A parasite to remember: Alien’s lasting influence
Most people remember what jumped out at them from Ridley Scott’s Alien: the toothy parasite that burst from an unsuspecting John Hurt’s chest.
Yet many more subtle things have issued from this 1979 sci-fi horror classic and their impact has been more meaningful.
This scary tale of a monster stalking astronauts in deep space, made with no pretense to great art, has almost by accident become one of the most influential films in history.
Many aspects of moviemaking, from the role of women to story structure to production and sound design, have felt Alien’s bite. The marketing department, too, thanks to that memorable, “In space, no one can hear you scream” tag line. Here’s what Alien has spawned: Female action heroes Sigourney Weaver’s beast-blasting Ripley character from Alien wasn’t the first female action hero, but she’s the most successful — with three sequels and a fourth being discussed — and arguably the most significant.
Before Alien, big showdowns were always about the last man standing, not the last woman. The Bechdel Test Weaver’s conversations with co-star Veronica Cartwright about the monster in their midst is a woman-to-woman conversation — and they’re not talking about a man. This inadvertently led to the creation of the Bechdel Test for movie sexism, as namesake cartoonist Alison Bechdel recently told NPR.
Bechdel name-checked Alien for a 1985 episode of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which quoted her friend Liz Wallace’s definition of what become known as the Bechdel Test for a female-positive movie: it must have a least two women, who talk about something other than a man.
“The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster,” Bechdel said.
“But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it’s this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test . . . surprisingly few films actually pass it.” “Save the Cat” screenwriting The end of Alien (spoiler alert!) has Ripley facing down the monster aboard the escape shuttle she’s using to flee the doomed spaceship Nostromo. Her plan is to eject the parasite from an airlock, but before she does so, she risks her own life by first rescuing the ship’s pet cat, Jones.
Author/screenwriter Blake Synder used this scene as a title and theme for his Save the Cat! series of manuals on successful screenplay structure. Snyder, who died in 2009, coined “save the cat” as the moment where a movie hero does something that wins audience affection and empathy. This could happen at any point in a movie. Saving the cat in Alien proved that Ripley had a heart, because she’s a steely cipher in the rest of the film. Blue-collar astronauts Before Alien, space travel was often depicted as the pursuit of squeaky- clean astronauts in sleek designer vehicles, Han Solo and his Millennium Falcon notwithstanding.
Alien’s Nostromo is an unglamorous flying bucket of bolts, which shows heavy wear from years of commercial use. Its seven crew members dress like the maintenance people many of them are, putting comfort and utility ahead of fashion or any uniform dress code. Tom Skerritt’s Capt. Dallas sports a full beard, and Harry Dean Stanton’s engineer Brett wears a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently anything goes aboard the Nostromo, a concept copied by many sci-fi movies since. “What’d they say?” sound It’s become annoyingly common for filmmakers to deliberately use muddy sound to keep moviegoers literally on the edge of their seats, straining for every word.
Blockbuster filmmaker Christopher Nolan is a big fan of this technique, as he demonstrated with The Dark Knight Rises: Tom Hardy’s beastly Bane character can barely be understood from behind his breathing mask.
Nolan expanded on the idea with the persistent droning sound he introduced to last year’s Interstellar, a sci-fi saga that had other acoustic impediments.
Ridley Scott was way ahead of Nolan. The opening minutes of Alien, where members of the Nostromo crew visit a remote planet to check out a mysterious distress signal, features deliberately muddled convos between the astronauts, to enhance the feeling of being in a dangerous space. A screaming great tag line Alien was originally conceived as a “B” movie with “A” execution. The first advertising tag lines considered for it followed the tried-and-true of genre films past.
Considered but rejected were such doomsday snappers as “Prepare yourself” and “The universe trembles,” and such mouthfuls as, “No one should be allowed to even imagine that thing which is now headed our way.”
Then copywriter Barbara Gips came up with the tag line to beat all tag lines: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Considered by many to be the best movie tag line ever, much imitated but never bettered, it perfectly captured the mood of Alien and still causes goosebumps, 36 years after the beast stalked the Nostromo. phowell@thestar.ca