After researching topics for this weeks blog, I ended up choosing something completely different at the last minute and jump on the chance to write about one of the most important films to have hit cinemas in the late 70’s - post Star Wars - and go on to redefine a genre, Ridley Scott’s, Alien. Released in 1979, it was, needless to say, an instant classic. Marked with Scott’s awesome visual flair and iconic female lead, Alien spawned an accomplished piece of cinema. For me personally, it’s not only one of my favourite films but it’s as close as one can get to a perfect film.

The film’s score has an air of controversy about it. Jerry Goldsmith, who composed some of the most refined music of his career on this project ended up having a rather odd relationship with Scott on this film. Scott ended up cutting up and manipulating Goldsmith’s score to the point that it became a shadow of the original soundtrack. With Scott’s version stripping down Goldsmith’s input to something almost unrecognisable. There are even some temp track cues that are still in the finished score, which for a composer who had spent months working on an orchestral score was understandably hurt.

All this just a couple of years after the inception of the most iconic film score in Hollywood, the Star Wars score helped reignite the symphonic approach to film scoring, harkening back to the fathers of film scores like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

It can be jarring when the composers work is shuffled around and edited by the director instead of the other way around, but this has obviously led to great things. Goldsmith’s score stands as a seminal piece of film music and a pioneering aesthetic to sci-fi and horror alike.

You will notice a contrast to the piece you may be used to hearing as the main theme. Goldsmith devised an overall warmer sound, a few fleeting emotional moments are carried by the elusive original main theme. Goldsmith, an established musical tour de force (and Oscar winner), he came to Alien with titles like The Twilights Zone, The Omen, Chinatown and Planet of the Apes, to name a few, under his belt. Despite this, Scott did not agree with the direction that Goldsmith was taking the music - a more romanticised idea of the universe and the vastness that is ingrained in it (more so with the opening theme).

Goldsmith’s approach was to paint the lucrative universe as a lyrically soft, but ultimately terrifying concept, thus suspending the shock of the antagonist to come later. Mirrored in a lonely trumpet and adorned by soft flutes which permeates sound and acts as a sort of hypnotic, dream-like atmosphere. The main theme, like the Nostromo are both suspended in the vacuum of space, with nothing familiar around to exert it’s influence.

The Soundscape is dissonant, although not an authentic dissonance. It emulates a tonal coldness on the low end of the register, more a gestation of thematic development. Scott wanted a score that was terrifying, it was the second version that Goldsmith produced that was eventually to be derived from - an auditory dichotomy of string techniques and gimmicks, lightly sketched over minimal orchestral lyricism. It’s a perfect set up to what is to come later.

Such employed techniques are able to elevate the piece, giving a more intense feeling of unease and claustrophobia. Establishing this corroboration between the visual and the audio, is in part what pushes the claustrophobic elements of the film that bit further. Unfortunately, poor Goldsmith was due even more dismay. He was understandably glum when he saw the final cut of the film, where the majority of the music he composed had been whittled down or replaced with music he had written earlier in his career - even the final cue is that of another composer (Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 (1930)).

Surprisingly, Scott took the typical horror tropes and flipped them on their side, with the men being the ones who must succumb to this perversion. H. R. Geiger, who infused this sexual imagery into the ships set and the dichotomy of the film. It elicits a subtle discomfort in it’s intimate relationship with Ripley. Geiger ended up pioneering a sub-genre of horror, ‘body horror’, which focusses of human’s anxieties over their own body. Geiger was a perfect collaboration to have on this film. His surrealist works tend to reflect themes of human blending with technology with a tinge of primal sexuality.

In the end, Alien is a film that is seeped the themes of the monstrous-feminine, a phycological construction fuelled with playing with men's anxieties in relation to the female form and sexuality. It also manifests the ideas of birth, the dehumanisation of man and questions of our own origins. This imagery is littered throughout. The opening scene, for example, is reflective of a clinical, futuristic birth scene or the initial discovery of the Alien itself.

Goldsmith commented that working on Alien was a miserable experience. Interestingly, despite the obvious lack of communication between the director and composer - the film and it’s score are both independently strong works. It’s a rare example, but an important one. The jarred collaboration between the two ended up with one of the most influential films to be released in cinema. One can’t help but wonder how different the film would have been given Goldsmith’s original score stuck and had not been dismantled or so heavily edited.

