpected delight. Using the true age of Alicia Silverstone's vampire to make fun of her being behind the times, Amy Heckerling also mocks the faded relevance of their previous, iconic collaboration, Clueless. That gives the goofy jokes more (forgive me) bite, and it eventually leads to an emotional breakthrough for its characters that hints at some of the same care that marked Heckerling's best film.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Alien3

Though it is rightly regarded as one of the most intriguing franchises in motion picture history, the Alien saga can also be viewed as a microcosm of changing studio values in the last quarter of the 20th century (and, if you count those Alien vs. Predator films, the beginning of the new millennium). The first film, made for a slightly hefty budget for the time, cast either unknowns or character actors and used the extra money afforded to craft something artistic and visionary out of a potential blockbuster. By the time James Cameron got attached to Aliens, the studios had figured out how to pump out blockbusters to make boatloads of cash. Alien and Star Wars had been creative gambles, but Cameron's film was a tax shelter, organized to be a write-off if it failed. Cameron did not have the opportunity to make something fully into his vision -- even the dynamic theatrical cut slices out much of the humanity to maximize the thrills -- but even the trimmed version displayed a clear directorial stamp, one that became clearer when Cameron cemented himself as the go-to guy for smartly paced (if dumbly written) action.

When 20th Century Fox began pre-production on the third film in the franchise, two things affected how the movie would be made. First, the artistic and commercial success of the previous two films created an intense pressure where there had previously been none, not even for Cameron's feature. Had Aliens failed, the numbers would have been balanced on the Fox budget, and fans of the original would simply go back to that film. When Cameron made a film every bit as good in its own right, now the franchise had the potential to the second-best and most profitable sci-fi franchise at Fox, next to George Lucas' space opera. Second, commercial cinema had entered into an uneasy amalgamation of '80s greed and New Hollywood talent searching. The only catch was that Hollywood never integrated the two, snatching up the Sundance talent and, for the most part, keeping them working with limited budgets that yielded potential for high profit ratios and awards prestige, only to continue to churn out big-budget features that managed to lack both the artistry of early blockbusters and the charming excess of the best of the '80s.

When David Fincher finally came on-board to the project after several directors had dropped out, any hint that he or any other filmmaker would have the last word on Alien³ had been openly eliminated. "We set out to make a release date, not a movie," laughs production executive Jon Landau ruefully in the comprehensive documentary on the making of the film, and Fincher, then known only for some music videos and commercials, had the unenviable task of making his first feature out of a wildly successful franchise and without the luxury of a script. Alien³ was written by committee and handed to the director in piecemeal each day, and the finished product is clearly not a bet on Fincher's talent, as the first two films were the results of gambles on unknowns who became stars. Instead, it takes elements of Scott's vision and Cameron's and filters them through a hired-hand who was too talented to be a conduit for the ideas of others.

Thus, the use of evil megacorporation Weyland-Yutani becomes, for the first time, an open metaphor for the studio system bankrolling the alien that the in-film company desires so deeply. Looking at the comparison retroactively, the first film puts the suggestion of corporate greed into the film, having the studio/company entrust the crew, only to make it known near the end that they are expendable in the name of profit. The second film, reflecting Hollywood's attitude in the '80s, shows Weyland-Yutani covering its bases by infecting many people rather than leave chance to a single creature. Here, they rely on a single egg once more as Fox limits the budget and tries to prevent costs from getting remotely out of control. Fincher would have his revenge in that respect, as the constant rewrites imposed by the studio forced him to go wildly over budget.

He also displays his disdain before the film itself even begins, subverting the 20th Century Fox theme to end on a minor chord before the end, sustaining the sound until it becomes ominous and vile instead of inspiring and exciting. The opening credits then establish a more cynical mood. Using quick cuts instead of the slow pans of the first and second movie, Fincher cruelly gets through the studio's desire to kill Newt and Hicks in their cryogenic pods, ending any hope for a happy life for Ripley. Between the black title cards, we see a hatched egg, a facehugger stretching into life, a medical scan of it attached to one of the passengers before dripping acidic blood onto the floor, leading to malfunctions that force a jettison of the pods in an emergency craft that crash lands on a planet. Without any time to get our bearings, Fincher destroys everything from the previous movie, a nihilistic slam to those who now felt that Ripley's character arc in Cameron's film meant nothing.

