ALIEN (1979): a review of the Theatrical Cut, the "Director's Cut", and THE BEAST WITHIN (2003)

Plus some thoughts on the cast and crew commentary, and the making-of documentary's Enhancement Pods.

Aug 26, 2024

- “You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

- “You admire it.”

- “I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

1979 Theatrical Cut

What else can one say about Alien that hasn’t already been said a trillion times?

I haven’t much of anything new to add. Like countless others before and after me, I grew up on this franchise via TV and DVD, getting the absolute everloving shit scared out of me as a child of around 10-or-so while watching the original “quadrilogy” (as the first four films were collectively referred to by their 2003 deluxe DVD boxset that I once owned, long before the super deluxe Alien Anthology Blu-ray boxset upgrade came along).

And while I was prone to avidly rewatching Ridley Scott’s Alien, and James Cameron’s Aliens, as opposed to the singular one-and-done viewings I had of David Fincher’s Alien 3, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, my affinity for the series as a whole was cemented by the exceptional quality of the first two entries, and the bountiful feast of making-of documentaries that festooned the special features of the Alien Quadrilogy’s nine jam-packed discs of content.

Back in that golden age of physical media being afforded the time, care, budget, and demand to provide home-viewing audiences with invaluably in-depth insights into every facet of the filmmaking process, the superlative array of special features for the Alien Quadrilogy ranked way up there with the gold standard likes of the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.

So, like innumerable others with similar stories to mine, Alien is unquestionably one of the most foundational building blocks of my education in, and lifelong love for, cinema.

From the film itself being a masterpiece of sci-fi and horror all at once (“a haunted house movie in space”, as it’s been frequently called, though I cannot find by whom originally), to its introduction of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley as one of the all-time greatest female characters ever created… from H.R. Giger’s nightmarish biomechanical/psychosexual design of the iconic xenomorph being a genuinely frightening monster to behold, to Jerry Goldsmith’s superb score, and Ridley Scott’s mastery of dark visual splendour and thickly immersive atmosphere… every little thing that went into the making of Alien is one in a dizzyingly long line of lightning-in-a-bottle filmmaking miracles that came together to produce the best final product everyone involved possibly could.

And while it may not scare me as viscerally as it used to when I was a kid - back when three or four of the same jumpscares would always work on me, without fail, no matter how many times I’d already seen either cut of the film - Alien continues to cast the same spell of clammy dread, fearsome intensity, breathtaking suspense, and unforgettably disturbing imagery that’s made it timelessly endure as a stone-cold classic for close to half a century.

Theatrical Cut rating: ★★★★★

2003 “Director’s Cut”

(in quotation marks because Ridley said the Theatrical Cut is still the cut he most prefers, so this is really more of an alternate version)

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2003 Cast and crew commentary

(featuring Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Dan O’Bannon, Ron Shusett, Terry Rawlings, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerrit, and Harry Dean Stanton).

I shan’t go over every little thing that was said in this 2003 commentary, as there’s probably a lot of ground similarly covered by IMDb trivia, and explored even further in Charles de Lauzirika’s comprehensive feature-length making-of documentary, The Beast Within.

And anyway, you could read the whole (slightly wonky) transcription of said commentary via this Alien fan blog HERE, if you so wished.

But here are a select few observations I’d like to highlight.

(SPOILERS for a near-50 year old movie, just in case there might still be anyone out there who’s never heard or seen anything that happens in the film…)

• John Hurt, regarding the circumstances of his casting:

“What I understand [was] that I was intended to be in the film originally, but I was, at that time, was not available, and I was going to be doing a film [Zulu Dawn] in South Africa, but I wasn't allowed to go to South Africa, and then of course we had to try and find out what the reason was. It turned out in the end that I was probably confused with that very wonderful actor John Heard [yes, the dad from Home Alone], who was a political activist, and had gone down on the South African books as an undesirable because he didn't believe in apartheid. Well, none of us agreed with apartheid, but fortunately some of us were not on the books at that particular time. So I came back, I didn't do that, and then Jon Finch, who was going to be playing Kane in Alien, became sick, and so therefore the inquiry came in again, and I was available this time.”

• Ridley Scott, on the kind of attitude it takes to be a good director:

”Every step you make, everybody's Doubting Thomas, you know. But that's where you’ve got to earn your way. But I just wonder how many people fall by the wayside because they can't push their point home, and therefore don't quite get what they want. Nobody respects you later for having been a nice guy and given up. You've got to get it, you have to get it now, because you're gonna wear what you've got, basically. You can be very unpopular on the route, but if you're right, all is forgiven.”

