Pay the cheese tax. (Spoilers)

I suppose I should clarify before I begin this Catching Up series that I have seen the first three Alien movies. And I saw them a very long time ago. A very, very long time ago. I had also seen Alien vs. Predator but unless I do a catching up on Predator I don’t plan on revisiting that movie. Some disappointments are best left in the past.

Alien is the film that started it all. Released in 1979 by Ridley Scott, Alien received mixed reviews on its release with Siskel and Ebert personally giving it their seal of approval. The film follows the crew of the commercial towing ship Nostromo as it heads home to Earth with twenty million tons of ore on its ass. It responds to a transmission coming from a derelict alien space ship, waking up the crew from their deep slumber in cryogenic sleep.

Alien stars Tom Skerritt as Dallas, the captain of the crew, as well as Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, John Hurt as Kane, Ian Holm as Ash, Yaphet Kotto as Parker, and Bolaji Badejo as the Alien. And more importantly it stars Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, aka “Ms. Was Right About Everything.” Ripley’s job is to be correct and be overruled by her crewmates leading to their horrible and violent deaths at the hands of an alien they could have avoided had they just listened to Ripley.

Part of what makes movies like Alien great are the characters and more importantly the efforts that the movie goes through to show them as just normal people. People in 2122 aren’t that different from people of our time or people in 1979. They complain about the food, have conversations about random stuff, and argue about stupid shit. In this particular case the crew are arguing over shares, pay, and contract disputes. Something anyone can relate to. Do they get a half share or a full share? Are they contractually obligated to check out a signal?

But it’s relatable. The food sucks, the boss sucks, and everyone just wants to get the job done, get paid, and go home so they can have a pork chop and sleep in their own bed. Maybe do both at the same time. And the crew reacts to the beacon how you’d expect, with some of them exhausted at getting sidetracked by what they consider to be stupid bullshit, the boss quoting company policy about being contractually obligated to follow up, and the scientist curious about what they might find.

The same goes for the sequence of events, leading up to the first character’s death being over the halfway point of the movie. And even then the film is pretty quaint in its kills with many of them either happening off screen or with a quick flash and jump away. In fact the only real brutal death we get is that of Ash, who turns out to be an android the whole time. That point where Ash starts spewing uh…milk? It’s his blood. It gets me every time.

And I’d like to circle back to my earlier point that Ridley was right the whole time. Had they kept Kane in quarantine as protocol required, or just not let him into the ship in the first place and left, there’s a good chance most of the crew would still be alive. Of course we learn that it’s not out of dismissiveness or hubris that Ash overrides her, but because the ship’s computer Mother has directed Ash to make priority #1 the containment and procurement of the alien with the lives of the crew being secondary.

Alien is great if you’re a speculation nerd and I am. There’s some deeper dialogue showing that humans have encountered alien life in some fashion, because they react to the alien ship and skeleton the same way you or I might look at the corpse of a deep sea creature, amazed but not at all shocked that it exists. The computer knows how to partially decode the alien transmission, which means people have likely encountered such transmissions before. The company seemingly knew about the likelihood of coming across the signal, because Ash had replaced the prior scientist just before launch.

Lovely. Also it’s a 70s movie so there’s tons of scenes of people just being incredibly sweaty.

Rating: A