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This article discusses the film Alien; for the other films, and spin-offs, see Alien (film series)
Alien
The original 1979 theatrical poster
Directed byRidley Scott
Written byStory:
Dan O'Bannon
Ronald Shusett
Screenplay:
Dan O'Bannon
David Giler
(uncredited)
Walter Hill
(uncredited)
Produced byGordon Carroll
David Giler
Walter Hill
StarringSigourney Weaver
Tom Skerritt
Bolaji Badejo
John Hurt
Veronica Cartwright
Harry Dean Stanton
Ian Holm
Yaphet Kotto
Music byJerry Goldsmith
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release dates
May 25, 1979
October 29, 2003 (Director's Cut)
Running time
Theatrical Cut:
117 min.
Director's Cut:
116 min.
LanguageEnglish
Budget$11,000,000
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Alien, a well-regarded 1979 science fiction / horror film directed by Ridley Scott, builds on an original story written by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. A single tag line promoted the script to studio executives: "Jaws in space".[1] The title Alien refers to the main antagonist, a highly aggressive extraterrestrial being that threatens the crew of the spaceship Nostromo after hatching from the body of one of the humans. Amongst the seven crew members, the film stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas and Ian Holm as Ash.

Alien became a critical and a box-office success, and spawned a Hollywood franchise of literature, video games, merchandise, and three official sequels. The film launched actress Sigourney Weaver's career. By featuring a strong heroine, the film itself also proved unconventional (by Hollywood standards) for the action genre. While the Alien (referred to in spin-offs as a "xenomorph") proved a popular aspect of the film, the story of Ellen Ripley became the thematic thread that ran through the series. Some observers believe that the film helped to popularize the body-horror subgenre. Sequels to the film include: Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), and Alien: Resurrection (1997), and the crossover Alien vs. Predator (2004). Publicity for the film used a tagline which became famous: "In space no one can hear you scream."

Plot

Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven and a computer the crew calls "Mother", which monitors the ship's operations. At the start of the film, Mother receives an apparently unidentifiable signal from a nearby planet and wakes the crew to investigate. The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit) and Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin. The group enters the craft, finding the pilot's (see Space Jockey) fossilized remains. Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot, discovering thousands of leathery eggs. One of the eggs opens, the lifeform inside leaps out, breaks through the transparent sealed visor of Kane's spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, the commanding officer in Dallas's absence, refuses to let them back onboard, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley's decision and lets them in.

Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane's face, but when they try to cut it off they can't because it will take Kanes skin off. When they try to take it off, its acid blood burns a hole through several decks. Eventually, the life-form detaches from Kane's face on its own (the crew later find it dead). Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal Kane begins to choke and convulse and an alien creature bursts through his chest. Parker grabs a fork to kill it, but Ash stops him. The creature then scurries away and the crew splits up into two teams with the aim of capturing it. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew's cat, Jones. Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch him. During his search, Brett encounters the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it hauls him into an air-duct.

File:Bye bye.jpg
Kane examining an egg

The crew realizes that the alien uses the airshafts to move around. Dallas enters the network of airshafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien's signal moving toward Dallas. Attempting to escape, Dallas runs right into the creature. Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that the "Company" (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as Weyland-Yutani) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien lifeforms brought back even at the expense of the crew. Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company's "Special Order", but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can finish the job. Parker dislodges Ash's head with a fire-extinguisher, revealing Ash as an android. The three remaining crew members decide to destroy the Nostromo and escape in the shuttle. While Ripley preps the shuttle for take-off, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle's life-support system. Ripley hears the screams of her colleagues echoing from the bowels of the ship and she runs off to investigate. She arrives too late, discovering the alien has killed Parker and Lambert. Ripley activates the ship's self-destruct and races to the shuttle, but sees the alien near the shuttle-bay entrance. After an unsuccessful attempt at aborting the self-destruct sequence, Ripley escapes with Jones to the shuttle, with the alien nowhere in sight. She takes off and the Nostromo explodes. As she prepares for hypersleep, Ripley discovers that the alien has hidden itself inside the shuttle. She succeeds in donning a spacesuit, blasting the alien outside the ship's hatch with a grappling-gun and blowing it into space using the ship's engines. The film ends as Ripley and Jones the cat enter hypersleep.

