Alien (film)

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, along with the ship cat, Jones. The ship's computer, "Mother", detects a transmission from a nearby planet and wakes the crew. Following company policy to investigate transmissions indicating intelligent life, they leave their payload in orbit and land on the surface, but the ship is damaged. Dallas, Kane, and Lambert discover the transmission comes from a derelict alien vessel. Inside is a giant, fossilized alien corpse with a hole in its torso. Meanwhile, Mother partially deciphers the transmission, which Ripley determines is a warning beacon and not an SOS as first thought. Kane enters a chamber containing hundreds of large eggs. When he touches one, an arthropod-like lifeform springs out, penetrates his helmet, and attaches to his face. Back at the Nostromo, Ripley refuses to allow them aboard, citing quarantine regulations, but Ash disobeys her. While the engineers work on ship repairs, Ash attempts to extricate the creature from Kane's face; he stops when he discovers that its highly corrosive acidic blood could harm Kane and damage the ship's hull. The creature eventually detaches itself and dies. After the crew returns to space, Kane awakens and seems well. During a final crew meal before returning to stasis, he suddenly chokes and convulses as a small alien creature bursts from his chest and escapes into the ship. After ejecting Kane's body into space, the crew uses tracking devices to try to locate and kill the creature. Encountering Jones, Brett follows him into a landing leg compartment, where the now fully-grown alien kills him. The crew determines that the alien is moving around the ship within the air ducts, and Dallas devises a plan to force the creature off the ship with an airlock. Dallas asks Mother about alternative plans to kill the alien, but the computer ominously refuses to answer his questions. Dallas then enters the ducts with a flamethrower, but is ambushed and killed by the alien. A hysterical Lambert believes that they will all die and suggests abandoning the ship in the escape pod. Ripley, now in command, rejects the plan because the escape pod cannot support the remaining four crew members. Ripley decides they will try Dallas's plan again. She accesses Mother herself and discovers a secret company directive: Ash must return with the alien for study, regardless of risk to the crew. Ash attempts to kill her when confronted, and Parker attacks and incapacitates Ash, who is now revealed to be an android. Ash states that the alien cannot be killed and expresses admiration for it. Parker incinerates Ash's remains. With no hope of defeating the alien, Ripley decides to initiate the self-destruct sequence and go ahead with Lambert's plan to abandon the ship. While they are gathering supplies, the alien kills both Parker and Lambert. Now alone, Ripley starts the self-destruct process, but the alien blocks her route to the escape shuttle. Ripley narrowly escapes and turns back to abort the sequence, but fails to return before the override option expires. With only a few minutes left to evacuate, Ripley frantically returns to the shuttle and finds that the alien is gone. She takes Jones, boards the shuttle and launches it seconds before the Nostromo explodes. As Ripley prepares for stasis, she discovers that the alien has stowed itself in a narrow compartment. She dons a spacesuit, loads a grappling hook gun, and straps herself to a chair before she begins discharging gases to drive the alien from its hiding place. It tries to attack her but she opens the shuttle door. The depressurization blast leaves the alien clinging to the door frame. Ripley shoots it with the gun, knocking it out, but the door closes on the grapple line, leaving the alien tethered to the ship. As it swings behind an engine nacelle, Ripley fires the engines to sever the line and blast the alien into space. After recording her log entry, she places Jones and herself into stasis to start their return journey to Earth. == Cast ==

, Stanton, Weaver, Kotto, Skerritt, Cartwright, and Hurt) • Tom Skerritt as Dallas, captain of the Nostromo. Skerritt had been approached early in the film's development, but declined as it did not yet have a director and had a very low budget. Later, when Scott was attached as director and the budget had been doubled, Skerritt accepted the role. Helen Mirren also auditioned. Weaver, who had Broadway experience but was relatively unknown in film, impressed Scott, Giler, and Hill with her audition. She was the last actor to be cast for the film and performed most of her screen tests in-studio as the sets were being built. • Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, the Nostromos navigator. Cartwright had experience in horror and science-fiction films, having acted as a child in The Birds (1963), and more recently in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). She originally read for the role of Ripley and was not informed that she had instead been cast as Lambert until she arrived in London for wardrobe. She disliked the character's emotional weakness, but nevertheless accepted the role: "They convinced me that I was the audience's fears; I was a reflection of what the audience is feeling." • Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, the engineering technician. Stanton's first words to Scott during his audition were, "I don't like sci fi or monster movies". • Ian Holm as Ash, the ship's science officer who is revealed to be an android. • Bolaji Badejo as the alien. Badejo, a 26-year-old design student, was discovered in a bar by a member of the casting team, who put him in touch with Scott. could portray the alien and look as if his arms and legs were too long to be real, creating the illusion that a human being could not possibly be inside the costume. • Helen Horton as the voice of Mother, the Nostromo computer. == Production ==

