Alien

Capsule Film Review #2

---

This is the second in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear in addition to my regular essays.

---

The second most disturbing thing about Alien (1979, d. Ridley Scott)—at least from the point of view of those of us who make a hobby out of trying and failing to give up the cigarettes—is that in it, even a hundred years into the future, people still smoke.

‘There is nowhere in the world,’ wrote Richard Klein in his 1994 book Cigarettes are Sublime, ‘where people do not smoke if they are allowed to’. Here, what applied to the world in the mid-1990s applies also outside of the world in 2122: in space, it seems, people can still see you light up, whether or not they can hear you scream.

The most disturbing thing about Alien, however, is not that, and not the lonely vastness of space, and not even the alien itself, but its vision of the future. The monstrous, acid-blooded creature that gestates inside a living human host is nothing compared to the film’s complete disregard for the notion of progress. It is a kind of anti-Star Trek: technology has advanced, but human beings have not. Not only do we all still smoke, but workers have not ceased to be exploited nor women abused. Over the course of the sequels, Ellen Ripley and the hated xenomorphs will seem to develop a strange symbiotic relationship, a mutual understanding. The firm that she works for, on the other hand, will never have so much as a face. Ripley’s true nemeses are men.

---