"I admire its purity."

I was in the middle of developing another project, and this script dropped on my desk.  I read it in forty minutes...and bang!  The script was simple and direct:  it was the reason I did the film."

Ridley Scott on the script for Alien, The Book of Alien

In the wake of my disappointing experience with Prometheus, I decided to revisit Alien:  the original ten-little-Indians-on-a-spaceship movie that started the franchise.

On paper, the two movies are very similar:  enigmatic alien spaceships, bad planetary weather conditions, hidden agendas, villainous androids, and, of course, slime-covered alien monsters.  However, that similarity is deceptive.  Alien is a much more elementary film - as Ridley Scott says, simple and direct.

The movie is a beautifully crafted piece of work.  The art direction had input from some of the top fantasy/science fiction illustrators of the day:  Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and of course Hans Rudi Giger, whose biomechanical illustrations provided the perfect starting place for the design of both the alien spacecraft and the Alien. 

The script, as Ridley Scott points out, is simple and direct, but it's also full of little moments of realism - of humanity, one might say.  Ripley's panic when the dead facehugger falls on her; the awkward sick room camaraderie when Kane has regained consciousness; the moments that Brett spends letting the condensation drip on his upturned face just moments before his death; Dallas momentarily knocking his headset loose in the air duct, and fumbling for a moment to get it right way round when he puts it back on.

I've always thought that the most brilliant of those moments is at the end, when Ripley is undressing in preparation for hibernation, only to discover that the Alien is in the lifeboat with her.  (It's easy to classify that scene as gratuitous, but I see it as a tactic designed to make Ripley as vulnerable as possible in her final confrontation with the creature. Ideally, she should have been naked, but you can't have everything.)  Ripley's responses are exactly what you would expect under the circumstances, making the ending much more effective than the sort of heroic dialogue-driven posturing that most action films are prone to.

I think that Prometheus wanted to have that feel of realism, of actual life, and that may well explain some of the odd little diversions in the plot.  Unfortunately, those diversions ended up feeling artificial, rather than part of the natural flow of events.

Of course, both movies share the basic lack of judgement that always predicates the action in this sort of science fiction horror thriller.  Doesn't anyone ever decide to disobey protocol in favour of common sense?  Think how much shorter these movies would be if the captain's log read as follows:

Stardate: 43205.6 

Discovered alien spaceship - no signs of life, crew died from unknown causes, cargo hold full of unidentified organic cocoons.  

Took one look and buggered off at warp nine.

- Sid