Writing 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. 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." 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. 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. 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 board the ship. The Thing from Another World (1951) inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment. He has also cited as influences Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer (1960), which covers alien reproduction and various EC Comics horror titles carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people. They were on the verge of signing a deal with Roger Corman's studio when a friend offered to find them a better deal and passed the script on to Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill, who had formed a production company called Brandywine with ties to 20th Century-Fox. This caused tension with O'Bannon and Shusett, since Hill and Giler had very little experience with science fiction; according to Shusett, "They weren't good at making it better, or, in fact, at not making it even worse." but which Shusett later described as "one of the best things in the movie...That whole idea and scenario was theirs." Development 20th Century-Fox did not express confidence in financing a science-fiction film. However, after the success of Star Wars in 1977, its interest in the genre rose substantially. According to Carroll: "When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre." O'Bannon recalled that "They wanted to follow through on Star Wars, and they wanted to follow through fast, and the only spaceship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien". O'Bannon had originally assumed that he would direct Alien, but 20th Century-Fox instead asked Hill to direct. Hill declined due to other film commitments, as well as not being comfortable with the level of visual effects that would be required. Peter Yates, John Boorman, Jack Clayton, Robert Aldrich, and Robert Altman were considered for the task, but O'Bannon, Shusett, and the Brandywine team felt that these directors would not take the film seriously and would instead treat it as a B monster movie. According to Cobb, Steven Spielberg was also considered to direct the film and was interested but prior obligations prevented him from directing the film. Giler, Hill, and Carroll had been impressed by Ridley Scott's debut feature film The Duellists (1977) and made an offer to him to direct Alien, which Scott quickly accepted. However, he was keen on emphasizing horror in Alien rather than fantasy, describing the film as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre of science fiction". In developing the story, O'Bannon had focused on writing the alien first, putting off developing the other characters. Shusett and he had intentionally written all the roles generically; they made a note in the script that explicitly states, "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women." This freed Scott, Selway, and Goldberg to interpret the characters as they pleased, and to cast accordingly. They wanted the Nostromos crew to resemble working astronauts in a realistic environment, a concept summarized as "truckers in space". To assist the actors in preparing for their roles, Scott wrote several pages of backstory for each character explaining their histories. He filmed many of their rehearsals to capture spontaneity and improvisation, and tensions between some of the cast members, particularly towards the less-experienced Weaver; this translated convincingly to film as tension between the characters. Filming and Shepperton Studios near London, while model and miniature filming was done at Bray Studios in Water Oakley, Berkshire. Art director Les Dilley created -scale miniatures of the planetoid's surface and derelict spacecraft based on Giger's designs, then made moulds and casts and scaled them up as diagrams for the wood and fiberglass forms of the sets. Tons of sand, plaster, fiberglass, rock, and gravel were shipped into the studio to sculpt a desert landscape for the planetoid's surface, which the actors would walk across wearing space-suit costumes. All of the visuals on the computer screens on the Nostromo's bridge are computer-generated imagery (CGI). The staff used CGI because it was easier than any alternative. For scenes showing the exterior of the Nostromo, a landing leg was constructed to give a sense of the ship's size. Scott was not convinced that it looked large enough, so he had his two young sons and the son of Derek Vanlint (the film's cinematographer) stand in for the regular actors, wearing smaller space suits to make the set pieces seem larger. The same technique was used for the scene in which the crew members encounter the dead alien creature in the derelict spacecraft. The children nearly collapsed due to the heat of the suits; oxygen systems were eventually added to help the actors breathe. Production designer Michael Seymour later suggested that Dallas had "become sort of food for the alien