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About
During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed.
Theatrical
Jun 21, 1979
Box Office
$104.9M
Budget
$11.0M
Return
9.5x
DVD / Blu-ray
Jun 1, 1999
Theaters
3
Director
Ridley Scott
Writers
Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Producers
Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill
Music
Jerry Goldsmith
Studio
Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions, Ronald Shusett Productions
Latest
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Quotes
See all →Corporate Greed in Science Fiction Cinema
“Alien at 40: In space no one can hear your plea for workers’ rights” (26 February 2019)
Sci-fi cinema has a long history of ruthless and evil corporations, including the Tyrell Corporation in Scott’s subsequent Blade Runner (1982), Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator films (1984-), Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop (1987) and the Soylent Corporation in Soylent Green (1973). The interests of these conglomerates, often inspired by real-life organisations, lie entirely in profit, operating with a total indifference towards the welfare of their employees. The companies at the heart of blue-collar science fiction such as Alien, Moon and Outland are similarly ruthless. Viewers watching Alien 40 years later may have little trouble recognizing the practices of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation; the way it controls its poorer workers with unfair and dangerous working conditions. Grounded in Scott’s gritty, blue-collar vision, it all seems both credible and familiar. As in 1979, 2019 and so in 2122, money is the ultimate goal, not worker’s rights or their well-being.
Workplace Fears in Ridley Scott's Alien
“Alien at 40: In space no one can hear your plea for workers’ rights” (26 February 2019)
Areas of the Nostromo are reminiscent of various blue-collar workplaces, a counterpoint to the sleek spaceships imagined in much science fiction before Alien. In his article ‘The set design of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Christopher Aguiar explains that this approach had rarely been seen in science fiction before 1979, which adds to the quality of trepidation: “Fear is built largely from the camera prowling around the empty spaces of the Nostromo ship – a battered, truly ugly spacecraft, unlike the Death Star or USS Enterprise… instead of being outside and exploring the world as sci-fi often wants us to do, we’re largely stuck inside the rundown, twisted corridors of a ship. That immediately works as a way of Scott installing fear and uneasiness.”
Alien: A Study of Industrial Horror
“Alien at 40: In space no one can hear your plea for workers’ rights” (26 February 2019)
Alien’s visual centrepiece is the alien itself, inspired by Giger’s 1976 print Necronom IV. It’s a truly hideous creature, replete with a long, smooth phallic skull, a set of razor-sharp teeth and a second set of pharyngeal jaws similar to those of an eel, which shoot out, stabbing and penetrating flesh. The creature also appears to have no eyes, but we know it sees, and its gender is never revealed, though it displays both male and female characteristics. The creature’s hands are monstrous and dragon-like, with long fingers and claws, but its body resembles the cross-section of some complex industrial machine, with human-like ribs lying externally over a mass of coils, springs and what look like hydraulic mechanisms.
Alien's Legacy: Art and Horror Unite
“Alien at 40: In space no one can hear your plea for workers’ rights” (26 February 2019)
Responsible for designing the seductive yet deadly alien, the insectile ‘face-hugger’ creature and the forebodingly derelict alien ship was Swiss surrealist artist, Hans Ruedi (H.R) Giger. Much like in the ‘body horror’ films of David Cronenberg, such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), Giger fuses human and machine, with his sleekly imagined biomechanical mash-ups of bone and metal resulting in images that take on a kind of disordered symmetry. Giger also designed the surface of LV-426, a sunless, boulder strewn, god-forsaken planet where brutal winds never stop blowing and jagged rocky outcrops, almost phallic in appearance, punctuate the landscape.
A science fiction horror film franchise, focusing on Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and her battle with an extraterrestrial life-form, commonly referred to as "the Alien". Produced by 20th...