• Ridley regarding Ash (Ian Holm), while making the obvious joke so I don’t have to:

“That funny little jog is a clue. Maybe all robots get stiff, so […] he's not a robot, he's a kind of humanoid, biomechanoid… you know, he's a replicant, basically. Half human, two thirds human.”

• Ridley’s pre-Prometheus idea of who or what the Space Jockey could have been:

“I think the Space Jockey is actually somehow the pilot, and he's part of a military operation, if that's the word that you want to apply to his world, and therefore this is probably some kind of carrier, a weapon carrier, a biological or biomechanoid carrier of lethal eggs, inside of which are these small creatures that will actually fundamentally integrate in a very aggressive way into any society or any place it dropped. So if you land on a human being, you’ll have a resemblance to a human being. If it dropped on an ostrich, it would look like an ostrich.”

• Dan O’Bannon, regarding the fresh originality of the xenomorph’s design, and the film in general, before lamenting how some of its impact may have faded over time:

“You see, there is the value of novelty. If it's new and you haven't see it before, it has impact. Once something becomes familiar, no matter how well it's done, if it's familiar… well, you know the old saying: familiarity breeds contempt. And it's a shame in a way, because you see Alien now, and Alien no longer has novelty, so that Alien seen today by a contemporary audience has only a fraction of the impact it had when the picture first came out, because they've see it all before. But at the time, there was a lot in Alien that was entirely new to an audience, and the impact that it had was considerable, and it was even received well by the critical community. Because in those days, science fiction films were very much looked down upon by movie critics, and they liked Alien.”

• Harry Dean Stanton on how to act as though you’re terrified:

“Now this is where I screwed up. I could never play terror. Oh, I can play crying, I can laugh, I can cry, I can do everything but playing terror, and I didn't know it at the time, but I found out later how to play terror. And I didn't use it in this part. It worked, but I wish I’d have known it. You don't look scared, you just look like: ‘I've never seen anything like this before.’ That's all you have to do.”

• Between their various intercut commentary recordings, Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerrit, and Ridley Scott separately but collectively confirm that, before it was cut from the film as an explicit plot point, there was an idea of inferring that Lambert (Cartwright) and Dallas (Skerrit) had been lovers, and that’s why Lambert was especially broken up over Dallas’ seeming demise. (“Seeming” in air quotes because, unlike in the theatrical cut, the 2003 version shows the terrible fates-worse-than-death that Stanton and Skerrit’s characters suffered at the xenomorph’s hands (claws?) when it took them away.)

Ridley also mentions that they supposedly toyed with the idea of there having been a lesbian relationship between Lambert and Ripley, which is something he says he probably would have done if he’d made the movie in the now of 2003.

[CORRECTION: There was a vagary of communication in the commentary that created a mistaken interpretation on my part, but upon watching the film’s “Enhancement Pods” that contained bonus bits of behind the scenes info, the source of the misapprehension was cleared up, so allow me to rectify and clarify: in the commentary, they were actually referring to Ripley and Dallas - not Lambert and Dallas - having an implied relationship whose planted hints altogether ended up on the cutting room floor. My apologies.]

• The biggest surprise for me that came from this commentary (assuming it wasn’t a piece of trivia I’d once known long ago from watching the Alien Quadrilogy special features as a kid, but had forgotten in the decades since) was learning that not only was the character of Ash not an idea Dan O’Bannon had in his original script, but that Dan O’Bannon also frankly hated the inclusion of that character, and didn’t see any relevance Ash held for the story or its themes.

Quoth O’Bannon:

“The general idea of what constitutes a suspense story was an issue of some contention among the producers, and I lost a couple of those battles. There was no Ash in my original script, they added that. The idea being here that all scripts must have a subplot, simply to have a single plot by itself is inadequate, all stories must have subplots, so they created a subplot. Ian Holm gives a brilliant performance, it's brilliantly directed by Ridley, but if you stop and think about it, if it wasn't in there, what difference would it make one way or the other? I mean, who gives a rat's ass? I mean, so somebody is a robot? It annoyed me when they did it, because it was what I called The Russian Spy. It was a tendency in certain types of thrillers, when people are on an interesting mission, to stick in a Russian spy. One of them is a spy, and they don't know which one, and he's trying to screw up the mission. Fantastic Voyage had that. When I saw Fantastic Voyage, I found it annoying. You're just about getting ready to head off into the body of this person, and have this fantastic mission to go through his blood stream, get to the brain, and save him, when you're informed that one of them is a Russian spy, and he's going to stop the mission from its completion. And instead of it adding any genuine suspense, all it did was annoy me, and made me think, ‘Oh I see, so maybe now I don't get to see what I want to see in the movie because the Russian spy will prevent it.’ It's a tensioning device which is commonly resorted to, and doesn't work, because it doesn't provide any real suspense, it doesn't do anything except provide finger exercise for the writer who thinks that all stories must have subplots. So I think it’s an inferior idea of inferior minds, well acted, well directed, and fortunately it occupies little enough screen time that it doesn't disrupt the main plot.”