creature", Music composed the music for Alien. The musical score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman, and performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Scott had originally wanted the film to be scored by Isao Tomita, but Fox wanted a more familiar composer and Goldsmith was recommended by then-president of Fox Alan Ladd Jr. Scott did not like Goldsmith's original main title piece, however, so Goldsmith rewrote it as "the obvious thing: weird and strange, and which everybody loved." Scott and Rawlings had also become attached to several of the musical cues they had used for the temporary score while editing the film, and re-edited some of Goldsmith's cues and rescored several sequences to match these cues and even left the temporary score in place in some parts of the finished film. The score has been released as a soundtrack album in several versions with different tracks and sequences. == Design ==

Creature effects O'Bannon introduced Scott to the artwork of H. R. Giger; both of them felt that his painting Necronom IV was the type of representation they wanted for the film's antagonist and began asking the studio to hire him as a designer. The "facehugger" and its proboscis, which was made of a sheep's intestine, were shot out of the egg using high-pressure air hoses. The shot was reversed and slowed down in editing to prolong the effect and reveal more detail. For the filming of the chestburster scene, the cast members knew that the creature would be bursting out of Hurt, and had seen the chestburster puppet, but they had not been told that fake blood would also be bursting out in every direction from high-pressure pumps and squibs. The scene was shot in one take using an artificial torso filled with blood and viscera, with Hurt's head and arms coming up from underneath the table. The chestburster was shoved up through the torso by a puppeteer who held it on a stick. When the creature burst through the chest, a stream of blood shot directly at Cartwright, shocking her enough that she fell over and went into hysterics. In 2007, Empire named it as the greatest 18-rated moment in film, ranking it above the decapitation scene in The Omen (1976) and the transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London (1981). IGN ranked it the 10th-best film moment of all time. For the scene in which Ash is revealed to be an android, a puppet was created of his torso and upper body, which was operated from underneath. In the following scene, Ash's head is placed on a table and reactivated; for portions of this scene, an animatronic head was made using a face cast of Holm. In April 2007, the original alien suit was sold at auction. Copious amounts of K-Y Jelly were used to simulate saliva and give the alien a slimy appearance. The alien vocalizations were provided by Percy Edwards, a voice artist who had provided bird sounds for British television throughout the 1960s and 1970s and the whale sounds for Orca: Killer Whale (1977). In most scenes, the alien was portrayed by Bolaji Badejo. A latex costume was made to fit Badejo's slender frame by taking a full-body plaster cast. Roger Ebert wrote that "Alien uses a tricky device to keep the alien fresh throughout the movie: it evolves the nature and appearance of the creature, so we never know quite what it looks like or what it can do... The first time we get a good look at the alien, as it bursts from the chest of poor Kane (John Hurt). It is unmistakably phallic in shape, and the critic Tim Dirks mentions its 'open, dripping vaginal mouth'." and to create a sense of being lost in machines, to aid Scott's metaphor of the ship as a Gothic castle or World War II submarine. Cobb created the name to imply a business alliance between Britain and Japan, deriving "Weylan" from the British Leyland Motor Corporation and "Yutani" from the name of his Japanese neighbor. The 1986 sequel, Aliens, named the company "Weyland-Yutani", and it has remained a central aspect of the franchise. Art director Roger Christian used scrap metal and parts to create set pieces and props to save money, a technique he employed while working on Star Wars. For example, some of the Nostromo corridors were created from portions of scrapped Canberra bomber aircraft, and a mirror was used to create the illusion of longer corridors in the below-deck area. Spaceships and planets O'Bannon brought in artists Ron Cobb and Chris Foss, with whom he had worked on Dark Star and Dune respectively, to work on designs for the human aspects such as the spaceship and space suits. Cobb created hundreds of preliminary sketches of the interiors and exteriors of the ship, which went through many design concepts and possible names such as Leviathan and Snark as the script developed. The final name was derived from the title of Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel Nostromo, while the escape shuttle, called Narcissus in the script, was named after Conrad's 1897 novella ''The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. The designs of the Nostromo'' and its attachments were based on combinations of Scott's storyboards and Ron Cobb's conceptual drawings. Only one shot was filmed using blue-screen compositing – that of the shuttle racing past the Nostromo. The other shots were simply filmed against black backdrops, with stars added by double exposure. It is referenced as one of the most iconic opening sequences of all time. == Release and reception ==