There is a subtle, sometimes subdued, psycho-sexuality to Alien. Aside from it’s ‘vaginal dripping’ (a real quote!) and it’s obvious phallic imagery, it actually goes beyond the superficial. The non-consensual impregnation of the alien during the first face-hugger scene results in a bizarre interspecies rape (sounds a bit mad doesn’t it?). Although this may sound like a death metal album, it actually begins weaving in the thematic narrative of sexual insecurities and birth/origin.

What’s great about Alien is that it takes a page straight out horror films like Jaws for example - both films share a similar thread of a small community threatened by a larger unknown predator, only to be picked off one by one - but both the alien and the shark are both obscured in a way that gives the illusion of an evolving appearance, the audience doesn’t yet know what the alien looks like. Only to change again and begin attacking, taking forms resembling that of an arachnid or reptile (this part was not in Jaws), which deliver new surprises.

On top of that, the Aliens abilities begin to reveal themselves as the alien begins to make more of appearance (which only confuses the team further), like it’s weird extending second mouth, increasingly terrifying shifting form or the dripping… fluids... that are revealed to be ‘universal solvents'.

There is a blatant contrast here. It is not the usual space adventure that the likes of Star Wars gathered popularity for, glamorising the unknown with a sense of mysticism. It is rather a hard science fiction approach. There has never been a more apt response to the discovery of such a creature than Ripley's full out murder rampage on Xenomorphs an obsession which is only fuelled further as the the series continues. This isn’t an adventure story, this is a crew of 7 hardened workers, mining for materials.

In contrast to the sequel Aliens point and shoot approach, the first int he series sides more with pacing of the film and contextualising the crew and the time spent at the beginning of the film that shapes the fundamental tone. Alien for me is a notch above its siblings in that there is more curiosity driving the force behind the film, than just set-pieces designed for cheap scares. It’s a more cerebral experience. Which sadly the rest of the series was never able to emulate again. Alien was a masterclass in restraint and teasing the audience just enough to keep the tension high.

As the android Ash states, ‘the perfect organism. It’s structural perfection is matched only by it's hostility.’ He admits, ‘ I admire it’s purity, it’s sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.' Alien, which has clear influences from the likes of Star Wars, Close Encounters or 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a distinguishable difference between the latter mentioned and Alien. Both are similar in it’s tonality , temperament and both feature grounded, pragmatic characters which centres around a hard sci-fi edge.

The score is a claustrophobic. This effect is only furthered with handheld camera techniques following our characters through the cramped, winding halls of the Nostromo. This is not the elegant, sterile vision of the future that 2001 embodies, but a blue collar, rough and ready mining facility. It’s also effective, sonically and visually, of marketing the horror of the vastness of space and how our humanity can be so diminished by perspective in the backdrop of space. The films now iconic tagline promotes this idea,

It has magnificent control in racking up audience anxiety, incrementally increasing the tension throughout. Sonically speaking there are huge, sometimes abrasive juxtapositions of the suppressing, sterile silence and aggravating, anxiety inducing bursts of sonic terror.

The first part of the film has our protagonists manoeuvre the ship in almost silence with limited dialogue. The thin, eerie scoring of the first part of the film heightens the isolation and suspense while staving off the aliens appearance. Coupled with minimal sound design, mostly of retro computer bleeps and bloops, the occasional spray of gas or rumble of the crafts engine go a long way in creating the feeling of a lonely ship, silently crossing the void.

“In space no one can hear you scream.
”

The cast bring natural, human performances to an otherwise most unnatural setting. Take the iconic chest-burst sequence, which Scott and John Hurt, who plays host to the alien withheld the exact details of how the scene was to be directed from the rest of the cast. The result is a natural, real looking reaction from a cast who were probably shocked at the sheer volume of fake blood on set. The very human nature of the casts performance make the reveal of an android among the crew all the more shocking, The eyeless creature on the other hand is made to seem even less human, metamorphosing throughout.

Interestingly, in what is possibly one of the finest moments of cinematic history, the final 20 minutes of the sequel Aliens has Ripley discover the mother alien, to stop in silence and burn the place to the ground in a heroic selfless final act. In the climax of it’s predecessor Alien, it is quite the opposite. Upon activating the self-destruct mode on the ship, all sorts of erratic noise bursts loose and the agitation, fear and utter chaos of the final act are shoved forward thanks to the intense, sometimes unbearable score.

In essence, despite a wobbly, albeit young relationship that Ridley had with Goldsmith as well as the craft of filmmaking, Alien has stood out to be one of the finest most refined films of cinema.

S.

Modern Masterpiece: Alien