Before one assigns the usual "nihilist" label to Fincher, though, it is important to note that even the unfinished script did away with Newt and Hicks before Fincher came aboard. Fincher's credits sequence communicates the mandate that he combine the previous two films, trying for the disturbing mood of the first in the faster, active pacing of the second. It also speaks to the disdain he picked up for the project during shooting, cynically killing off key aspects of a film he clearly loved in a way that immediately throws a wrench into the franchise. He knew Alien³ would be a disaster, and even the elements of the film that remained in his control (which is exceedingly little, even in the superior workprint cut) communicate an exasperation and hopelessness. The only time I would genuinely consider Fincher a nihilist was when he got royally screwed.

Yet that alternate cut reveals Fincher's true outlook, one of cynicism but also perseverance. Marooned on a prison colony and suffering the loss of the makeshift family she created to fill the void of losing her real family, Ripley must worry about yet another outbreak with a group of people to whom she has even less connection than previous crews. She lives with prisoners who have converted to an apocalyptic religion as tehy toil in their rotting station, long ago abandoned by the company and kept running only because the prisoners asked to remain. Even with their conversion, however, they remain self-absorbed and violent, and when Ripley finally tells them about the alien and the company's intention to take and weaponize the creature at the expense of hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, no one seems to care. But Ripley continues to fight, just as Detective Somerset, try as he might, cannot bring himself to run from horror, Jack pushes back against the monster he created and Robert Graysmith continues to hunt the Zodiac killer. No one can accuse Fincher of being cheery, but even in the darkest moment of his career, he does not fully give in to hopelessness. What makes Alien³ unique is that someone else came in later and did the job for him.

Still, there are things that the film gets right, especially in the longer, admittedly lethargic version. The planet where Ripley crash-lands is perfect for the religious zealots in the colony. It's grimy, rotting, lit in industrial yellow and always dripping. The heat coming off the dilapidated machinery can almost be felt, and the grime cakes until it's as solid as the metal it rusts. If the planet in Aliens, still in the process of terraforming, resembled an Earth at the start of Genesis, unformed by God, then the fiery, collapsing world of Alien³ resembles one nearing the end of Revelation.

Killing Newt and Hicks may reek of cynicism on Fincher and the studio's part, but the decision allows Fincher to develop the series' narrative to its next logical step, wherein the alien is no longer as key a threat to the humans as the overarching corruption of Weyland-Yutani, which sends a rescue party to get Ripley off-planet not to save her but in the hopes of, once again, collecting a specimen. After proving they held sway over the military in the previous film, they here demonstrate that every level of society must be run by the company, even prison control. Nobody has any sympathy for the company -- the thought of Weyland-Yutani succeeding in getting an alien, only for it to tear through the science division is a darkly appealing idea -- but who can afford to leave its employ?

The deaths of Newt and Hicks also feed into the most ingenious element of the film, the effect of rampant misogyny on cinema's most visible action heroine. Aliens was all about maternity, taking the androgynous character from the first and emphasizing her femininity by contrasting it with the perverse idea of pregnancy and birth offered by the aliens. Ripley found a surrogate child in Newt and a possible romance in Hicks that promised to be mutually supportive, one where Hicks would give Ripley respect instead of shouting her down like the other men. Killing them rips Ripley's second family away from her, leaving her with nothing and symbolizing how cruel the world can be to a woman.

It also plants the idea in her head that maybe she's just bad luck, something the prisoners latch onto immediately. Not only are all the prisoners men, they have double-Y chromosomes. Having sworn themselves to celibacy to prevent the usual prison rapes, this band of rapists, murderers and molesters view the presence of a woman as an evil temptation, and the confluence of reactionary religion and hyper-masculine violent offenders makes Alien³ into a study of the effects of misogyny. After Cameron lightened up on the eroticism to focus on the more nurturing side of the gender issue running through the franchise, Fincher contacted H.R. Giger about reinjecting some blood into the series (or at least a certain body part). Sexual imagery abounds once more, from blood trickling out of Ripley's nose in menstrual fashion as men look on uncomfortably to the sensual design of the quadrupedal alien, even if designers ultimately rejected Giger's more outlandish features.

The longer cut fleshes out the ideas of perverted spirituality in a universe where one has traveled the stars and still hasn't seen God. Who knows how badly polluted and devastated Earth is in this franchise, but these colonies cannot be any sort of improvement, and it's understandable that these prisoners look to a cataclysmic event to deliver them. The spiritual leader, Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), understands that the driving motivation behind the colony's conversion is less hope for salvation than catharsis for their barely contained rage, and even the prison warden (Brian Glover) lets them maintain their reactionary views because the alternative would be riot. When the creature attacks, one prisoner, Golic (Paul McGann), is coated with another's blood, prompting a religious experience in which he views the alien as some sort of angel of death. In the theatrical version, Golic is randomly cut out of the movie: in the workprint, he actually foils Ripley and the others' efforts to trap the alien when he releases it from a hold expecting deliverance. He gets his wish.