An initial screening of Alien for 20th Century-Fox representatives in St. Louis was marred by poor sound. A subsequent screening in a newer theater in Dallas went significantly better, eliciting genuine fright from the audience. which was written by Barbara Gips, husband of Philip Gips, who designed the poster. Alien was rated "R" in the United States, "X" in the United Kingdom, and "M" in Australia. Alien had its world premiere as a midnight screening on May 24, 1979, at the Seattle International Film Festival and opened in a limited release in American theaters on May 25. Moviegoers lined up for blocks to see the film at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, where a number of models, sets, and props were displayed outside to promote it during its first run. Vandals set fire to the model of the space jockey, believing it to be the work of the devil. before starting an exclusive run at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on Thursday, September 6, 1979, for one week before expanding slowly until opening wide in Britain in 180 theaters on October 1, 1979. The film opened in France and Spain in September before expanding to other markets in October 1979. It was the number one film in the United States where it remained for three weeks. In its first 4 weeks it grossed $16.5 million from only 148 prints before expanding to 635 screens. It remained at number one for eight weeks. By the beginning of October 1979, the film had grossed $27 million internationally including $16.9 million in Japan, $4.8 million in France and $3.7 million in the UK. 20th Century Fox claimed that Alien lost $2 million in the 11 months following its release. The claim was decried by industry accountants as an example of Hollywood creative accounting, used to disguise the revenue and limit any payments to Brandywine. By August 1980, Fox readjusted the figure to $4 million profit, although this was similarly refuted. Eager to begin work on a sequel, Brandywine sued Fox over their profit distribution tactics, but Fox claimed that Alien was not a financial success and did not warrant a sequel. The lawsuit was settled in 1983 when Fox agreed to fund a sequel. Critical reception Critical reaction to Alien was initially mixed. Some critics who were not usually favorable towards science fiction, such as Barry Norman of the BBC's Film series, were positive about the film's merits. A review by Time Out said the film was an "empty bag of tricks whose production values and expensive trickery cannot disguise imaginative poverty". In their original review on Sneak Previews, critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film "two 'yes' votes." Ebert called it "one of the scariest old-fashioned space operas I can remember." Siskel agreed that it was scary but said it was basically a "haunted house film" set "in a spaceship" and was "not the greatest science fiction film ever made." Siskel gave the film three stars out of four in his original print review, calling it "an accomplished piece of scary entertainment" and praising Sigourney Weaver as "an actress who should become a major star," but listed among the film's disappointments that "[f]or me, the final shape of the alien was the least scary of its forms." Accolades Alien won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and was also nominated for Best Art Direction (for Michael Seymour, Leslie Dilley, Roger Christian, and Ian Whittaker). It won Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Ridley Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Veronica Cartwright, It was also nominated for British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards for Best Costume Design for John Mollo, Best Editing for Terry Rawlings, Best Supporting Actor for John Hurt, and Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Role for Sigourney Weaver. Jerry Goldsmith's score received nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, the Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album, and won a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. == Post-release ==

Home video Alien has been released in many home video formats and packages over the years. The first of these was a 17-minute Super-8 version for home projectionists. A VHS box set containing Alien and its sequels Aliens and Alien 3 was released in facehugger-shaped boxes, and included some of the deleted scenes from the Laserdisc editions. When Alien Resurrection premiered in theaters that year, another set of the first three films was released including a Making of Alien Resurrection tape. A few months later, the set was re-released with the full version of Alien Resurrection taking the place of the making-of video. This set, which was also released in a VHS version, included a commentary track by Ridley Scott. Upon viewing the expanded version, Scott felt that it was too long and chose to recut it into a more streamlined alternative version: The "Director's Cut" restored around four minutes of deleted footage, while cutting about five minutes of other material, leaving it about a minute shorter than the theatrical cut. Many of the changes were minor, such as new sound effects, trimming of some shots to speed up the film's pace and the removal of the "What Are My Chances?" scene. The restored footage included the scene in which Ripley discovers the cocooned Dallas and Brett during her escape of the Nostromo. Fox released the Director's Cut in theaters on October 31, 2003. It also won a Saturn Award for Best DVD, and