Illuminating the Empty Spaces of ‘Alien’
Alien is a masterpiece. That sounds obvious today, a no-brainer, utterly lukewarm film opinion, but it definitely wasn’t always. It was not spectacularly reviewed upon first release, either dismissed as an unpleasant horror show or criticized for being too derivative of earlier sci-fi/horror pictures. Even many books on the genre throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s would still mention Alien almost begrudgingly, suggesting that it was simply a collection of recycled ideas that offered absolutely nothing new. To be fair, a lot of the films that inspired Alien, such as Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires and especially It! The Terror from Beyond Space were much more in the horror zeitgeist than they are now and do share strong similarities. It! features a creature hiding among the darkened corners of the ship that is even, at the end, fired out of the airlock.
And I’m absolutely not saying that it’s not healthy to have and share an honest opinion about any film, no matter its legacy, but it was such a common thing to see not only in the early reviews, but books and magazines of the time that it’s worth noting. They would talk about it exactly the same way authors would talk about Saw in the mid-2000s, something that was made cheaply but became wildly popular, but one they’d insist had no merit aside from (or, depending on author, because of) that popularity, which is just a fascinating thing to note how — regardless of personal opinions — cultural opinions of movies so often change over time.
While the basic plot of Alien does take inspiration from several sources, it’s silly to say it offers nothing new, because it is unlike anything audiences had seen before and honestly unlike anything we’ve seen since, just visually. The work put in by HR Giger, Moebius and so many other talented artists and crew is staggering. That’s primarily what I want to talk about. Alien is such a powerful film because it is about the blue collar workers of space. The creators, from Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett all the way up to Ridley Scott, were wise enough to recognize that in a future where space travel is so normalized, we wouldn’t just have teams of scientists. There would have to be work for the truckers, the maintenance crews, the oil rig guys, and that’s the kind of person that Alien is about.
That is a huge part of what makes it so great, and the entire film is framed from that perspective, the everyday workers who are just pawns that corporations could not ever be made to care or even think about. This makes for characters recognizable to the average moviegoer, makes them feel more real and lived-in so that when the horror starts it is that much scarier. But plenty has been said about the great cast of characters, so I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about their environment.
One of my favorite things about Alien is that it has so many moments of absolute stillness. There are lingering shots in which none of our characters are present and those moments are crucial for a few different reasons. First and foremost, as a horror film, it gives us the layout of the ship before the alien is introduced. We see all these spaces so that, once it unleashed, we have a vague layout of all the many, many places it could potentially hide, all the shadows it could jump out of at any second. But these moments also highlight the isolation, the loneliness of the job that the crew of the Nostromo are performing. Even more than that, though, these shots do a crucial job of selling the space that the characters inhabit as a believable environment that human beings actually work and live in, which is not an easy job for a spaceship.
The opening few minutes of the film do this most explicitly. We’re introduced to the Nostromo before we’re introduced the crew, giving the audience a largely silent tour of the ship. Knowing the space, more than anything, allows the Nostromo to feel like a character, and not just because it eventually talks in the form of the computer assistant MU/TH/UR. I love spending these scenes just inhabiting the empty space of the ship, because it really lets you linger on and appreciate the work that went into it. We sit in these shots of the hallways, the crew mess, just long enough to see the cracks, and that’s the whole point.
You’re supposed to see the cracks. Those are what sell this ship as “real” more than any clean, polished design ever could.
Because of this, the Nostromo is the only spaceship I’ve ever seen in a movie that I could truly believe people sleep, eat and crap in. It looks futuristic, but the pipes are rusty, there are stains on the floor, the ship is constantly requiring maintenance, and some stuff is just left the way that it is. They just patch it up or walk around it and there’s nothing they can do about it. For example, there’s a great moment when Parker is working on a pipe with steam blasting out of it, realizing that while the valve stops it temporarily, it keeps going as soon as he takes his hand away, so he just curses and leaves it. Scenes like that are perfect at conveying the relationship not just between individual crew members, but particularly between the crew and the ship. In that, they’re also about the relationship between the crew and The Company, the corporate entity responsible for pretty much every horrible thing that happens throughout the movie.