Even in the version that displays more of what Fincher had in mind, however, Alien suffers from key flaws. The CGI is as clumsy as you'd expect from an early '90s movie, and even when the production swelled over budget, Fincher's movie never enjoyed the amount Jim Cameron required to make the computer animation in Terminator 2 so convincing. The cast here is as talented as the previous crews, but the shaving of everyone's heads makes it difficult to figure out who's on-screen. The Alien franchise impressively built its stock on not one but two separate casts of mostly unlikable people that do not make us root for clear favorites (the only exceptions being Newt and Ripley herself), but here it's next to impossible to discern which character is on-screen. Even when that's intentional, as in the bewildering climax, a chase through the labyrinthine corridors of the foundry's molding facility (complete with raucously clever use of POV Steadicams to show the alien running along the walls and ceiling), this confusion becomes irritating. Furthermore, the brief romance between Ripley and the colony's medic (Charles Dance) is unconvincing, unexplored and, frankly, too quickly inserted as Ripley contends with the death of her implicit new boyfriend, Hicks.

The biggest issue, however, is in the open struggle between what Fincher wanted to do with the material and the studio's attempt to make the sequel nothing more risky than an amalgam of what people liked about the first two films. Fincher himself seems to want to find a happy medium between atmospheric horror and a faster pace: his decision to shave Ripley's head brought the character back to her androgynous roots, while his experience making commercials and music videos made him a whiz at telling a story quickly (see how the credits sequence is a short narrative unto itself. But Fox's involvement cut out any hope he might have had to explore the area between Cameron and Scott. Renny Harlin, the first director attached to the project, left when the project came to resemble something made by Scott and Cameron and not something he might craft into his own work.

Even in the longer cut, the discrepancy between Fincher and the studio is evident. If anything, it's more obvious, because the theatrical version looks like the work of a decently talented hired hand with a bad script. The long version drags, not because it's 2.5 hours long but because one can see from scene to scene which moments were meticulously planned by Fincher and which were just handed down to him one day and forced to shoot. I was more fascinated by the epic Charles de Lauzirika documentary for this film than any of the others he made for the saga (and, at times, Alien³ itself), precisely because we see the devolution of the studio's idealism. Original planning of the film shows writers and executives hunting for the next big thing as the first two films had done, taking two directors who had just begun to raise a profile and shooting them into the stratosphere. Then, the script issues begin and the studio starts moving to cut possible losses, hobbling their potential wunderkind at every turn. In interviews conducted on-set and retroactively for the 2003 DVD release, the cast sings Fincher's praises to the heavens, all of them marveling that a first-time director could be so intuitive not only with the action and visuals but the characters and the ways that actors discover how the people they play live and function. They would gladly have given them their full confidence but, as ever, those with the least creativity had the last say.

Looking back today, Alien³ can be seen as an intriguing mess, an underrated attempt to get the franchise back to its erotic horror roots that is improved more by its alternate cut than even Aliens (at least that film was good in its theatrical version). One cannot help but wonder what might have happened had Fincher made Se7en first and proved his mettle, whether that would have secured him more freedom from the studio*. Sigourney Weaver purportedly refused to do the movie if executives rewrote a draft that had Ripley die at the end, but by the time we reach the film's conclusion, Ripley's self-sacrifice, a final act of defiance to the company, seems mostly a cathartic release for Fincher, who would eventually prove trusting executives correct when he proved a more visionary stylist than either the inconsistent Scott or the more pedestrian Cameron. I enjoyed the Assembly Cut of the film, having detested the theatrical version, and its post-industrial decay managed to take what would have otherwise been a rehash of the Aliens sets and made something original. No one can deny that the series took a sudden, drastic step downward, but those paying attention will also find it impossible to overlook how much of Fincher's innate ability was on display, even if the powers that be buried it at every juncture.



*I also wonder what might have come from sticking to Vincent Ward's original concept, in which the story took place on an ironically Luddite space station inhabited by a monastic order that would have taken the religious angle of the film to a whole new level. Storyboards depict a fascinating man-made planet segmented by climates and differing sects of monks, and the narrative was to be backed up with Bosch-like visuals in a Gothic throwback in space. At the same time, I sympathize with those who kept asking why the ship interior was to be all wood and the logistics not only of the ship within the film (one cannot create atmosphere without a much more massive size than a man-made orb) but also of designing the thing in a studio lot. Still, watching David Fincher get his start with a Boschian nightmare in space would be something, that's for sure.