was nominated for Best DVD Collection and Golden Satellite Awards for Best DVD Extras and Best Overall DVD. In 2010 both the theatrical version and Director's Cut of Alien were released on Blu-ray Disc, as a stand-alone release and as part of the Alien Anthology set. In 2014, to mark the film's 35th anniversary, a special re-release boxed set named Alien: 35th Anniversary Edition, containing the film on Blu-ray, a digital copy, a reprint of Alien: The Illustrated Story, and a series of collectible art cards containing artwork by H.R. Giger related to the film, was released. A soundtrack album was released, featuring selections of Goldsmith's score. Additionally, a single of the Main Theme was released in 1980, and a disco single using audio excerpts from the film was released in 1979 on the UK label Bronze Records by a recording artist under the name Nostromo. Alien was re-released on Ultra HD Blu-ray and 4K digital download on April 23, 2019, in honor of the film's 40th anniversary. The 4k Blu-ray Disc presents the film in 2160p resolution with HDR10 high-dynamic-range video. Several previously released bonus features on the 4k Blu-ray include audio commentary from director Ridley Scott, cast and crew, the final isolated theatrical score and composer's original isolated score by Jerry Goldsmith, and deleted and extended scenes. Cinematic analysis Critics have analyzed Alien sexual overtones. The film is often cited as a major work of abjection, as outlined by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 work Powers of Horror. According to Kristeva, the abject refers to that which signifies the breakdown of conventional borders and rules. It confronts the subject with the fallibility of the human body and societal norms, and thus exposes how the supposedly sacred distinctions between what is Self and what is Other are arbitrary. She suggests that this confrontation—often manifesting in excrement, bodily invasion, and corpses—is an inherently traumatic interruption of subjectivity, and thus all evidence of abjection is hidden in conventional society. Much of Alien effectiveness as a work of horror has been attributed to its use of abject themes and imagery, a narrative strategy that has made Kristeva's abject a major framework for feminist and psychoanalytic critics such as Barbara Creed. Following Creed's assertion that the alien creature is a representation of the "monstrous-feminine as archaic mother", Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith compared the facehugger's attack on Kane to a male rape and the chestburster scene to a form of violent birth, noting that the alien's phallic head and method of killing the crew members add to the sexual imagery. Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the film's screenplay, has argued that the scene is a metaphor for the male fear of penetration, and that the "oral invasion" of Kane by the facehugger functions as "payback" for the many horror films in which sexually vulnerable women are attacked by male monsters. David McIntee claims that "Alien is a rape movie as much as Straw Dogs (1971) or I Spit on Your Grave (1978), or The Accused (1988). On one level, it's about an intriguing alien threat. On one level it's about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important to the writers and director, it's about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it's about this happening to a man." He notes how the film plays on men's fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears. Alternatively, H.R. Giger's xenomorph design has been interpreted through the lens of "machinic modernism," an aesthetic movement reacting to industrialization and social upheaval, linked to proto-fascist ideology (New Cinemas 2023). The xenomorph embodies traits such as armoured aggression, zoomorphism, and hierarchical social organization, reflecting anti-humanist ideals that valorize violence and dominance. Eden contextualizes the creature alongside works by Wyndham Lewis and Jacob Epstein, whose art similarly celebrated hardened, phallic forms as responses to modernity's destabilizing forces. The alien's role in the narrative—eliminating a flawed, liberal crew to pave the way for Ripley's emergent leadership—mirrors proto-fascist fantasies of elite replacement, where a "heroic" figure (Ripley) justifies authoritarian reorganization by contrast to both weak democracies (the crew) and totalitarian horrors (the xenomorphs). These readings, challenge the view of the xenomorph as a purely feminist return of the repressed, instead framing it as a "vanishing mediator" that consolidates fascistic subjectivity through its phallic coherence and mythic violence. Film analyst Lina Badley has written that the alien's design, with strong Freudian sexual undertones, multiple phallic symbols, and overall feminine figure, provides an androgynous image conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines. O'Bannon described the sexual imagery as overt and intentional: "I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number." Alien roots in earlier works of fiction have been analyzed and acknowledged extensively by critics. The film has been said to have much in common with B movies such as The Thing from Another World (1951), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and Queen of Blood (1966), as well as its fellow 1970s horror films Jaws (1975) and Halloween (1978). O'Bannon denies that this was a source of his inspiration for Alien