Every visual element in Alien is in total service of the story and that is so explicitly clear in the design of the Nostromo. Nothing could ever more perfectly sell that the corporation in charge doesn’t give a crap about its workers than seeing a ship that is beautiful from afar and even honestly inside, but one where you can take a closer look at any given room and see is clearly a hunk of junk. It needs maintenance that they don’t have enough crew for, repairs that The Company isn’t willing to pay for, and so it just is what it is. Nothing has to be expressed through dialogue for this to come across. The story deals more and more with corporate greed as it goes. Wallowing in that space only helps to make it that much more believable once we get where we’re going. Crew expendable? Of course the crew is expendable. Look at this goddamn thing.
Crucially, the believability and realism of the Nostromo is also important once we hit the desolate planet of LV-426 and reveal the derelict spacecraft. Even though we see our crew throughout these scenes introducing the planet, then both the exterior and interior of the ship, these moments feel very similar to the opening quiet, still tour of the Nostromo. The howling winds of this barren planet are a stark difference from the utterly silent shots of the Nostromo in the beginning, and immediately express a different mood.
We’re isolated once again, but not in the quiet. This empty landscape is loud and harsh. In many of these shots, the suited-up crew members are very small, set against the expansive wasteland of a planet they’ve landed on and then, once they reach it, the vastness of the abandoned ship. Just like those opening shots of the Nostromo, these moments perfectly nail the isolation. They are totally and completely alone out here. If they do run into something, that’s worse, because there’s nobody around to help, as the plot eventually demonstrates.
As soon as we’re inside the ship it is crystal clear why Giger was the person, and possibly the only person, for the job of heading up these alien designs. He was at the very least the only one who could have conveyed not only the creature but the space in which it is introduced to the film in that very first egg, in a way that resonates as Alien has for the past 45 years. The design of the derelict ship is perfect when compared to the Nostromo. Because the ship our crew inhabits, where we spend most of the first act of the movie, genuinely looks like a freighter, or an oil rig. Like a place that sweaty and overworked people probably aren’t paid enough to keep running. In comparison, the derelict ship could not be more different, it has no visual similarities. Instead of looking like an industrial ship or metalworks, it looks like an organism, nothing mechanical, almost alive, its structure completely different from any vessel we as an audience would recognize. Simply put, it looks alien.
That, in a nutshell, is the brilliance of the production design of this movie. We spend so much time getting comfortable in a place that we recognize, we buy into the fact that the Nostromo is realistic to the point that it is kind of run-down, so that when the characters are introduced to a new environment, we as the viewer are right there with them. It’s almost beyond comprehension, and when that alien bursts out of Kane’s chest and runs loose across the ship, it is truly a thing that is utterly unknown rampaging through an environment we find almost familiar. That elevates the horror so much more than it would otherwise.
Importantly, by the same token, it also means that the Nostromo is as alien to the rampaging Xenomorph as the derelict ship was to the crew. It is living out its life cycle alone in an environment it has absolutely no context for. And it was meant to living through its full life cycle over the course of the film, too, according to the filmmakers. Why is the alien in the escape pod with Ripley at the end, embedded in the wall and covered in slime? Because it’s cocooning itself. Little touches like that only add an extra fascinating layer to the film as a whole.
Alien remains one of the best science fiction and one of the best horror movies ever made. So many people have wisely written about how it’s a haunted house movie in space, how it’s a tale of corporate greed at the expense of the working class, how it’s about a situation that would have been completely avoided if one woman had just been allowed to do her job. But what’s truly remarkable is how all of those important elements of the story are conveyed through every individual aspect of the film, even (and perhaps especially) down to just looking at the spaces these characters inhabit. Those lingering shots on both ships sell the dread of what’s to come in a way no line of dialogue ever could.
So much of horror in general relies on taking familiar places and making the audience think “I recognize that, so maybe that could happen to me?” That should be impossible to do in a movie set in the far future, in space. Many have failed completely. None have ever succeeded at that more perfectly than Alien.