Cast

  • Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley, who serves as an officer on board the Nostromo. She has a strong distrust of her fellow crewmate Ash after he disobeys her order not to let the infected Kane back on the ship. Eventually, she becomes the only survivor of the crew's encounter with the alien.
  • Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas: the laid-back captain of the Nostromo, he has sole access to "Mother", the ship's on-board computer.
  • John Hurt as Executive Officer Kane: operates as the second-in-command aboard the Nostromo. During his investigation of the derelict space ship, an unknown life-form attaches itself to his face and (unknown to him and to the crew) impregnates him with an alien creature. The creature unexpectedly bursts through his chest and kills him during the crew's dinner. (Jon Finch, originally cast for the role of Kane, had to drop out of the film after suffering a severe attack of diabetes during the first day of shooting.)
  • Ian Holm as Science Officer Ash: serves as the on-board science-officer and technician. Unknown to the crew, "The Company" placed him on the Nostromo in order to ensure the delivery of the alien specimen discovered on the derelict ship. After he attacks Ripley his crewmates unmask him as an android.

Inspirations

Many reviewers have noted that the basic plot of Alien, the pitting of a small group of humans against a relentless alien creature in a remote location, derives from earlier sci-fi horror movies. [2][3][4] Dan O'Bannon has over the years expressed clear views on the exact sources.[5] He has even gone as far as saying "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"

Admitted inspirations include:

  • The Thing from Another World (1951), featuring the hunting of professional men (soldiers in this case) through closely confined areas.
  • Forbidden Planet (1956) in which a ship lands despite warnings and an invisible creature hunts them down one by one.
  • It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) where a spaceship crew bring a murderous alien onboard who then hunts them down. Ivor Powell, the associate producer, has also highlighted the influences.
  • Planet of the Vampires (1965), in which humans discover the remains of a large alien sitting at the controls of its spaceship.
  • "Junkyard", a short-story by Clifford D. Simak:, humans find deserted spaceships on an asteroid and the crew stumble across an egg-chamber.
  • Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer which deals with extraterrestrial reproduction.
  • Various stories from Weird Tales in which monsters eat people from the inside.

O'Bannon denies influence on the part of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which features aliens laying eggs in people which then hatch and eat their way out. However, a lawsuit brought by A. E. van Vogt ended with a settlement out of court. [6]

Philip French suggests another non-science-fiction parallel: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None[7]

Production

History and early versions

File:Chris Foss Pyramid Book of Alien.JPG
According to the book "The Book of Alien" (Titan Books © 1979), a very early draft of the script envisaged the eggs housed in a completely separate architectural structure, shaped in the form of a massive pyramid. The British illustrator and science-fiction artist Chris Foss drew these illustrations of the discarded sequence.

After completing Dark Star (1974) Dan O'Bannon wanted to take some of the ideas (such as where an alien hunts a crew through a ship) and make them into a sci-fi horror movie, at that time provisionally called Memory. He also worked on Gremlins (released in 1984), which features gremlins getting loose aboard a World War II bomber and wreaking havoc with the crew (the B-17 segment of the movie Heavy Metal (1981) used a significantly altered version of this original story). Screenwriter Ronald Shusett contacted O'Bannon about collaborating on projects. Although Shusett wanted input on a script that would later become Total Recall, they decided to focus on the lower-budget Memory. However, O'Bannon got drafted in to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. Although this came to nothing he did meet H.R. Giger, Chris Foss and Moebius on set and a lot of their work together led to later developments when production of Alien started in earnest.[8] For Giger's well-recognized influence see below. Foss' spaceship designs remained unused (some later appeared in some of his books) but Mœbius's designs for the Nostromo spacesuits made it into the final film.[9]