Aliens

Ridley Scott's Alien ended in such a way that it begged for a sequel. Even those of us who roll our eyes at the prospect of unnecessary "enfranchisement" had to admit that Ripley's story didn't end with her slipping into cryogenic sleep and hoping someone intercepted her signal. Yet with Scott himself reluctant to get trapped on one series of films, the prospect of a sequel faded into the back of 20th Century Fox's corporate mind for years.

Enter a young upstart named James Cameron, an up-and-comer who'd been thrown off the set of the great Piranha II and then knocked on Hollywood's door with a sledgehammer with The Terminator. A fan of Scott's film, Cameron had an idea for a sequel, but changing hands at Fox put his initial work on hiatus, waiting to see how The Terminator fared at the box office before giving him the keys. Even when they finally relented, they gave Cameron a budget only $7 million higher than the one Scott received seven years earlier. And where Scott got by with only a few distinct sets and a single alien, Cameron's film called for all-out war with more locations, a bigger cast and more aliens.

Thus, when Aliens finally hit screens, the money-saving techniques were plainly evident. The narrower aspect ratio, the heavy grain in the film stock -- reversing the issue of the original Alien's soft stock by leaping to the other extreme -- the recycling of a handful of alien costumes. What is far more noticeable and relevant, however, is the manner in which Cameron dispenses almost entirely with the elements that made Alien great, only to re-assemble the broken parts into a masterpiece in its own right.

Where Scott's film was atmospheric, graceful, cerebral, Cameron's is quickly paced, blunt and in your face. The degree of difference can be seen all over the place, from substituting Jerry Goldsmith for the always on-the-nose James Horner to replacing Alien's tagline "In space, no one can hear you scream" to "This time, it's war." Aliens is loud and brash, with a cast of characters who, in true Cameron fashion, are utterly two-dimensional but just kooky enough to be endearing. Cameron even has the balls to return to the planet where the Nostromo stumbled across the eggs, risking all sorts of plot holes just to maintain a continuity and to avoid larger logical questions. Then, he manages to change everything anyway by dropping in a bit of dialogue that explains Ripley floated in stasis for nearly 60 years, and in the interim, Weyland-Yutani set up colonies on the planet.

This addition, especially as it is fleshed out in the vastly superior longer cut of the film, allows Cameron to develop two of the more tantalizing threads left in the ether in the first film: the vicious anti-corporate mentality of the franchise (and something that would concern Cameron intermittently across his career with the Terminator films as well as Avatar), and the character of Ripley. As we learn in the longer cut, Ripley had a daughter when she left, only to return and find that her child had grown into old age and died while she drifted in cryostasis for six decades. Now, she must sit in a company hospital, discredited by a board of trustees that not only denied her story but charged her with destroying a perfectly good tow-ship, left under nominal psychiatric care as she thinks of the life she no longer has.

Eventually, a company rep, Burke (Paul Reiser), sheepishly and discreetly comes to Ripley and mentions that all transmissions from the colony on LV-426 have ceased, coinciding with a shot given to the audience of colonists sent to inspect the alien ship they somehow never noticed while exploring the planet and returning with a facehugger attached. Ripley, still scarred by what happened to her seemingly only a few days ago, understandably does not wish to go back to the planet to survey what's happened, but Burke's invitation amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of her truthfulness, and Burke will send her with a contingent of marines, though she takes little comfort in this.

If Scott's predecessor cut against the grain of post-Star Wars cliché by presenting a cast of characters who were average and relatable to audiences despite the centuries between reality and fiction, Cameron's film messes with military tropes. It's not entirely clear who controls the marines, but the squad sent to investigate the colony ultimately answers to Burke. If the military is not privatized in this future, it does at least openly look out for business interests. Cameron has never been what you might call subtle, but he gets at a side of Vietnam with this film that even the slew of 'Nam movies didn't address so directly: that war was started by the military industrial complex and kept going long after it became evident we had no business there and, furthermore, could not win. Cameron takes it one step further and brazenly warns of using federal (or planetary) troops to protect business interests.

