Movie review: 'Alien: The Director's
Cut'
3 1/2stars (out of 4)
Inside an alien spacecraft, Kane (John Hurt) finds himself amidst a
colony of eggs.
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
Kane (John Hurt) is about to be attacked as he investigates the
mysteries of an alien egg.
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
Kane (John Hurt, on table) comes to a horrific end as Ripley (Sigourney
Weaver), Parker (Yaphet Kotto),
Dallas (Yaphet Kotto) and
Ash (Ian Holm) try to help.
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) search for a deadly
alien creature.
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) resorts to desperate measures to stop an alien
creature.
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
Sigourney Weaver made her feature film debut, as the heroic warrant
officer Ripley, in 'Alien.'
(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)
"Alien:
The Director's Cut" is an old nightmare, made shiny new. It's a scream
from another era that still echoes around us. Director Ridley Scott's new,
digitally refurbished and re-edited version of his 1979 pop science-fiction hit
- the subzero tale of beautiful astronaut Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the
beast of space that pursues her - is a movie that can still give you the
shakes, even though most of its surprises have long since passed into popular
legend.
The plot wasn't new even when the film was first released. With its hook of a
seven-member, multicultural spaceship crew running afoul of a ravenous space
alien who gets aboard their ship and malevolently kills them, one by one, it
suggests a mix of Stanley Kubrick's "2001,"
Howard Hawks' "The Thing" and every monster movie since
"Frankenstein." But the look of the film was new. Few science-fiction
movies are as cold, as full of cavernous space, angst and horrific beings. The
original "Alien" is a work of popular entertainment and movie art in
which the makers took the "art' as seriously as the entertainment.
Perhaps that's why screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (who wrote John Carpenter's 1974
hippie space opera "Dark Star") and company call their spaceship
"Nostromo," after one of Joseph Conrad's
finest novels. College-educated and literate, they're winking to the more
sophisticated audience out there among the popcorn-chewing masses jumping in
their seats. "Alien" was a movie that appealed to both, rendering its
archetypal bad-dream story in images of stunning austerity or wild imagination.
This imagery elevates the story, in which a spaceship crew returning from deep
space runs into the wrong alien, an unstoppable fiend that finds its most
stubborn foe in the lissome and pugnacious Ripley. The space jockeys are a
colorful lot: earthy leader Dallas (Tom Skerritt, of
the original movie "M*A*S*H"), eccentric or rough hewn mechanics
Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and
Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), nervous scientist Kane (John Hurt), mysteriously
taciturn navigator Ash (Ian Holm), jumpy Lambert (ex-child star Veronica
Cartwright, the little girl in "The Birds") and Ripley. Most of us
know Ripley will survive and battle the alien mother in other incarnations and
other movies, with a new Ripleyless one in the works.
But does it matter? Familiar plots, even a certain
knowledge of what will come next, don't necessarily spare you jolts. One of the
grisliest shocks in movie history occurs midway through "Alien" as
the crew sits around a dinner table, eating and jawing convivially. Suddenly
pallid Kane - who's recovering from an alien assault on a nearby planet - feels
his stomach rumbling. No one who has seen the movie can forget what happens
next, though some may want to.
Yet that famous moment couldn't attack our senses and sensibilities so strongly
if it weren't for the weird overclean atmosphere
Scott and his technicians create: the way Derek Vanlint's
camera glides through the gleaming and bare ship's interiors and the great,
goopy horror of the extra-terrestrial lair where aliens and eggs lie waiting. Those nerve-rending H.R. Giger-created
interiors resemble the innards of some giant Satan-lizard, a black putrescent
lair given over to rot and the generation of vipers.
So what happens to Kane, whose name affectionately nudges Scott favorite Orson Welles, is doubly horrifying. So is the movie, which played
on our 1979 sense that these high-grade actors and magnificent sets wouldn't
veer quite so crazily into horror and gore. "Alien" was released a
year after Carpenter's "Halloween" and it altered the landscape of high-budget
studio horror as irrevocably as "Halloween" changed cheapo horror.
"Alien" was a classy picture with classy people - both Scott and Holm
were later knighted - but it was also gruesome, awful. "In space, no one
can hear you scream," ran the original ad line; like
Scott has added five minutes of outtakes, including the fascinating
"nesting" scene, where Ripley finds the sentient heads of her slaughtered
shipmates tangled up in knots of squiggly alien organs that climb like ivy on
the ship walls. And he has subtly trimmed the rest, shortening scenes by
seconds to speed us along, so the recut is actually
briefer by two minutes.
The look of "Alien" remains fabulous: a cross between the elegant
austerity of "2001" and the raw funk of "Dark Star" and
other low-budgeters. The sets are dazzling and macabre. The characters are both archetypal - even slightly cliched
- and cipherlike. Being trapped on those sets, with
those people, still imparts a creepy chill. There have been three other
"Aliens" since, by directors James Cameron, David Fincher and
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but though all have their points,
none is as relentless as this. Weaver was never quite as sexy, vulnerable or
compelling. And though they kept trying and repeating, none had an alien this
gruesomely, shatteringly awry and unexpected. When it jumped, or when it jumps
now, so do we.
"Alien: The Director's Cut"
Directed by Ridley Scott; written by Dan O'Bannon, story by O'Bannon and Ron Shusett; photographed by Derek Vanlint;
edited by Terry Rawlings; production designed by Michael Seymour; music by
Jerry Goldsmith; alien design by H.R. Giger; concept
artist Ron Cobb; produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler,
Walter Hill. A 20th Century Fox release; opens Wednesday. Running
time:
Ripley.....Sigourney Weaver
Parker.....Yaphet Kotto
Kane.....John Hurt
Brett.....Harry Dean Stanton
Ash.....Ian Holm
Lambert.....Veronica Cartwright