story. Several critics have suggested that the film was inspired by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava's cult classic Planet of the Vampires (1965), in both narrative details and visual design. Rick Sanchez of IGN has noted the "striking resemblance" between the two movies, especially in a celebrated sequence in which the crew discovers a ruin containing the skeletal remains of long-dead giant beings, and in the design and shots of the ship itself. Robert Monell, on the DVD Maniacs website, observed that much of the conceptual design and some specific imagery in Alien "undoubtedly owes a great debt" to Bava's film. Despite these similarities, O'Bannon and Scott both claimed in a 1979 interview that they had not seen Planet of the Vampires; decades later, O'Bannon would admit: "I stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires." Writer David McIntee, as well as reviewers for PopMatters and Den of Geek, have noted similarities to the Doctor Who serial The Ark in Space (1975), in which an insectoid queen alien lays larvae inside humans which later eat their way out, a life cycle inspired by that of the ichneumon wasp. McIntee also noted similarities between the first half of the film, particularly in early versions of the script, to H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, "not in storyline, but in dread-building mystery", and calls the finished film "the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, without being a Lovecraft adaptation", due to its similarities in tone and atmosphere to Lovecraft's works. H. R. Giger has said he liked O'Bannon's initial Alien storyline "because I found it was in the vein of Lovecraft, one of my greatest sources of inspiration." Audience research Findings from an international audience research project conducted by staff from Aberystwyth University, Northumbria University and University of East Anglia were published in 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan as Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie. 1,125 people were surveyed about their memories and opinions of the film in order to test some of the theories offered by academics and critics about why the film became so popular and why it has endured for so long as a masterpiece. The study discusses memories of Alien in the cinema and on home video from the point of view of everyday audiences, describing how many fans share the film with their children and the shocking impact of the "chestburster" scene, among other things. Re-release For its 45th anniversary, Alien was re-released in theaters by 20th Century Studios on April 26, 2024. == Legacy ==

Critical reassessment In a 1980 episode of Sneak Previews discussing science fiction films of the 1950s and 1970s, the reviewers were critical of Alien. Roger Ebert reiterated Gene Siskel's earlier opinion, stating that the film was "basically just an intergalactic haunted house thriller set inside a spaceship". He described it as one of several science fiction pictures that were "real disappointments" compared to Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, in both episodes Ebert singled out the early scene of the Nostromo crew exploring the alien planet for praise, calling the scene "inspired", said that it showed "real imagination" and claimed that it transcended the rest of the film. Over two decades later, Ebert had revised his opinion, including the film on his Great Movies list, where he gave it four stars and said it was "a great original". In 1980, Alien was mentioned in Cinefantastiques chronological recap of the top films of the 1970s but was not included in the article's "Decade's Top Ten" list. Frederick S. Clarke, the Cinefantastique editor, wrote that Alien was "an exercise in style, refreshingly adult in approach, wickedly grim and perverse, that manages to compensate for a lack of depth in both story and characters". In 1982, John Simon of the National Review praised the cast, particularly Weaver, and the visual values. He wrote: "For fanciers of horror, among whose numbers I do not count myself, Alien is recommendable, provided they are free from hypocrisy and finicky stomachs". Despite initial mixed reviews, Alien has received critical acclaim over the years, particularly for its realism and unique environment, It is seen as one of the most influential science-fiction films. It holds rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "A modern classic, Alien blends science fiction, horror and bleak poetry into a seamless whole." Metacritic reports a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". ''Halliwell's Film Guide'' awarded it a full four stars, describing it as "a classic of suspense and art direction". Critical interest in the film was re-ignited with the theatrical release of the "Director's Cut" in 2003. Roger Ebert ranked it among "the most influential of modern action pictures" and praised its pacing, atmosphere, and settings: David A. McIntee praises Alien as "possibly the definitive combination of horror thriller with science fiction trappings." David Edelstein wrote, "Alien remains the key text in the 'body horror' subgenre that flowered (or, depending on your viewpoint, festered) in the seventies, and Giger's designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate — how's that for future shock? This was truly what David Cronenberg would call 'the new flesh,' a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness that has never, thank God, been equaled." In 