Furthermore, the initial arrogance of the marines, with their smart weapons and state-of-the-art equipment, falters in the face of a less advanced but more committed foe. Granted, the aliens have an advantage over the Vietcong in that their are biologically superior, but the most terrifying aspect of Aliens is the inability of the humans to even momentarily stop an advance no matter how many creatures they kill. The aliens never retreat, never show any sign of dwindling numbers, and they can pop out of anywhere. Sound familiar?

As for the actual cast, you gotta love 'em. Cameron makes these marines the most hilariously cocky-cum-terrified misfits you ever saw. The C.O., Lt. Gorman (William Hope), clearly just graduated from the academy and is out of his element with the rest of the squad, who've done their time and formed a bond. They make for a veritable who's who of clichés, from the tough-as-nails, black sergeant who whips them all into shape (played by Al Mathews, because Carl Weathers must have been busy); a fiery Latina who does not react to the taunts of her male comrades because she's tougher than all of them (Jenette Goldstein, making up for Veronica Cartwright's hysterics in the first film); and a sensible corporal who matches the sergeant's toughness with a softer side (Michael Biehn); and a private who talks the most shit during the preparation for the mission, only to instantly morph into a coward when he finally faces the enemy (Bill Paxton). Also accompanying them are Burke and Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android who inspires distrust from Ripley based on Ash's actions and spends most of the film walking the line of suspicion.

Given how shallow these side characters are, it's a wonder what Cameron accomplished with Ripley. In the extended edition, the director delves into the character, making explicit her sense of maternal loss. This, of course, is explored more thoroughly through the character of Newt (Carrie Henn), a young girl and the only survivor of the alien outbreak in the colony. Her ingenuity saved her, but when the marine stumble upon her in their first sweep of the colony, she's been driven half-feral and silent from shock. As Ripley nurses her back to health, Newt clearly becomes a surrogate child for the daughter Ripley never got to see grow up. So touching and believable is their chemistry, in fact, that even the special edition, which adds mostly additional scenes on this dynamic, does not slow down the film's perfect pacing.

Let's talk about that pacing. Alien worked primarily because Ridley Scott had a keen sense for shot length and plot advancement. His film is slow enough to sink into the mind and give the audience space to inject their own fears into the mystery, yet quick enough not to lose the tension. Cameron faces the problem of maintaining the flow of an action movie. The lulls of a horror film can be as effective in scaring audiences as the actual moments in which something happens, but an action film languishes in its moments of empty character building. Despite the limited budget and the ambition of the project, Cameron never once lets the momentum sag, even in the longer cut. If so many supporting characters are two-dimensional, Cameron at least acknowledges it and doesn't bother saddling us with cheap, dispensable background for them. Apart from Ripley, all of these characters live in the present, and they react to the situation, not dwelling on some past issue. And who has time to even think about what's happening in the moment when dozens upon dozens of aliens bear down on the humans at all times?

The speed of the film also helps Ripley's transition into the ultimate badass for feminists. The first film showed Ripley growing until she proved she had the capacity to survive. In Aliens, she evolves until she proves the capacity to save others. When Gorman blanches in the face of the alien attacks, she steps in and capably directs the marines, who almost never question the force in her voice. She also displays the most self-restraint, choosing to spare the double-crossing Burke even when he locks Ripley and Newt in the medical bay and unleashes facehuggers in the attempt to implant them with embryos to be taken back to the company.

Occasionally, Cameron's lines take on a certain hard-boiled charm. Paxton's goofy performance allows him to toss out nugget after nugget, the best being his macho breakdown when he paces around screaming "Game over, man! Game over!" until Ripley and Cpl. Hicks have to slap some sense into him. When the depths of Burke's malfeasance appears, Ripley spits in disgust, "I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." Of course, nothing beats that most crowd-rousing of lines, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

The finale of Aliens puts the final spin on the subject matter that crafts the film into its own distinct entity. Scott's film, leaving H.R. Giger's imagination to fill the cracks of our mind, presented an androgynous vision, pitting Sigourney Weaver, who, at six feet tall with an athletic build, combined traditionally feminine and masculine physical traits, against an alien comprising nothing but phallic and vaginal symbolism. Here, Ripley, traveling into the bowels of the infestation to save Newt, comes across the alien queen, a giant xenomorph laying dozens of eggs to wait for the next round of surveyors to infect. It's a maternal showdown that puts the final touches on Cameron's feminist vision. By triumphing over not only the male establishment that silenced her (by the end, the marines answer to her and the only one who lives, Hicks, treats her as an equal) but a projection of the motherhood she feels she lost, Ripley casts out her demons and just so happens to look like a complete badass doing so.

