This review was updated on September 21, 2024
Of all the great cast lists in Hollywood history, pound-for-pound the best of them might very well be Alien. Of an only seven-strong ensemble, three – Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt and Ian Holm – were Oscar nominees, while two more – Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto – belong on any cinephile’s list of the all-time great character actors. Between them, they bring not just a depth and seriousness to what could have been a cheap exercise in interplanetary schlock, but a vital sense of relatability and realism: these characters are working stiffs, they’re you and me – so when they start getting taken apart, we really feel it.
Of course, the cast isn’t the only thing about Ridley Scott’s movie that’s essentially perfect. The narrative runs like clockwork, drawing us slowly, almost gently into the world of the film before unleashing a string of extraordinary, stake-raising shocks: the downed ship, the eggs, the facehugger, and of course, that dinner scene, which totally upends the film and seems to take the cast by surprise as much as the viewer. Scott’s direction is gorgeous, from the gliding grace of the early scenes to the up-close handheld ruthlessness of Weaver’s climactic race against time.
It’s a workmanlike world invaded by an unstoppable force
Then of course there’s the design, not just HR Giger’s predatory, leather-clad penis-with-teeth or those monstrous, fossilised ‘space jockeys’ but the costumes and the computer banks and the corridors, giving us the sense of a functional, workmanlike world invaded by an unstoppable, almost supernatural force. Later, in movies like Prometheus, Scott would attempt to ‘explain’ his xenomorph, to give it a backstory, a reason for existing. What a mistake: the alien is most powerful when it exists simply as a primal force, an unthinking monster, the savage, rapacious avatar of a vast and utterly uncaring universe.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
Blade Runner (1982); Aliens (1986); Event Horizon (1997)