Alien: Truck Drivers In Space
Alien (1979)
The crew are contractors on a tow, they argue about bonuses, and the monster was designed by a Swiss surrealist.
A Haunted House With A Union Dispute
Dan O'Bannon's insight was to populate a spaceship with employees rather than officers. The Nostromo crew eat badly, complain about shares, talk over each other and resent being woken up, so the horror lands on people the audience recognises from work. Ridley Scott then shot it like a haunted house: corridors lit by practicals, steam, chains, water dripping in a cargo hold the size of a cathedral. The creature works because of how little of it is shown and because Giger designed it as biomechanical rather than animal, with a lifecycle borrowed from parasitic wasps. The film's most quietly radical decision is that the company knew, filed the crew as expendable in a line of code, and is never punished for it.
Runtime
117 minutes
Director
Ridley Scott
Budget
$11 million
Box office
$106 million worldwide
Cinematography
Derek Vanlint
Watching Alien
Intensity
/
Scene
"Crew expendable.
"Special Order 937 · Alien · 1979
The chestburster was shot once, with the cast placed around a table and told only that something would happen. Veronica Cartwright's reaction is genuine and so is most of the blood on her.
Jerry Goldsmith wrote a lush romantic score that Scott cut heavily, dropping in his own earlier Freud music and Howard Hanson's second symphony for the ending. Goldsmith never forgave it.
Two things outlived the film. One is Giger's creature, which fixed the shape of screen monsters for forty years. The other is Ripley, who was written without a specified gender and cast late with an unknown, and became the template for the competent woman who survives by paying attention. The company that files its crew as expendable also became a genre in itself: every corporate villain in science fiction since is Weyland-Yutani with a different logo.