When O'Bannon returned to America, broke, after the Dune film project collapsed, he ended up sharing a flat with Shusett. Shusett suggested mixing in elements of Gremlins and how the alien got on board. He said: "It screws one of the crew. Something jumps up at his face, grabs hold of him and shoves its seed down his throat, then later it bursts out." Ron Cobb had worked on the designs for Dark Star (and would later provide the bulk of the designs for Alien); he offered the idea of the creature's acid blood stopping the crew from simply blowing it up. These various ideas came together in the O'Bannon and Shusett script Star Beast.[10] At this stage the title loomed as the main problem. Casting around for a better name, O'Bannon noticed the number of times the word "alien" occurred in the script, and so he adopted this for the film's title.[11]

The original script bears many resemblances to the film as actually produced, yet with significant differences. The spaceship — designed with a low-budget production in mind — originated as a small craft, initially a galactic coastguard-like ship and then a commercial vessel, called the Snark.[12] In the original script, the ship has an all-male crew, including the Ripley character (though the script's "Cast of Characters" section explicitly states that "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women").[13] Actor Tom Skerritt originally won the role of Ripley, but later, in the course of developing the script, character re-casting made Ripley a woman, because producer Alan Ladd, Jr., and script-doctors Walter Hill and David Giler had heard rumors of Fox working on other titles with strong female leads.[14]

The script recounted how, after responding to the intercepted alien message, the crew discover the derelict alien craft and its dead pilot. Ominously the pilot in its death throes had scratched a triangle on its control console. The crew members go outside and see the remains of an ancient pyramid. They lower Kane into the structure, where he finds a chamber with a breathable atmosphere. An altar-like structure houses the alien embryo-eggs, and a hieroglyph depicts the alien's lifecycle.[15] This concept survived for a long time, and preliminary H.R. Giger pyramid-drawings intended for Alien exist, but eventually the producers went with the idea of combining the wrecked derelict ship with the egg-chamber (also designed by Giger), although the ideas of the pyramid, the altar and the hieroglyphs re-surfaced in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator.

Apart from the disappearance of the pyramid, the final script changed the story's pacing. The impregnation occurred around the mid-point in the film, with a long, slow build up of tension reminiscent of the atmosphere generated in At the Mountains of Madness. It also ended with an Alien egg seen clinging to the bottom of the escaping shuttle, a detail that survived various drafts and disappeared only in the final version dated June 1978.[16]

Pre-production

O'Bannon and Shusett almost completed the sale of the film to Roger Corman. However, at the last minute, a friend, Michael Haggerty, said he could get them a better deal; and thus they sold the script to the Brandywine company of David Giler, Gordon Carroll, and Walter Hill who had a production-deal with Twentieth Century Fox with Hill attached to direct.[17]

Hill and Giler re-wrote the script, discarding superfluous elements, making it more action-oriented, adding the character of Ash, and rewriting much of the dialog — giving the characters more distinct personalities. They also introduced the whole motherhood aspect, although the detail of Ripley going back for the cat originated in the period of the male Ripley-character.[18] These changes caused tensions between O'Bannon and the other production members that lasted through the making of the film. Parts of O'Bannon's scripts appear on various DVD releases, with the full early version presented on the Alien Quadrilogy.

At this stage, a hiatus occurred in the production, as the studio expressed alarm at the prospect of committing to a new science-fiction film in the pre-Star Wars era when such movies remained a rarity.[19]

When Star Wars became a box-office hit, Fox gave the film the go-ahead with an $8 million budget — much higher than the writers had originally hoped. During the production hiatus, Ridley Scott replaced and revised many of the design-elements before principal photography started at Shepperton Studios in England. Giger, brought in from Zürich (Switzerland), set up at the studios along with Ron Cobb as a type of artist-in-residence. (Giger kept a diary through the production which became the basis for his book Giger's Alien).[20]

