Alien: The Director's Cut
"The perfect organism," the science officer coolly calls the beast stalking his spaceship. "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility -- I admire its purity." Ash (Ian Holm) could be speaking of the movie that surrounds him. Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien" is remembered as the film that not only fused the sci-fi of "Star Wars" with the splatter of "Halloween" but that helped launch the careers of Sigourney Weaver and, ultimately, directors James Cameron and David Fincher, who both oversaw controversial sequels. What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism. Seven crew members, a rusting salvage ship 10 months from earth, and one ever-morphing, near-pornographic fiend -- that's all "Alien" has and all it needs to have. It's a movie that locates terror in silence and that has the unfashionable patience to wait good and long before it strikes.
When it does -- in the now-famous dinner sequence in which crew member John Hurt suffers the worst case of indigestion in cinema history -- an hour has already elapsed and the audience's guard is down. That scene still has the power to shock in the director's cut of "Alien," which opens in area theaters today, even if you know what's coming and even if the larval monster that erupts from Hurt's chest looks a little rubbery in these days of digital effects. It's the randomness that's scary -- in seconds, the bickering, mundane world Scott and his cast have carefully established is shredded.
For this re-release, the director has gone back to the edit bins and incorporated a number of scenes that were cut from the original "Alien." The most notable are a brief fight between crew members Ripley (Weaver) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) after the former balks at letting the infected Kane (Hurt) back onto the ship, and a climactic scene in which Ripley stumbles across the still-living Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), who have been hung up for use as alien incubators. Those scenes were available as separate outtakes on the 20th anniversary DVD version of "Alien," but Scott has put them back where they belong, and the film is better for it.
He has also quickened the pace by trimming the fat from some scenes; say what you like about messing with the Mona Lisa, but this "Alien" is a leaner, meaner animal. It's still "Ten Little Indians" in outer space, and it still somewhat loses its grip toward the end-- do we really believe Ripley would try to save the ship's cat with that H.R. Giger-designed hellbeast on her tail? -- but it looks more like a classic than ever. This critic still thinks Cameron's 1986 "Aliens" is the superior film (not to mention one of the best pure action movies of all time), but at the very least Scott has reset the stage for endless film-geek arguments.
One of the real pleasures of revisiting "Alien" is to watch the emergence of both Ellen Ripley as a character and Sigourney Weaver as a star. Scott keeps Ripley in the background for the film's first third -- she's just an attractive extra visible behind the character actors and Skerritt, who in 1979 was the movie's only "name." By the end, of course, she's a quick-witted survivor and well on her way to becoming the warrior matriarch of the sequels. The climactic scenes have her running around in a T-shirt and a pair of itsy-bitsy panties, but Weaver just juts her jaw and gets on with the business of saving the galaxy. She stoops to babe-itude this once, as if knowing she'd never have to again.
Video