2008, the American Film Institute ranked Alien the seventh-best science fiction film as part of ''AFI's 10 Top 10, a CBS television special ranking the greatest movies in ten classic American film genres. The ranks were based on a poll of over 1,500 film artists, critics, and historians, with Alien ranking just above Terminator 2: Judgment Day'' (1991) and just below Scott's other science fiction film Blade Runner (1982). The same year, Empire named Alien the 33rd-greatest film, based on a poll of 10,200 readers, critics, and members of the film industry. In 2021, Phil Pirrello of Syfy named it the second-scariest science fiction film. He described it as a "groundbreaking science fiction classic" and "a movie so influential that it's hard to think of a time before Alien". Cultural influence "Alien" gargoyle () in Paisley, Scotland Alien had both an immediate and long-term effect on the science fiction and horror genres. Shortly after its debut, Dan O'Bannon was sued by another writer named Jack Hammer for allegedly plagiarising a script entitled Black Space. However, O'Bannon was able to prove that he had written his Alien script first. In the wake of Alien success, a number of other filmmakers imitated or adapted some of its elements, sometimes by using "Alien" in titles. One of the first was The Alien Dead (1979), which had its title changed at the last minute to cash in on Alien popularity. Contamination (1980) was initially going to be titled Alien 2 until 20th Century Fox's lawyers contacted writer/director Luigi Cozzi and made him change it. The film built on Alien by having many similar creatures, which originated from large, slimy eggs, bursting from characters' chests. Nintendo's long-running Metroid video game series, created in 1986, was significantly influenced by Alien, both in stylistic and thematic elements. As an homage to Alien, villains in the first Metroid installment were named Ridley and Mother Brain, after the movie's director and the ship computer, respectively. Notably, at Paisley Abbey, during a restoration project that took place in the 1990s, a stonemason from Edinburgh hired to replace twelve crumbling stone gargoyles erected one bearing a strong resemblance to the space creature from the film. A picture of the gargoyle went viral in 2013, though a photograph of the statue first surfaced on the internet in 1997. In 2002, it was confirmed the abbey would be subject to a 10-year-long restoration project. In SFR Yugoslavia the film and its sequels were distributed under the title Osmi putnik (transl. Eighth Traveller). The highly popular Yugoslav and later Croatian hard rock band Osmi Putnik chose their name after the film. In 2002, Alien was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the National Film Preservation Board of the United States, and was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for historical preservation alongside other films of 1979 including All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, The Black Stallion, and Manhattan. In 2019, author J. W. Rinzler published The Making of Alien, a behind-the-scenes book about the making of the film with cast and crew interviews and previously unseen photographs. The Verge praised the book as "the definitive story of the classic horror film". Eli Roth cites Alien as his primary influence, saying "I saw Alien when I was 8 years old. To me, it was like a combination of Jaws and Star Wars and that's the movie that made me want to be a director. It traumatized me. I actually threw up I was so nervous after I saw it but that's like the highest compliment you can give a horror film." Ty Franck, one of the authors behind the sci-fi series The Expanse, credits Alien as one of his major inspirations. Merchandise Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelization of the film in both adult and "junior" versions, which was adapted from the film's shooting script. Kenner also produced a larger-scale Alien action figure, as well as a board game in which players raced to be first to reach the shuttle pod while Aliens roamed the Nostromo corridors and air shafts. He donated to the school to put on an encore performance at which Weaver was in attendance. She got on stage before the performance to congratulate the cast and crew for their creativity and commitment. Video game adaptations In 1982, Fox Video Games released an Alien video game for the Atari 2600. With gameplay reminiscent of Pac-Man, in it the player traverses a maze collecting items and destroying alien eggs, while avoiding the creature. Argus Press Software made another game called Alien in 1984 for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC computers, a straighter adaptation of the film where after Kane's death the player controls the crew of the Nostromo roaming the ship in search for the alien. The 2014 video game Alien: Isolation, which serves as a partial sequel to Alien in featuring Ripley's daughter Amanda trying to find out the whereabouts of her mother 15 years after the destruction of the Nostromo, had two downloadable content packs titled Crew Expendable and Last Survivor depicting alternate versions of key events from the film, with the original cast members Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerrit, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Yaphet Kotto reprising their respective roles. Crew Expendable centers around the events of the movie after Brett's disappearance in the air ducts, prompting the crew to