The alien

File:Hrgigeralien.jpg
H.R. Giger's original design for the Alien, based on his earlier work, Necronom_IV

Swiss painter and sculptor H. R. Giger designed the alien creature's adult form and the alien architecture. The designs feature the creative use of bones in the architecture (the set constructors used real bones in making the interior of the alien ship). Giger received an Academy Award for his work on the original film. The design of the creature's strong Freudian sexual undertones allegedly made the "organism" even more frightening, making it neither man nor woman.[citation needed]

The adult alien appears predominantly black in color, similar in cast to heavily tarnished silver. In keeping with Giger's blending of biological and mechanical life-forms, some shots reveal a metallic patina. It has an elongated shiny head with no eyes. (Some production stills reveal a human skull used in the sculpture beneath its translucent anterior shell). Below, the jaw holds the razor-sharp metal teeth. The mouth houses a tongue-like body part with a second mouth on the end. On the alien's back stand four curved black pipes (Giger designed these for the purpose of breaking up the back). Apart from this, the alien has an anthropomorphic form, with two legs and two arms, its hands each armed with six long, black, razor-sharp claws. The "blood" of the creature, a powerful acid, also serves as a natural defense mechanism.

The slime of the costume would eat through the paint, so it needed repainting every day.[21]

Set-design and construction

Michael Seymour worked as the film's production-designer. John Mollo supervised the costumes, including the distinctive spacesuits, and Carlo Rambaldi produced the crucial mechanical effects for the title-alien's head. The team of Brian Johnson and Nick Allder — who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999 — headed up special effects. Scott turned to a computer-animation pioneer, Bernard Lodge, from his old college — the Royal College of Art in London — to produce the film's green-line computer displays. The thin layer of mist that "notified the eggs" came from smoke and a pulsating laser, which the film crew borrowed from the band The Who.

According to the behind-the-scenes documentary The Beast Within: The Making of 'Alien', the film crew built the spaceship set in one piece. To move around the set, actors had to navigate through the hallways of the ship. Toward the end of the shoot, many members of the cast and crew recalled walking inside the set alone as a very unnerving experience. Some maintain that such emotions come across on the screen.

According to the DVD behind-the-scenes commentary, the film crew kept details of the scene in which the chestburster emerges secret from all actors except John Hurt (Kane). The rest of the crew entered the scene with Kane already on the table and all cameras set. Veronica Cartwright later recalled feeling suspicious at finding all the movie-equipment covered with protective sheets. None of the other actors knew what they would witness, and as a result produced genuine reactions of shock, horror, and disgust.

Some shots outside the Nostromo on the planet use children in spacesuits (specifically Ridley Scott's and the cameraman's children) as stand-ins in order to make the spaceship's landing-legs seem larger. Ridley Scott says in the director's commentary on the DVD, "This shot here, actually is three children made in miniature spacesuits ... who were my two sons and the cameraman's son.... I had small costumes made for them so the landing legs looked bigger...."[22]

Other filming has re-used the set. In particular, the BBC One series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy re-used some of the Nostromo hallways, as well as other parts of the set. These appear most prominently in the scenes set onboard the Vogon Constructor Fleet.[23] When the BBC sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf moved production to Shepperton Studios it used some surviving Nostromo hallway sets from Alien in Series 5, most notably in the episode "DNA" (as revealed on the DVD commentary).

Music

Jerry Goldsmith composed the original score for the film. Despite the film's futuristic setting, the composer's score reflects the film's underlying horror-film genre with its use of oscillating string textures and bizarre sounds. Goldsmith composed a main theme in the romantic style that barely appears in the finished film. A short passage from "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also plays during the time Dallas spends alone relaxing in the shuttle.

