"I wasn't scared when
I saw this movie. I always sit in my dates lap."
- W.J. Flywheel, Webporium
Curator
Alien
is a 1979 science-fiction/horror film directed by Ridley Scott tells
the story of refinery workers travelling on a long journey through
deep space who are woken in mid-flight to investigate signs of alien
intelligence. The crew finds such evidence and inadvertently brings
aboard a living specimen that begins to take out the crew one-by-one.
It was the first film in what would become a successful Hollywood
franchise. The title of the film refers to the highly-aggressive
extraterrestrial creature, but the plot's connecting thread becomes
the saga of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, who finds
herself the principal opponent of the species throughout the series.
Alien is credited with having launched the first major American film
series with a female action hero. H.R. Giger designed the film's
visual imagery and won an Oscar for it. In 2002, the United States
Library of Congress deemed Alien "culturally significant"
and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. The
movie used the tagline which became famous: In space no one can hear
you scream.
Dan
O'Bannon (who had collaborated with John Carpenter on the cult
sci-fi film Dark Star) wrote the original screenplay as a script
titled Star Beast, a revision of some earlier ideas of O'Bannon's
(one of which dated from some years before) about gremlins getting
loose aboard a World War II bomber and wreaking havoc with the crew.
O'Bannon's original script bears many
resemblances to the film as actually produced, yet with significant
differences. The spaceship — designed with a low-budget
production in mind — originated as a small craft called the
Snark. In the original script, the ship has an all-male crew —
including the Ripley character. Actor Tom Skerritt originally won the
role of Ripley, but in the course of developing the script, character
re-casting made Ripley a woman, reportedly at the insistence of
producer Alan Ladd, Jr.. This decision proved crucial to the film's success.
After sailing in response to the
intercepted alien message, the crew discover the derelict alien craft
and its dead pilot. Ominously the pilot in its death throes had
scratched a triangle on its control console. The crew members go
outside and see the remains of an ancient pyramid. They lower Kane
into the structure, where he finds a chamber with a breathable
atmosphere. An altar-like structure houses the alien embryo-eggs, and
a hieroglyph depicts the alien's lifecycle. This concept survived for
a long time, and preliminary H.R. Giger pyramid drawings intended for
Alien exist, but eventually the producers went with the idea of
combining the wrecked derelict ship with the egg-chamber (also
designed by Giger), although the ideas of the pyramid, the altar and
the hieroglyphs re-surfaced in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator. The
subplot of Ash as an android and the betrayal of the crew came in
later in the script-development process. The production dropped a
scene in which Ripley and Dallas have sex — in order to secure a
lower censorship-rating.
Substantial excerpts of O'Bannon's
original script appeared as bonus materials on the 1992 laserdisc
boxed set of Alien (though the 1999 Alien Legacy DVD box omitted
these). The complete O'Bannon script appears in the 2003 Alien
Quadrilogy DVD box set as a bonus feature.
Some early concept art came from Chris
Foss and from Jean Giraud, better known as the comic-book artist
Mœbius. Mœbius's designs for the Nostromo spacesuits made
it into the final film.
Untitled
Aliens is a 1986 science
fiction film directed by James Cameron and starring Sigourney Weaver,
Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton and Paul
Reiser. It is a sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.
The
film picks up 57 years after the events of the original film. It
tells the story of a group of futuristic Marines (accompanied by the
protagonist, Ripley, alive because of cryogenic stasis) who are sent
to investigate a terraforming base on a far-off planet. The planet
turns out to have been overrun by an extremely deadly race of aliens
that implant their eggs into human hosts in order to incubate them.
Directed by James Cameron, from a story written by Cameron, David
Giler and Walter Hill, the film is faster paced and more
action-oriented than its predecessor, but many fans see it as a
worthy sequel to Scott's original horror film.
The film was tremendously
successful, and help to establish Cameron (The Terminator), as a
major Hollywood director. The film, like its predecessor, was shot in
England, this time at Pinewood
Studios, with a budget of about $18 million. The work on the film
was beset by problems, being especially troubled with disputes
between Cameron and the film crew, which eventually led to an all-out
strike late in the production.
The third installment in
the Alien franchise, Alien³ (sometimes pronounced alien cubed)
is a science fiction/horror movie that opened May 22, 1992. It was
the feature film debut of director David Fincher. Lt. Ripley
(Sigourney Weaver) is the lone survivor when her crippled spaceship
crash lands on Fiorina 161, a bleak wasteland inhabited by former
inmates of the planet's maximum security prison. Ripley's fears that
an Alien was aboard her craft are confirmed when the mutilated bodies
of ex-cons begin to mount. Without weapons or modern technology of
any kind, Ripley must lead the men into battle against the terrifying
creature. And soon she discovers a horrifying fact about her link
with the Alien, a realization that may compel Ripley to try
destroying not only the horrific creature but herself as well.
Directed
by French stylist Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the events of Alien:
Resurrection take place two centuries after the events of Alien³.
Ellen Ripley has been cloned using "blood samples from Fiorina
161, on ice" so that the United Systems Military can extract the
Xenomorph queen embryo that was inside her from Alien³. The
first seven tries are unsuccessful hybrids of human and alien body
forms. Six of them are dead in fluid-filled preservative chambers.
The seventh, horribly deformed, remains alive to be discovered and
mercifully killed by Ripley later in the film. On the eighth try the
scientists recreated a viable normal-looking Ripley with a viable
alien queen embryo inside her.
This film reveals a new
alien capability - the ability to transfer memory genetically, which
enables the resurrected Ripley to keep her former self's memories. It
also piques the curiosity of the scientists and leads to their
decision to keep her alive for further study. Having her DNA mixed
with the aliens' has also given Ripley increased strength, lightning
reflexes, enhanced hearing and weak acid blood. She also has somewhat
of an empathy for the aliens, referring to them as "my
babies." At the end of the film, it is shown that the alien
queen has also received a gift from Ripley's DNA: the ability to give
birth to live offspring directly. This offspring seems more
"human" than others aliens, with an human-like skull and
eyes. This creature kills its alien mother right after birth,
recognizing Ripley as his "true" one, weeping in a quite
"childish" mode. A rogue ship full of freelancers arrives
with kidnapped humans for the aliens to parasitize and reproduce
upon. However, before the freelancers depart, the aliens escape and
wreak terror across the ship. Ripley teams up with the freelancers to
help destroy the ship before it reaches home base, Earth.