attempt to force the alien into the airlock. Unlike the film, where Dallas would be the first to attempt this while armed with a flamethrower, the game provides the player with the option to play as Ripley, Dallas, or Parker, which would result in the chosen character to enter the ducts first. Last Survivor focuses on the climax of the film, where Ripley is left to be the last crew member and proceeds to self-destruct the Nostromo. In 2023, an Alien Chapter DLC was released for the multiplayer asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight. It included the Xenomorph and Ellen Ripley as a playable Killer and Survivor, respectively. The Nostromo was added as a Map in the form of the Nostromo Wreckage, where players can interact with the environment and spot Easter-eggs such as Jonesy the Cat, and a Facehugger. The Xenomorph's Power allows it to enter Crawler Mode, where it runs on all fours, gains access to a Tail Attack, and becomes stealthier. Its secondary ability involves Tunnels that it can enter and travel quickly around the Map, gaining Crawler Mode quicker while inside them. Survivors are able to collect Flame Turrets from these tunnels, which, once placed down, can indicate if the Xenomorph is near, and will spew a stream of fire if it gets close enough, potentially forcing it out of Crawler Mode. The Xenomorph can destroy these turrets, which will force Survivors to collect new ones. Notable Cosmetics that players can buy and equip include the Xenomorph Queen from Aliens, the Grid Xenomorph from Alien vs. Predator, a Human-Xenomorph Hybrid based on the Newborn from Alien Resurrection, and Rain Carradine from Alien: Romulus as a Skin for Ripley. Sigourney Weaver's likeness was not used for Ellen Ripley, and neither did she voice the character. == Sequels and franchise ==

became the star of the Alien films, reprising her role as Ripley in three sequels between 1986 and 1997. She did not appear in either of the Alien vs. Predator crossovers of the 2000s, but has expressed interest in doing a fifth Alien film. The success of Alien led 20th Century Fox to finance three direct sequels over the next eighteen years, each by different writers and directors. Sigourney Weaver remained the only recurring actor through all four films: the story of her character Ripley's encounters with the aliens became the thematic and narrative core of the series. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection (1997) saw Ripley resurrected through cloning to battle more aliens even further in the future. The success of the film series resulted in the creation of a media franchise with numerous novels, comic books, video games, toys, and other media and merchandise appearing over the years. A number of these began appearing under the Alien vs. Predator crossover imprint, which brought the alien creatures together with the eponymous characters of the Predator franchise. A film series followed, with Alien vs. Predator in 2004, and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007. Sigourney Weaver has expressed interest in reuniting with Ridley Scott to revive her character for another Alien film. In the 2003 commentary track for the Alien DVD included in the Alien Quadrilogy set, she and Scott both speculated on the possibility, with Weaver stating: "There is an appetite for a fifth one, which is something I never expected...it's really hard to come up with a fifth story that's new and fresh...but I have wanted to go back into space...I think outer space adventure is a good thing for us right now, 'cause Earth is so grim...so we've been talking about it, but very generally." Weaver supported this idea, saying "I think it would be great to go back, because I'm asked that question so many times: 'Where did the alien come from?' People really want to know in a very visceral way." Cameron had been working on a story for a fifth Alien film which would explore the origins of the creatures, but ceased work on it when he learned that Fox was pursuing Alien vs. Predator, which he felt would "kill the validity of the franchise". In July 2009, 20th Century Fox announced that Jon Spaihts had been hired to write a prequel to Alien, with Scott attached to direct. The script was subsequently re-worked by Scott and Damon Lindelof. Titled Prometheus, it went into production in May 2011, and was released the following year. Scott said in a statement: "While Alien was indeed the jumping-off point for this project, out of the creative process evolved a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place. The keen fan will recognize strands of Alien DNA, so to speak, but the ideas tackled in this film are unique, large and provocative." Variety reported on February 18, 2015, that a new Alien film would be developed by Neill Blomkamp. On February 25, it was confirmed that Sigourney Weaver would have a role in the film, the intent being to produce a direct sequel to Aliens, ignoring the events of later films, featuring the characters of Hicks and Newt. Blomkamp's sequel was ultimately shelved by Fox in favor of Alien: Covenant, a continuation of Scott's prequel, Prometheus. An eventual fifth Alien film, Alien: Romulus, set between the events of Alien and Aliens, was released in 2024, directed by Fede Álvarez. A television series titled Alien: Earth, developed by Noah Hawley, released on streaming on Hulu in 2025. Several computer games based on the film were released, but not until several years after its theatrical run. == See also ==