Director Ridley Scott and editor Terry Rawlings became quite attached to several of the cues they used for the temporary track while cutting the movie. As a result they moved around much of Goldsmith's score and had many sequences rescored. (Interviews on the "Quadrilogy" DVD release of this film document the viewpoints of Goldsmith, Rawlings and Scott in regard to this situation and why it occurred.) Two cues from Goldsmith's earlier score for Freud appear in the film, and a section of Howard Hanson's second symphony, "The Romantic" replaced the end credits. As a result, Goldsmith's original soundtrack LP represented more the original score he wrote than what ended up appearing in the film.

The initial DVD release (the 20th Anniversary edition) of Alien included an isolated score track that synched the original music up to where it would have appeared in the film, as well as an additional track with the re-scored tracks (the production audio plays when the music does not appear). The soundtrack CD has gone out of print, however. In the final DVD release, most of the scenes showing the Nostromo exterior, and all of the sequences from Howard Hanson's 2nd Symphony ("Romantic"), some of which went along with them, have disappeared, for reasons unknown.

Influence

In film

Roger Ebert called Alien (and John Carpenter's Halloween) "the most influential of modern action pictures". He went on to say that many of "the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking", including the re-make of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.[4] Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "almost every horror film since Alien has ripped it off in some way, but most of the imitations have focused on details."[24]

In 1980, Ciro Ippolito made an unauthorized sequel, Alien 2.

Commentators[citation needed] point to Alien, along with The Brood, as launching the body-horror sub-genre of horror film. Also, the film's cramped, claustrophobic sets have become the de facto norm for horror movies set in space.[citation needed] The film's representation of the ship's crew has also had a huge influence. For the first time, a blockbuster science-fiction film depicted space-travelers as blue-collar company employees (or 'space jockeys') rather than as highly empowered agents of a military-styled entity (such as in Star Trek or Star Wars). (A hint of this also appeared in earlier films such as Silent Running (1971) and Dark Star (1974).) The film Outland (1981) borrows much of this premise, as did the British TV sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf (which also appropriated a good deal of the aesthetics), and across the genre the aesthetic of Alien for future technology became the norm in the following decade.[25]

On television

On the DVD commentary for The End, an episode of the British science fiction series Red Dwarf, Doug Naylor, Rob Grant, and Ed Bye cite Alien as an inspiration for the show.

On video-games

Alien supposedly greatly influenced the video-games series Metroid.[citation needed] For example, one of the main bosses of the series has the name "Ridley" in presumed reference to the director of Alien, Ridley Scott.

The game Xenophobe features creatures very similar to the Alien, including acid blood and a facehugger.

The game Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64, the final boss is a Xenomorph.

Gender politics

Many analysts have examined the film's gender politics, and some [citation needed] have linked it to wider cultural idioms such as the experience of abjection as presented by French poststructuralist Julia Kristeva.

Merchandising

Alien became the first R-rated film to have a merchandising line aimed at children. The children's products released included various toys and models based on the creature and on its egg, jigsaw puzzles, a board game, a Viewmaster-style movie reel, and even a storybook, all of which rate as collectible today. Most notably, Kenner Products released an 18-inch Alien figure, impressively made (for its time) with articulated parts including the retractable jaw and glow-in-the-dark cranium. However, the toy did not sell well, probably because its target demographic failed to recognize it and parents deemed the toy too frightening for children.[26] No models of the Nostromo space-vessel reached the market.

Toy-lines for R-rated films would not become common until the 1990s.[27] At the time, Kenner's decision to do a toy-line based on Alien came before the release of the movie. Due to their success with the other 20th Century Fox film, Star Wars, Kenner Products admittedly acted on the assumption that Fox would produce another space-adventure movie: their research failed to ascertain that the horror-oriented Alien would target adults.

