A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(c) 1979 20th Century Fox Alien (1979) Directed by Ridley Scott Written by Dan O’Bannon, based on an original story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shussett Starring; Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm, John Hurt In space no one can hear you scream. Released in the summer of 1979, director Ridley Scott’s  Alien  is the most effective blend of science fiction and horror since Howard Hawks’  The Thing from Another World  (1951). Set almost entirely aboard a commercial space tug owned by “the Company.”  Alien  borrows effectively from Hawks’ chiller about a Cold War era military-science team’s fight against a parasitic alien and Steven Spielberg’s  Jaws.  Its leisurely pace, laser-like focus on characterization, and Scott’s unerring instinct for creating rising tension help earn  Alien  its status as one of the greatest films ever made. A...

One of the more interesting aspects of the four-film  Alien  saga is the way in which the audience was given a seemingly satisfying conclusion at the end of each chapter in the Ellen Ripley-versus-the-xenomorph saga, then, after a decent interval of five or six years, a new installment was released by 20th Century Fox that dispelled whatever feeling of closure Ripley (and the audience) felt after each “fade to black.”  At the end of James Cameron’s  Aliens  (1986), it seemed impossible that there could be another installment of the Alien  franchise. After all, Sigourney Weaver’s signature heroine had nuked the Company/Weyland-Yutani’s “Shake-n-Bake” colony on LV-426 and duked it out mano-a-mano with the Alien Queen aboard the  Sulaco  before going into her cryogenic sleep tube just like her fellow survivors Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn). Ripley’s tale, it seemed, was happily over.  Until, of course, producers David Giler...