Alien

Ridley Scott’s *Alien* (1979) begins aboard the Nostromo, a commercial spacecraft returning to Earth with a cargo of mineral ore. Its seven crew members are awakened from suspended animation when the ship’s computer detects a transmission from a nearby moon. Captain Dallas leads an expedition to investigate, accompanied by Kane and Lambert. They find a derelict spacecraft filled with large eggs. When Kane approaches one, a creature springs out and attaches itself to his face.

Back aboard the Nostromo, warrant officer Ellen Ripley initially refuses to open the airlock, citing quarantine rules. Science officer Ash overrides her. The creature later drops off Kane and appears to have died. During a meal, however, a new organism bursts from Kane’s chest and escapes into the ship. The crew’s attempts to find it reveal how quickly it grows and how dangerous it is: its blood is corrosive enough to eat through the spacecraft’s decks.

The cast includes Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, Tom Skerritt as Dallas, John Hurt as Kane, Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Ian Holm as Ash, Yaphet Kotto as Parker and Harry Dean Stanton as Brett. As the creature kills crew members, Ripley discovers that Ash is an android. He has been following an order to bring the organism back for study, with the crew’s survival treated as expendable. After the remaining crew members disable Ash, Ripley prepares to destroy the Nostromo and escape in its shuttle. She succeeds, but the alien has hidden aboard. In the film’s final confrontation, she forces it out of the shuttle and uses its engines to drive it away.

Dan O’Bannon wrote the screenplay from a story credited to O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Swiss artist H. R. Giger designed the alien and the derelict spacecraft, giving both a distinctive biomechanical appearance. Jerry Goldsmith composed the score. The film’s restrained views of the adult creature make encounters such as Brett’s disappearance and Dallas’s search through the ventilation shafts especially tense. Its most famous shock, Kane’s death at the dinner table, turns an apparent recovery into the beginning of the crew’s ordeal.

*Alien* was released in 1979 and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It also established Ripley as the central character of a continuing series: Weaver returned in James Cameron’s *Aliens* (1986), then in *Alien 3* (1992) and *Alien Resurrection* (1997). The original film remains specifically a story of a working crew trapped aboard its own ship, facing a creature their employer wants more than it wants them alive.