The first film in the increasingly expansive Alien saga remains, in my view at least, the very best. Though Ridley Scott’s more recent entries continue to expand the lore of the franchise with varying degrees of success, what remains most compelling to me is what he did so well right at the very beginning. As we meet Ripley, Dallas, Brett, Parker and the rest of the Nostromo crew, what’s immediately foregrounded is the mundane reality of their lives as workers in service of a company that’s already exploiting them for little pay and will gladly screw them over in a heartbeat if it sees profit in it. The alien that stalks the crew and picks them off one by one is chilling, but what really makes it resonate is that larger theme of capitalist fuckery, so economically and efficiently communicated by the wonderful line, “Priority one — Ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.”
But themes, no matter how well executed, aren’t enough to give a film soul. No, what makes Alien so exceptional is the way its characters are embodied so naturally by its outstanding cast—Sigourney Weaver of course, in a star-making performance, but also folks like Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and the wonderful Yaphet Kotto—who, as we get to know them in the film’s opening scenes, so well-directed by Scott, interrupt and talk over each other in such a natural, believable way, the sort of thing you rarely see in American cinema after the 1970s. Also, like Spielberg’s Jaws four years before, Alien’s strength so often lies in what remains unseen, left to our imaginations. The Nostromo, more than many movie settings, feels believably lived and worked in, and naturally conducive to giving the xenomorph stalking the hapless crew plenty of places to hide. Later films in the franchise have been more intense, more elaborate, and more expensive, but the tightly focused humanity and horror of the series’ progenitor remains, arguably, the best the series has ever been.
— Carolyn Petit
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