Alien

Alien is a culturally influential 1979 science-fiction horror film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver. The film's title references the main antagonist, a highly aggressive, unfamiliar extraterrestrial life-form. Reluctantly following a distress beacon in deep space, a crew member of the space-faring towing vehicle Nostromo encounters a young Alien that attacks and infects him. The creature soon comes aboard the ship, wreaking havoc and threatening the entire crew. 

Alien garnered both critical acclaim and box-office success, spawning a Hollywood media franchise of literature, video games, merchandise, and three official sequels. The film effectively launched actress Sigourney Weaver's career as well. By featuring a strong heroine, Alien also proved unconventional (by Hollywood standards) for the action genre. While the alien itself (referred to in spin-offs as a xenomorph) was a popular aspect of the film, the story of Ellen Ripley became the thematic thread that ran through the series. Together with the films of David Cronenberg from the 1970s, Alien emerged as a central work in the development of the body-horror subgenre. Publicity for the film involved a tagline that became widely known: "In space no one can hear you scream." 


Swiss painter and sculptor H. R. Giger designed the alien creature's adult form and the alien architecture. The designs feature the creative use of bones in the architecture (the set constructors used real bones in making the interior of the alien ship). Giger received an Academy Award for his work on the original film. The design of the creature with strong Freudian sexual undertones and multiple phallic symbols, while simultaneously presenting an overall feminine figure, provided a compelling androgynous image, conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines. The adult alien appears predominantly black in color, similar in cast to heavily tarnished silver. In keeping with Giger's blending of biological and mechanical life-forms, some shots reveal a metallic patina. It has an elongated shiny head with no eyes. (Some production stills reveal a human skull used in the sculpture beneath its translucent anterior shell). Below, the jaw holds the razor-sharp metal teeth. The mouth houses a tongue-like body part with a 

second mouth on the end. On the alien's back stand four curved black pipes (Giger designed these for the purpose of breaking up the back). Apart from this, the alien has an anthropomorphic form, with two legs and two arms, its hands each armed with six long, black, razor-sharp claws. The "blood" of the creature, a powerful acid, also serves as a natural defense mechanism. 


Roger Ebert called Alien (and John Carpenter's Halloween) "the most influential of modern action pictures". He went on to say that many of "the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking", including the re-make of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "almost every horror film since Alien has ripped it off in some way, but most of the imitations have focused on details."  


As with most iconic monsters, “Alien” has been subjected to increasingly disappointing sequels, including Aliens (1986) which reduced the monsters to fodder for a Rambo-type shoot-em-up, Alien³ (1992), a noble but ultimately dull attempt to restore some of the chills and Alien: Resurrection (1997), a bizarre chase fantasy helmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunot. More recently, the monsters have been taking part in aimless duels with the creature from the early 90’s film Predator, itself an Alien rip-off.   In 1980, Italian director Ciro Ippolito made an unauthorized sequel called Alien 2 sulla Terra.  (Moria)