Yikes. Dude didn’t mince his words, did he?

Personally, while I understand where he was coming from, I also emphatically disagree with his position that Ash is a worthless addition. After all, discovering that lifelike androids exist in this world, and that our ensemble cast of characters work for a corporation that is huge enough, duplicitous enough, and cruel enough to do such a thing - on top of said corporation having deliberately doomed them all to their deaths by a Lovecraftian alien monster in the first place - both enriches the worldbuilding of Alien’s universe, and enforces the constant thematic underpinning of the horrors that capitalism and corporations subject the working classes to, just to line their own pockets, and gain more and more power, regardless of the greater harm they cause to humanity and nature alike.

But whatever, the guy wrote Alien to begin with, so he was more than entitled to his opinion. And anyway, O’Bannon probably hated Ash’s existence mostly because he hated Walter Hill, and the invention of a robot character was the only thing that stuck among the various other changes thought up by Walter Hill and David Giler, when they tried heavily rewriting O’Bannon’s screenplay to make it their own thing and take all the credit, only for all their drafts to get progressively worse because neither was a fan of science fiction (Hill proudly so), and it showed in their lacklustre material that the studio would then roundly reject. So my speculation is that Dan O’Bannon’s dislike of Walter Hill carried over, and was projected onto Ash, because Ash represented O’Bannon’s resentment of Hill’s meddling in his work.

• Another particularly interesting nugget of information that puts a whole other spin on a scene about which I thought I understood everything there was to understand:

Assuming Ridley wasn’t just trolling (which is completely possible, given his ultra wry, dry sense of humour), he tells Sigourney that, with regards to the moment of Ash attacking Ripley with the rolled up nudie magazine he tries choking her with, the symbolism here is of as much a Freudian psychosexual nature as everything else to do with the xenomorph has already been. (See also: every dissertation ever on how the alien is a symbol of rape, what with its phallically shaped head, its phallic inner mouth that shoots out and penetrates its victims’ bodies, its phallic tail that suggestively invades Lambert’s body when it attacks her later, and most of all, its violent impregnations of unwilling hosts who become infected with its vicious seed.)

In Ash’s case, Ridley basically asserts that due to the android’s physical design perhaps not having been provided an… outlet, shall we say, for sexual frustrations it might feel as a result of the human emotions built into its mental design to make it a more convincing facsimile of humanity, Ash attempts to assert power over Ripley through sexual violence, an inhuman committing an all too human crime, wielding the rolled-up magazine as a makeshift phallus to suffocate and silence her, so that thus Ash becomes another symbol of the threat of rape, alongside the alien wreaking havoc on the ship.

To quote the exchange verbatim, so you know I’m not taking anything out of context, or mischaracterising what was said:

SIGOURNEY: You said, “well, come on downstairs, it's gonna be great, Ash is gonna pick up this sex magazine, and he's gonna stick it up your hooter!” And I didn't know Cockney, and I thought, “hmm, my hooter?” And so, luckily, when we got downstairs, it was up my mouth to choke me! But it was funny, it was one of those things, you know I didn't actually think, “well, Ridley would never do that...” [laughing]
RIDLEY: Yeah, exactly.
SIGOURNEY: Nothing would have surprised me!
RIDLEY: But I figured that robots had to have, if they're really sophisticated, had to occasionally have the urge. So I said to Ash, “how do you feel about sexual drive?” He said “great”.
[Sigourney laughing]
So I said, “rather than just beating her up, isn't it more interesting that he actually has always wanted to, and here's his opportunity, but he doesn't have that part”—
SIGOURNEY: Oh, he doesn't!
RIDLEY: And therefore it's a magazine.
SIGOURNEY: Ahh, I didn't understand the Freudian overtones of the scene!
RIDLEY: I hope there aren't any kids listening to all this.
SIGOURNEY: Well, if kids can watch these movies, they can hear this stuff.

