Alien, directed by Ridley Scott

Alien (1979) -- The second best thing to happen that year.

In 1979, something amazing happened. It was unprecedented and was a gift to the entire world. People have applauded the stroke of creative genius that was given the planet that year, and it has only gotten better with age. I’m talking about, of course, me.

Oh, wait, something else happened in 1979 besides my birth?

Okay, we’ll talk about Ridley Scott’s seminal hit Alien. It was The Terminator before The Terminator, in that the sequel was better was the original, but was good enough to spawn one.

The movie provides some groundbreaking special effects, and cinematography and story-telling on par with Kubrick, but in a sweaty, face-hugging, chest-bursting kind of way. The story was good, the acting was well executed, and the script was admirable. But what made this film the classic it is, is the monster.

 Aliens to that point were, for the most part, just like us, bipedal and intelligent. Alien upped the ante by showing us an alien that was driven by instinct with all a host of evolutionary traits that make it more menacing than any animal on Earth.

The titular character is actually four different “monsters” throughout the film. We first see it as a large egg. At this point of the film, we are already dealing with unknowns: An mysterious distress signal, a strange world, a monstrous ship. When we come across the eggs they represent a code without a cypher: Where did they come from? What is in them? We know they’re dangerous because the look scary. We know something horrible is going to happen. We just don’t know what.

And then it happens. We see our second iteration of the monster when it bursts from the egg and attaches itself to one of our heroes’ face. Now it’s a little scarier, not because we can see the monster, but because we don’t know what it’s doing. The attack was fast, there was no tension. The tension is in learning about the creature, and waiting to see what it does. In their attempts to remove it, they learn they know even less about it than they thought. It bleeds acid, a fantastic evolutionary defense mechanism. So they wait to see what happens. Now we’re scared because this creature seems so primitive, yet so advanced. And it’s feeding off one of our characters.

Then it lets go. Whew!

But we’re smart and that know it would be a really short movie having the alien just let go and die right there. Something else must be amiss.

So we wait to see what that is, the already heightened tension only gaining more ground. Just when we see the crew begin to relax (our former patient one of them) and have a nice meal, part three of the alien appears.

This time it claims its victim, bursting through the Kane’s chest (we all know the scene, and probably enjoyed the parodied version of it in Space Balls), and disappearing into the bowels of the ship.

And now the genius of the monster’s anatomy and physiology begins to make sense. It’s like a biblical version of Russian nesting dolls. Eggs beget face-huggers beget chest-bursters beget the Alien. So complicated it’s simple.

So now we have the Alien (with a capital A) running around the ship and a group of miners with heavy artillery that they can’t use. Why? Because shooting, cutting or otherwise knicking the Alien will result in its corrosive acid blood eating through the hull and killing them all. So the only recourse is to attempt some space-aged Wile E. Coyote-type traps as they get picked off one by one.

By now we see another trait the Alien has: a rigid tongue that has its own mouth. I’m not sure what the evolutionary value to that is (the better to taste and eat you with, I presume), but it is a creative twist. Because by this time we’ve seen the Alien in all its glory, and not much is left to the imagination. By now, the tension is less about what the threat is, and more about how to deal with it. But I think that’s what separates this movie from its superior sequel: It’s a horror movie, whereas Aliens is a science-fiction flick.

There’s a pretty cool twist that I won’t give away, but it’s a chance for Scott to reimagine what the insides of an android would look like.

This movie provides us with a great example of how to create a new and relevant monster. Forty years on, and this creature holds a spot among the pantheon of greats because it’s creative. More importantly, it’s terrifying because it’s a monster that makes sense for its environment.