Awards and accolades

Alien won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and also received a nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration. [28] The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA named it the Best Science Fiction Film of the year and Ridley Scott Best Director, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. [29] In 2002, the United States National Film Registry deemed the film "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and inducted it into its collection. [30]

In 2007 Empire Magazine named the "chestburster" scene in Alien the greatest 18-rated movie moment ever as part of its 18th birthday issue.[31]

Special Edition

October 29 2003 saw the re-release of Alien in cinemas as a Ridley Scott Director's Cut. This release restored many — but not all — of the deleted scenes that had already appeared as bonus materials on previous VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases of the film, and made deletions to the original. The new release did add some minor effects to the film: a shot of the sunrise on the planetoid; and lights on the helmets of Dallas, Lambert and Kane move under a natural arc on the left side of the screen. Also, when Nostromo aligns itself with the planetoid, a field of stars appears in the background.

Ridley Scott stated that he did not really think that Alien required this tweaking, and drew attention to the use of the term "Director's Cut" for marketing reasons only (and inconsistently as well). In the Alien Quadrilogy materials, he goes out of his way to state his preference for the original: "rest easy, the original 1979 theatrical version isn't going anywhere". He recut the film himself, but only after viewing the studio's attempt to do so; he characterized the studio's version as "too long" and felt that it ruined the film's pacing.

The Alien Quadrilogy boxed set released on December 2 2003 includes both the Special Edition and the original theatrical version. Because of the scenes cut from the original release to accommodate the new footage in the "Director's Cut", the "Director's Cut" actually runs a full minute shorter in time than the original theatrical release.

Spins-off

The novelization by Alan Dean Foster appeared in 1979, and includes dramatizations of a number of scripted scenes never filmed, or only filmed in part (such as a scene depicting the creature outside the ship).

Subsequent spin-offs include comics, novels, and computer games.

The Aliens have since also appeared in numerous crossovers featuring Predators, Superman, Batman, WildC.A.T.s, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and others.

References

  • McIntee, David Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films, Telos, 272 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-903889-94-4
  1. ^ [1] "A space odyssey" - Sir Ridley Scott looks back on his classic Alien'
  2. ^ Adrian Mackinder. "FutureMovie's review of Alien". Retrieved 2006-08-30.
  3. ^ Todd Wardrope. "A Voyage Interrupted: Alien and Science-Fiction Film". Retrieved 2006-09-04.
  4. ^ a b Roger Ebert. "Chicago Sun-Times Review of Alien". Retrieved 2006-08-30.
  5. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 19-20
  6. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mysciencefictionlife/A20258336
  7. ^ Philip French. "Guardian Review of Alien". Retrieved 2006-08-30.
  8. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 20-21
  9. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 27-28
  10. ^ McIntee (2005) page 21
  11. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 21-22
  12. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 21-22
  13. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 22
  14. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 20-21
  15. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 22-23
  16. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 22-23
  17. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 24
  18. ^ McIntee (2005) pages 25
  19. ^ Alien Quadrilogy DVD set
  20. ^ Robert Sutton. "R0BTRAIN's Bad Ass Cinema: Alien". Retrieved 2006-09-04.
  21. ^ "201 Greatest Movie of all Time". Empire. March 2006 (Issue 201). p. 97. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  22. ^ Ridley Scott (1999). Alien: 20th Anniversary Edition director's commentary. {{cite AV media}}: |format= requires |url= (help)
  23. ^ McIntee (2005) footnote 9, page 39
  24. ^ Andrew O'Hehir. "Alien review on Salon.com". Retrieved 2006-09-06.
  25. ^ Dragan Antulov (2002). "OUTLAND (1981): A Film Review". Retrieved 2006-10-24.
  26. ^ Marc H. Cawiezel. "The History of Unproduced ALIEN and PREDATOR Toy". Retrieved 2006-09-04.
  27. ^ Shocka. "OAFE - Point of Articulation: Get Your "Eek!" On".
  28. ^ "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Alien search results". Retrieved 2006-12-18.
  29. ^ "Saturn Award: Past Award Winners". Retrieved 2006-12-18.
  30. ^ "Films Selected to The National Film Registry, Library of Congress 1989-2005". Retrieved 2006-12-18.
  31. ^ "Alien named as top 18-rated scene". Retrieved 2007-04-28. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |publishdate= ignored (help)
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