10 Best Alien Moments
5. Ripley vs the Alien
Every final girl, even if the term ‘final girl’ wouldn’t be coined for another seven years, needs a monster to face off against. Ripley, a feminist icon in the making, must defeat the walking embodiment of uncontrolled violent sexuality, a monster of Freudian nightmares, in a battle that would come to define not only Sigourney Weaver’s career, but ripple throughout cinema. This is where Ripley really becomes Ripley, and as we know from Alyla Browne’s character Charlotte in Sting (who actively channels Ripley to confront her own monster), the world is better for it.
Yet it’s not a conventional fight. It’s mostly done in the quiet, in Ripley slowly slipping into a suit to jettison the creature out into the vacuum of space. It is a test of cunning and skill, of patience, of trying to hold down fear of the ultimate monstrosity. The patient camerawork, the overall cinematography, and Weaver’s performance, combine to create an incredible final combat between the two future icons of cinema. This is a great final scene to cap an exceptional tale of horror in the dark depths of space.
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4. Brett’s Death
You can’t keep your monster in the dark forever. If you do, your audience is going to think you’re cheating them out of something important. In Alien, with such an iconic and unique design based on H.R. Giger’s painting Necronom IV, Ridley Scott knew that he needed to show it as much as is artistically and dramatically possible. Scott gives enough flashes of its size and costuming to give you nightmares, ensuring that we don’t know enough to work out exactly what the thing is, but that we see enough to conclude that it is strange and big and has two mouths; that it is certainly not something to come up against.
If you’re Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett, confronting this monster isn’t much of a question. He doesn’t stand a chance, and he’s the first to find this out. Trying to track down the little chestburster and get back Jonesy the cat, he stumbles into the path of the now-fully-grown alien creature, which descends from the cooling ducts, glistening and slick and drooling and completely horrific. The slow build, combined with the reaction shots of Jonesy backing away from the alien, gives that ultimate sense of dread just before it appears. When it kills, it shows no mercy. Our first look at our titular alien is the one that stays with us, and perhaps no other appearance of a monster has done more to give its audience nightmares for life.
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3. Air Ducts
The Nostromo is claustrophobic, so when a monster has killed two of the crew, the remaining members have no choice but to go and hunt it down. They grab a flamethrower and proceed through the ducts and vents, chasing the monster, tracked by Lambert with a dodgy bit of kit that doesn’t seem to work all the time. The tracker loses the monster, but then it comes back again, heading straight for Dallas. They, and we, don’t know exactly where. He tries to run, to get out. Then, in a flash, it’s there: one of the greatest jump scares ever put to screen.
For all the creature’s size, here it doesn’t use its strength. This sequence is pure cat and mouse, the creature relying on instinct and the human relying on communications and technology to hold it up. But the creature is of biomechanical design, with pipes and tubes integrated into its body, its head shape camouflaging it perfectly against the pipes at the end of the film. It has the upper hand. The tension slowly builds as we get more and more evidence that the monster is closing in on us, unable to move anywhere, and suddenly that flamethrower doesn’t seem as good as it did a few minutes ago. Lambert’s frantic shouts to run mirror our own, but we know it’s no good. When it appears in that perfectly timed scare it is well earned, well deserved, and the end of an incredible piece of filmmaking.