Upon its release, Aliens enjoyed a similar reaction to its predecessor: Scott's film got mixed reviews at first until the movie took off, but critics and fans alike instantly embraced Aliens, and its effect on reintroducing artistically qualified genre film to America, while not as powerful as the first movie, was substantial: Weaver even snagged a much-deserved Oscar nomination despite the Academy's long-standing ambivalence toward science fiction. The final two films in the proper Alien franchise would suffer from the sudden interest of the studio that casually let Cameron tinker with a classic, suddenly hounding studio hands during every bit of production and robbing the franchise of what made it stand out with its first two films: directorial ambition and artistic daring. Also, the other two had the rotten luck of following perhaps the two most enduringly entertaining and rewarding popular sci-fi films of the 20th century, and they just couldn't live up to the standard. After all, though I must confess to prefer the atmosphere of the first, Aliens is one of those precious few sequels that can stake a serious claim to being better than the original. Apart from Die Hard, I cannot name a more immaculately crafted action extravaganza. And Die Hard didn't also inject a thoughtful meditation on the role of women and maternal instincts within an action framework. Score one for Cameron.



*Some quick words on the Blu-Ray: I'm planning a Blu-Ray-specific review of the new Alien Anthology release for another site (if you're interested, check the Apocalypse Now review I did last week), but I thought I'd at least address some of the concerns related specifically to this entry in the saga. In an interview before the box set's release, James Cameron mentioned that he'd scrubbed all the grain from the picture's infamously thick and hazy stock, leading some to fear that he'd gone haywire with Digital Noise Reduction gizmos and smoothed things until the image looked too plastic. Fear not: Aliens has never looked so good, retaining a great deal of grain in most shots while adding a degree of dimension and depth never seen in the film's image. It's certainly not the greatest restoration I've seen, but frankly I'm impressed that Cameron and the crew that restored the film managed to create such a clear image, and they ought to share their methods with a number of other commercial studios (and to be fair, even Criterion restorers couldn't have totally salvaged this stock). A hearty round of applause all around for the transfer, which doesn't look as spectacular as the deepening of Alien's more softer look, but in many ways this is the more admirable of the two restorations.

Alien

Alien sits in the middle between the opposing styles of my two favorite horror films, the two films I believe represent the pinnacle of the genre. On one end is John Carpenter's Halloween, an elegantly composed film so meticulous that it has no jump scares but instead creates a deliberate and well-sustained atmosphere of unsettling discontent. You're waiting for something to jump out at you, but for the most part it never does. That film is about the inevitability of an unstoppable force. At the other pole is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film made by an equally gifted filmmaker who nevertheless has a sloppier style than Carpenter's immaculate perceptions. Yet that messiness works in Tobe Hooper's favor, allowing him to make a horror film that works, time and again, on a feeling of spontaneity. Even when you're watching it for the second, or fifth, time, it has the power to startle you because everything happens in the moment.

Alien certainly has the atmosphere and directorial sophistication of Halloween down pat. Its sets are complex while looking well-worn, with H.R. Giger's legendary monster instantly announcing itself as one of cinema's most ingeniously designed creatures. With a nuanced soundtrack and an equally delicate and haunting score, the grace and intelligence of the direction has lent itself to endless analysis over the sexual imagery of the film and the themes elicited from a creature with broadly phallic and vaginal physical characteristics, a debate that compounds when you consider the status of the franchise's heroine as perhaps the great feminist icon of popular cinema.

What so few critics do, sadly, is talk about how magnificently terrifying it is. Inevitably dated by the homages, the spoofs and the outright plagiarism, Alien nevertheless continues to hold a power over this viewer after a number of viewings, its pacing setting the mood in the first act, only to mingle with the more unpredictable action in the next acts that keep the film fresh. For as much as Giger's Xenomorph attracts attention for what it symbolizes, attention should also be paid to the simple fact that the creature's constant evolution, combined with Scott's wise decision to only show the barest glimpses of the monster, allow the monster to take on a greater psychic weight in the audience's mind instead of giving it away. Even with Spielberg's Jaws, the audience had a rough idea of the shape of the shark, if not the size. Here, it's all up to guess work, and that make it all the more scary.

Alien exists in a world where space travel has become banal. Where Star Wars kicked off a host of space opera imitators, Scott's film, working off Dan O'Bannon's script (itself a horror version of his comedic Dark Star, made by John Carpenter) presents the average Joe in space. Despite the humongous size of the Nostromo, the ship in which a crew far too small for its cavernous interior resides, the ship is a towing vessel, and its crew, with the exception of a science officer, would not seem out of place on any working class job on Earth. They bitch about paychecks, grumble over the food and worry about fixing the rundown ship. They are not presented as some facile family, but they do come off as relatable people, giving the film's upcoming fantasy a realistic foundation.

