1. Alien
Alien burst forth as a breath-taking riposte to the optimism and hope of Star Wars and Close Encounters, themselves going against the grain a little in relation to the more cynical and weary tone of much of New Hollywood’s 1970’s output. Corporations are bad and ruthless, simple blue-collar workers are expendable, the every day man can be shafted as the men in suits chase another dollar.
But that doesn’t make Alien a terribly right-on message movie. On the contrary, it is a gripping and matchlessly unnerving horror film as well, the tropes of every haunted house film you’ve ever seen transferred into a sci-fi outer shell. That Alien can comfortably feature in either a sci-fi or a horror top 10 is deserved praise for its enduring and broad quality, its stark feel but complex tone and themes elevating it above simple pigeon-holing. Its iconography is now well-established – the space jockey, the face hugger, the secondary jaw, the leathery eggs, the acid blood, the silent movement through space of the Nostromo, John Hurt’s demise at the hands (and teeth) of the chest-burster – but it has lost none of its impact over time, even if ugly, inconsequential nonsense like AvP:Requiem has done its utmost to tarnish Alien’s memory and reputation.
Ridley Scott was relatively untried at the time. He’d done a lot of TV work and his feature debut, The Duellists, had shown him to possess a lot of style and film-making ability, but there was no indication that he would prove to be so well suited to science fiction (or horror). His ability to ratchet up tension and generate atmosphere is so well shown here and he masterfully directs his actors too, giving us fully fledged characters instead of archetypes or ciphers. James Cameron would take this “world” and morph it into a Vietnam allegorizing action film, which turned out to be no bad thing at all, but this remains the high water mark of the franchise.