Whether or not this reading was in jest, you better believe it completely changes how I view this scene from now on. How can it not?!

• Returning to the disparity between his and Walter Hill’s ideas of what Alien was about at its core, Dan O’Bannon says:

“The whole point of Alien isn't that this is a dangerous space monster; the whole point of Alien, according to Walter Hill, is that evil corporations created this situation, this crew wouldn't even be in this desperate situation in the first place if the evil corporation hadn't sought out this organism, and decided to use it as a weapon, and stuck a robot on board to deceive the crew, and get them trapped in this situation where this alien organism can do its worst, and show that it would be a very good weapon for the corporation's weapon systems. As far as Walter Hill is concerned, that's what the movie is about. But you can see how, having taken the time and trouble to have conceived of and write Alien in the first place, to find myself butting up against a producer who was a writer.”

• As the film concludes, Ridley lays out his ideas for what would most interest him to focus on, if he were to return to the Alien-verse to explore where the xenomorphs came from, and in so doing, essentially gives his thesis statement on what he tried to explore in Prometheus:

SIGOURNEY: Would you ever want to go back to where they came from?
RIDLEY: Oh, I think you have to.
SIGOURNEY: I think that that's the question I've always asked myself, is what kind of society are they, if they are one? What kind of world do they come from, and why did they leave? Why did they send aliens out?
RIDLEY: It's entirely illogical that we are the only people in this galaxy.
SIGOURNEY: I think so, too.
RIDLEY: It's entirely illogical that there are not... there are no more.
SIGOURNEY: It would be so disappointing.
RIDLEY: Exactly.
SIGOURNEY: And ridiculous.
RIDLEY: That's us? If you believe in the big bang, which is... from that, to where we are now, is such an accident of trillions of events to do the right thing, so that you can sit right here, is actually impossible. So, a scientist will say, "it is actually the wand of god, or it's a far more superior being that enables us to be sitting here.” That's where science and religion start to do that.

• Harry Dean Stanton hilariously signs off the entire commentary by saying:

“Well, that's all from me, isn't it? [chuckle] Can I go now?”

“Director’s Cut” rating: ★★★★★

The difference between the two cuts is virtually negligible, with the only truly significant additions being the reincorporation of the moment Lambert slaps Ripley, and the later scene of Ripley discovering, and mercy-killing, the cocooned Dallas and Brett. Other than that, the theatrical cut remains the only version you need.

THE BEAST WITHIN: MAKING ‘ALIEN’
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Enhancement Pods

In case you don’t have the Alien DVD or Blu-ray to hand, have never seen this epic 3 hour making-of documentary before, and wish that Disney+ would’ve had the courtesy to include it as bonus content alongside their hosting of the film on their service, you can thankfully watch the whole shebang on YouTube!

Because if you’re an Alien fan, or even just a filmmaking fan, you owe it to yourself to see The Beast Within.

The extra supplemental video materials - a.k.a. “Enhancement Pods” - don’t seem to be as readily available beyond the Alien Anthology Blu-ray I’m watching all these from, though that perhaps doesn’t matter to anyone but the staunchest of completionists.

However, if there’s one Enhancement Pod that is essential viewing, it has to be the final segment regarding Dan O’Bannon’s fight against Walter Hill (yes, the same Walter Hill of The Warriors fame) to get properly credited for writing the film. In this unexpectedly moving segment, you really get to see how deeply wounded O’Bannon was by Hill’s unscrupulous behaviour towards him, and precisely why he hates Hill’s guts so much, perpetually on the verge of tears as he recounts the legal and public coals that Hill dragged O’Bannon over for five years after the film was completed and released. It may only be O’Bannon’s side of the story, but the way he tells it, Hill comes across as a limelight-hogging prick, using his clout to try and sway public opinion, and the Writers Guild of America, into believing he (and David Giler, who’s rendered kind of an unspoken third wheel in the telling of the primary bitter feud between O’Bannon and Hill) deserved full credit for writing Alien, when their only lasting contribution was the invention of an android character, while everything else that made it from page to screen was the work of Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett, and the myriad tweaks and additions that came from the cast and crew in the collaborative miasma that comes with making a movie.
Thankfully, O’Bannon won the battle, and his legacy as the man who (actually) wrote Alien remains intact to this day.

Walter Hill, however, for his part as the villain of this story, can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, take a flying fuck at the mooooooon…