Movies You Gotta See: 45 years later, ‘Alien’ remains a titan of sci-fi horror

“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

It’s pretty wild to think that the Best Movie Tagline Debate has been settled since 1979, when Ridley Scott dropped his sci-fi horror classic Alien.

Of course, there have been quite a few bangers over the years. Take, for instance, the tagline from Wes Anderson’s 2001 family drama The Royal Tenenbaums: “Family isn’t a word. It’s a sentence.” Clever, but a tad dark. You alright, Wes?

Or, the one from The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece about the founding of Facebook (a movie I wrote about last year): “You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” In Mark Zuckerberg’s case, one of the aforementioned “enemies” was his best pal. The dude threw away his closest friendship to create the website where your great-uncle now shares weird political memes. Hope it was worth it, man!

And then there’s my personal favorite: “If you see only one movie this summer, see Star Wars. But if you see two movies this summer, see Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Pure brilliance.

A great tagline sells a movie, and they’re especially effective if the film’s storyline can be explained in a few words. Alien’s plot could be summed up in probably a dozen or so words, but we’ll dive a little deeper than that before getting to why, 45 years after its release, it’s still an all-timer.

Here’s the setup of the movie. The Nostromo, a commercial towing vehicle, is headed back to Earth with 20 million tons of iron ore. The tug is crewed by seven people: Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in a star-making role), Navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm, also known for being my guy Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and engineers Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (the late great Harry Dean Stanton, playing the best-dressed man in outer space here). The crew awakens from a state of hibernation to find that the ship’s computer system, Mother, picked up a signal from a nearby planet and changed their course to head for it. Company policy requires all vessels to check out potential signs of intelligent life, so the Nostromo makes for the planet. Once there, Dallas, Kane, and Lambert go to check things out, and they find that the transmission came from what’s left of a non-human craft. Inside, they discover a large, dead alien creature with a hole in its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley, back on the Nostromo, figures out that part of the transmission was a warning message.

After finding a bunch of strange-looking eggs, Kane touches one, which, you know, just as a general rule, you probably shouldn’t do. A creature leaps out, smashes through his helmet, and attaches itself to his face. When Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane, who’s having a rough day at the office at this juncture, back to the Nostromo, Ripley, the acting senior officer with her superiors off-board, refuses to let them in, citing quarantine procedures. But Ash, in the name of what appears to be scientific curiosity, breaks ranks and opens the doors.

Now aboard the Nostromo, the creature eventually detaches itself from Kane’s face and dies, and Kane seems to be on the road to recovery. But as the crew’s having a final meal before going back to deep sleep for the trip home, Kane starts suddenly convulsing. The crew lays Kane on the table, and in one of the most iconic images in film history, a small alien creature bursts from his chest, killing him before taking off to hide somewhere on the ship.

Herein lies the problem for the Nostromo crew. They’re now trapped on a spaceship with an absolute killing machine: our titular alien, one of cinema’s great monsters. As the crew learns more about the creature in a series of attempts to dispatch it, they realize how truly dire their circumstances have become. This thing is simply indestructible, and it’s vicious. Oh, and its blood is extremely corrosive acid. I almost forgot to mention the extremely corrosive acid blood part.

Alien has stood the test of time in part due to its stunning practical effects. If they aren’t completely unrivaled in film, then they’re certainly among the very best. The movie is one giant technical masterpiece. It’s poetry in motion, folks; movie magic of the highest order.

The film has this tactility that makes everything feel so unbelievably real. The astounding use of models to show the Nostromo docking and landing in space would make George Lucas involuntarily blurt out “Oh heck yeah.” Scattered throughout the masterfully-conceived ship are various screens and panels, but the dazzling production design doesn’t feel like it was pulled from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or from any other movie; it has an atmosphere all its own.

Outside the ship is where the movie’s staggering scale is fully realized. Wide shots depicting the tiny Nostromo against the background of colossal planets and the darkness of space peppered with distant stars and galaxies, looks as good, if not better, than just about anything you’d see in a sci-fi flick today.

While the gorgeousness and scope of the production design are breathtaking, the film’s brilliance is in its deftness at flipping the viewer’s amazement on its head. What was once awe-inspiring slowly starts evoking feelings of uneasiness, and claustrophobia, and dread, and finally, full-blown terror. If Star Wars showed audiences the majesty and wonder of outer space, Alien offered the inverse, honing in on the existential fear of the unknown universe and suggesting that it might be even more terrifying than we ever imagined.

Alien’s lasting impact can be attributed to its ingenious juxtaposition of beauty and horror; not just in how the audience perceives those things, but the crew. In the alien, most of the crew sees an invincible monstrosity bent on violently compromising each and every one of them to a permanent end. But Ash sees something else.

“You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you?” Ash says, his voice dripping not with fright, but with admiration. “The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

This doubles as both a description of the creature and the film itself. Alien, and the alien, are objectively impressive and brutally unforgiving. The movie presents a grim, terrifying possibility about our universe: What if this is our most accurate portrait of alien life, if it exists somewhere out there? Most of us probably imagine extraterrestrials being something like E.T., or, at the very scariest, the creatures in M. Night Shayamalan’s 2002 sci-fi thriller Signs. But what if they’re more sinister? What if they can’t even be communicated with, let alone reasoned with? What if they’re as Ash described their alien – unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality?

Alien ultimately works because the alien itself is just downright petrifying. If the big reveal of the creature finally came, and it turned out to be, like, a dog wearing a weird mask or something, audiences would’ve laughed the movie into permanent obscurity. But the physical creation of the alien is a filmmaking miracle, which has led to Alien being a titan of sci-fi horror for nearly a half-century. It’s a movie that has few peers; if you happen to be searching the genre in hopes of finding a better film – I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.

Jalen’s columns, “Movies You Gotta See” and “The Free Play,” can be found online at www.medium.com/@jalenmaki.

Follow Jalen on Letterboxd at www.letterboxd.com/jalenmaki182/ to see what he’s been watching.