Awoken from their cryogenic sleep, the crew is surprised to find they've not returned to Earth's solar system but have been redirected after intercepting a distress signal in another part of the galaxy. Immediately, the crew voices their protest, asking if they're going to get more money and threatening to simply continue back home after a long haul. Only when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the warrant officer, tells them that company policy dictates all ships must respond to any distress calls under threat of forfeiting payment altogether does the crew stifle their grumbles.

This first act suggests no impending doom, no sense of disquiet. Its halcyon inactivity allows Ridley Scott to probe the main areas of the Nostromo with a fluid intelligence, using each shot to establish key sections of the ship while framing them in ways that flirt with the careful compositions of 2001 while still adhering to the fast pace of commercial sci-fi like Star Wars. Scott is a notably inconsistent filmmaker, but when he's on, he has an uncanny ability to suffuse artistic mise-en-scène, even a certain amount of grace, into shots that never lose their more direct, mainstream appeal.

When the tow ship arrives in the orbit of an uninhabitable planet and a search party lands a shuttle on the barren rock in adverse conditions, the noose gently tightens around the throat, more so when the crew happens upon a massive, derelict alien ship. Jerry Goldsmith's already subtle score steps back further to let the ambient sounds of howling wind and the creaking of the decaying spaceship. Compared to the almost pedestrian spin on interstellar magnificence of the Nostromo, the alien ship is more lavish, more intricately designed and ornate, clearly the result of bioengineering compared to the obsolete industrial construction of the Nostromo. Scott's talents have never been more evident than they are when the search crew stumbles across a gigantic fossil of an alien corpse. The "space jockey" instantly changes the dynamic of the film: where the enormous derelict suggested something bizarre, this humongous corpse, frozen forever at what could be a giant cannon, one last futile gesture of defense, inspires awe and fear in equal measure. What is this thing? Are there more of him in the sector? And why does he have a gaping hole in his chest?

One of the crew finds a section in the depths of the ship filled with large, leathery eggs and, well, you know the rest. Where Alien previously existed as a realistic depiction of working class slobs in space, suddenly the film explodes into surreal, hypersexualized energy. Poor Kane (John Hurt) looks into an open ovum, gets attacked by a clawed, acidic vagina from hell, which stays on his face for a day before everything seems to return to normal. Then, a penis with a mouth bursts through his chest. So it goes.

As if the attacks weren't frightening enough, Giger's Freudian construction of the alien plays on subtle fears, most of the actually masculine, concerning rape. The "facehugger" invades Kane's mouth and, in a sense, impregnates him -- even the science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), refers to the beast as "Kane's son." Later, when Ash is revealed to be with the crew solely to ensure that the company they work for can get a hold of the alien specimen for their weapons division, he attempts to kill Ripley by choking her with a rolled-up newspaper. The surviving crew finds them and literally knock off Ash's head, revealing him to be an android. And the milky substance that runs through his wires is blatantly reminiscent of semen.

This is all well and good, but the manner in which Scott never places the focus on Giger's interpretive imagery, allowing the audience to consider it on their own terms while he gets down to the business of crafting a thriller. The use of Jonesy the cat as a miscue seems dated today mainly because the "It's Only a Cat" cliché, which had existed in bare forms before but exploded after this film. Yet Scott slyly uses the cat as a means to warn the characters, who never figure out that the cat hisses when the alien is nearby because anyone who might have put two and two together subsequently met a gruesome end. The cat's hiss, in a way, becomes the alien's "theme." Elsewhere, Scott sets up the ingenious chase through the air ducts, in which the ship captain (Tom Skerritt, proving that not even faster-than-light travel and cryostasis could propel humans far enough away from '70s hair) crawls through the vents attempting to lure the alien to the airlock. We process most of the action via the rest of the crew, who monitor movement in the ducts on a scanner that shows a second dot coming at the captain impossibly fast, disappearing and re-appearing again. Veronica Cartwright had the thankless role of being the sobbing, hysterical mess, but you empathize with her terror as she watches some unknown monster closing in on her friend.

