Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.
Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon as part of a promotional bundle they were offering combining this set and a standalone Blu of Prometheus.
Seen before?: Three times - once on VHS some time in the mid-'90s, once in October of 2003 during the theatrical release of the director's cut and once from this disc on March 9th, 2017.
While a film student at USC, Dan O'Bannon wrote a script that would become the film Dark Star. That film, the directorial debut of fellow USC student John Carpenter, is a dry, amusing sci-fi comedy about a small crew of astronauts tasked with destroying rogue planets. O'Bannon uses this as a hook on which to hang his sympathies for the worker drone - above all else, Dark Star is about being stuck in a dead-end job, one where you hate your coworkers and they hate you and everyone is stressed and cranky and all you can do is plow ahead and dream of the day you don't have to do this shit anymore.
His next film was more or less the same thing.
If nothing else, Alien is one of the greatest portraits of the hazards of blue-collar life ever put on film. That it takes place in space and prominently features an ill-tempered murderous lifeform slaughtering its cast does nothing to diminish this - it is, in fact, a scenario only strengthened by the facts of its characters' day-to-day existence.This is, of course, not a new insight - it's been written about fairly often - but the fact that these people are just anonymous grunts doing a job, not scientists or astronauts or anyone else who might be prepared to deal with the situation makes the spectre of their potential deaths loom all the larger. Their expendability is the point - even before the appearance of the Xenomorph, there's danger enough in a job that requires those who do it to roam an isolated metal container light years away from any sort of help or backup. The hull-breach sequence is the most striking example of this - sirens screaming and flashing lights sputtering through the darkness as the crew tries to mitigate the damage while outside, the wind on an alien planet howls like a demon, shrieking a warning of disinvitation. Life is fragile, the job is dangerous and the crew is being asked to do things they shouldn't; when Parker files this exact objection, saying, "It's not in my contract to do this kind of duty," he's threatened with "total forfeiture of shares." (It's also made clear that Parker and Brett, the fix-it guys constantly working underneath the rest of the crew, are getting paid less than the rest. Hierarchies within hierarchies.) Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong and killed everyone on board, which is one reason why Alien is already a nervous affair prior to the chest-burst.
Another reason is more sinister: The alien is clearly not the only villain on board. When things do go wrong, there's nothing and no one to reason with - all that surrounds is rickety metal run by indifferent, unfeeling computers under the thrall of the orders programmed into them by the corporate masters who sent these people into the sky to die. The opening scene contrasts the efficient workings of the autopilot system, humming away without a soul in sight, with the empty corridors of the ship proper, finally settling into the hypersleep room, a bright and fluorescently sterile room where the ship's ostensible crew slumbers away. The film hasn't even started and already the humans in the story are marked as superfluous. When things go south and the alien escapes its host, Scott keeps cutting back to Ash, his grim and impassive curiosity standing out against the screams and panic evinced by his crewmates, his inhumanity blossoming by the moment. The shock-reveal of his true nature, in retrospect, is telegraphed in a lot of clever ways; I especially appreciated his lack of sweatiness, the only being wandering through this hothouse without a drop of liquid on his brow. IN the aftermath of Kane's rupture, the crew is essentially left adrift - stonewalled from learning how to defend themselves by an unresponsive Mother(ship) and a corporate android mole. Ripley tries to find ways to reword a question about survivability to get a straight answer from Mother, utlimately settling on WHAT ARE MY CHANCES? The response: DOES NOT COMPUTE. Ash, reduced to a milk-spewing head, intones, "I cant lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathy." Both machines playing their part to crush the working stiff, beholden to their programming as much as the Xenomorph is beholden to its instincts towards predation. All that and it's a real motherfucker of a horror film.
Also, if this isn't the only film in which Harry Dean Stanton meows, it's definitely the best.