In the climax, Scott mounts a sensory overload as Ripley sets the ship to self-destruct. Klaxons blare, lights flash and steam hisses through every leaking hole in the Nostromo. It's a bewilderingly executed segment, taking the well-defined structure of the ship's interior and throwing everything into chaos. When Ripley runs back to get the cat, there's no telling how far away she is from Jones, where the alien is, and how she can get back to the escape shuttle. Naturally, she makes it, and we get one last scare when the alien guesses ahead of Ripley and stows away on the escape pod.

In those final moments, Ripley becomes a hero for the ages, even if she managed to save no one else (well, except the damn cat). One of the enduring draws of Alien is that it's nearly impossible until the end to tell who will live. Ripley immediately projects a hardline approach in the movie, lecturing the engineers on company policy, refusing to let the search crew back because Kane's condition places them all in quarantine (our first taste of Ash's ulterior motives comes from him letting them in). But that severity is often costly in the movies, and usually the most focused one ends up dying. As Roger Ebert astutely noted in his "Great Movies" entry on the film, the cast is, for the most part, skewed to middle age. The youngest two, Cartwright and Weaver, were 29 and 30, respectively. The rest vary from mid-'30s all the way into the early '50s. These are people who just want to go home: would a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker ignore a distress call? Of course not. Hell, even Han Solo wouldn't, though he'd make a big show of ignoring it before his conscience nagged at him. Even with ship ranks, there's no real leader here, no clear social strata. They have enough of a bond with each other that each death affects them on a slightly personal level, but they're distinct enough that the driving impulse is simply fear that they'll be next. Also, their separation allows them to turn on each other that much more easily.

Not until James Cameron resurrected the franchise nearly a decade later and developed the tendrils of Ripley's personality would she become a screen icon, but what Alien lacks in its protagonist's distinction, it more than makes up for with an atmosphere and a sophistication that none of the sequels could even approach. Cameron worked magic with the material but nevertheless had to wrench it almost entirely from its horror roots into more direct action territory. Scott's film lives on as the most nuanced of the four films -- let us count those Alien vs. Predator movies as some separate, not at all equal, property -- gently laying the framework for the ideas other movies would handle more explicitly, such as the third and fourth films playing with the idea of the alien's host dictating its evolutionary outcome, the brilliant anti-corporate thread involving Weyland-Yutani's constant interference with lives simply to get a weapon they could never control, the ruthlessness but also the humanity of its heroine.

Alien revolves around these topics with the same fluid tracking shots that it uses to move through the Nostromo, and as much as I admire Scott's decision to leave science fiction after this and Blade Runner after guessing he could go no farther in the genre -- and thus far, no one else has really exceeded what he did with those two films -- I do so wish he'd made more space films. Rarely have I felt a chill run down my spine so disturbingly as I have when watching the captain, just before going to his death, asking the ship supercomputer, MU-TH-UR, "What are my chances?" After a brief moment, the screen returns with its reply: "Does not compute." In the intervening decades, Scott has proven himself to be anything but a master, connecting only occasionally, and often only with alternate cuts that never even hit theaters. Yet Alien is undeniably a masterpiece, one of those films that meets neatly at the nexus of genre entertainment and artistic endeavor, and whether those who enjoy it today do so for its ambition and vision or for the simply glee of its lasting scares, they're not missing the point.




*Addendum: I wanted to work this into the review proper, but I have such love for the marketing campaign that went into this film that I feel it should be its own separate thread. Today, the film's trailer is almost universally recognized as the greatest preview of all time. In the late '70s, films still often came packaged in the old-school way that went obsessively into detail in trailers, not so much about plot -- that came later when audiences seemed to react so viscerally against being surprised that the industry catered to their wishes to basically know the movie before seeing it -- but in the endless parade of sales pitches. Watch the original Star Wars trailer and listen to a flat voice drone endlessly about "a big, sprawling space opera of rebellion and romance," speaking about a raucous adventure with all the conviction of a police officer reading aloud the traffic report in court. The Alien trailer has no voiceover, not even dialogue from the film. This is old-hat today (the Coen brothers even did a funny version to advertise A Serious Man), but the crafting of the preview solely through the diegetic sounds of the film's atmosphere -- the echoing klaxon, the hissing stem, the shrieking cat -- gradually mounting until it becomes a horror film in miniature, is savagely brilliant and deeply ahead of its time. Then, of course, there is the matter of the tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream." I would give that tagline the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am the sort of person who hates marketing. I hate trailers that give too much away, or that contain the distillation of a great idea that excites me for a full product that doesn't deliver (oh, Watchmen trailer, how you lied to me), but every now and then someone puts some thought behind how they sell a movie, and the results can be as engaging as the final product. Alien is one of a handful to get it completely right.