hey everyone my name is Paul welcome to the heavy spoiler show and I'm so excited to talk about one of my favorite films of all time that is alien and I think the level of influence at its head over the Sci-Fi genre is completely undeniable I was lucky enough to see this movie when I was about four years old because my Grandad knew I like cool space aliens and he taped it for me after seeing the title many happy nightmares followed and it's a film that stuck with me for years and years and years now throughout this video I want to go through the films scene by scene to talk about all the little details in it horrifying hidden themes and just some of the aspects that make it one of the greatest movies ever made [Laughter] now this would never actually have been made at Star Wars not been so successful 20th Century Fox had the script lying around for a while and they weren't expecting Lucas to deliver the massive Blockbuster that he did people were desperate for science fiction stories and they quickly green lit it and ordered a cash in on the hype what we got is very different totally the Star Wars like very very different but I'm so glad that it got made now Scott actually borrowed slightly from Star Wars and just in the same way that we get an opening on the Star Destroyer alien starts off with this opening on the Nostromo the underside of the ships are shot in a similar way and it helps to add skull and scale to the vessels there are two versions of this film which exist and depending on what you watch you'll get a couple of extra scenes and moments the director's cut is actually 47 seconds shorter than the theatrical version even though it technically has more scenes and this was achieved by shortening some of the other sequences and exercising certain unnecessary moments there's a big list of the differences online with most of them being things like character drinking coffee and so on and so forth Scott said that he trimmed things down because he wanted to keep up the pace but also adding extra stuff so we got more of the movie personally I prefer the theatrical version but let me know below which one of the two you like now there are two big differences Alan Brett goes looking for Jonesy he lets him water drip on him in order to refresh him depending on what version you watch we get a moment in which we see some change dangling down and amongst them you can catch the xenomorph hidden there this adds to its chameleon-like structure and throughout the film the environment itself looks a lot like the xenomorph this adds to the subliminal horror of it and around every corner you feel like you could run into it now there's also an extra scene in which we see some of the crew turning into eggs this of course contradicts the way they're laid in the sequel with the alien queen being the one who's behind it you can find this version in the director's cut but yeah it does go against the established law that would end up springing up in the sequel I also think it was removed because there's not really anything in nature where creatures turn into a different species egg half their size another scene is creepy I tend to go with a theatrical and like I said that's across the board too that is my favorite version with even really Scott admitting that he only did the director's cover money and that he likes the one he put out originally the best which yeah fair enough I'd won the money and a Ridley is actually from South Shields which is where I live and a couple of years back they had this great alien exhibit with all the props costumes and so on now at its heart aliens very much a slasher said in space and Scott said that he actually looked more at movies like Texas Chainsaw than anything in the Sci-Fi genre but it does perfectly is that it slowly builds this feeling of dread throughout the film and things get more and more extreme the longer we go on there's this feeling of an easiest that gets more and more intense and this is set up early on with the slow title reveal it's also the fact that not aware is spoken in the film for the first seven minutes and you very much get detached from what's going on the title itself almost feels like it's in an alien language too as the letters slowly fade in on first viewing we don't fully know what the word will be and they're almost like hieroglyphics throwing us off balance until the name of the film's revealed obviously we know the movie is going to be called alien but this slow reveal definitely has the feeling that we don't fully understand what's going on it's in an easy way to start the movie and there's also large gaps of Silence with minor drones from the score creeping in when we do finally get to see the crew interacting though we get a great moment around the lunch table in which we bond with them all the dialogue here really helps you decide with them and it's such a fun scene come the end of the film we watch as this group is torn apart and see that all of the people within it aren't who they seem to be who I'm talking about is of course Ash who is revealed to be an Android the franchise actually keeps up a nice theme throughout and when viewed in release order the main films all have an Android in them whose initial sense in alphabetical order a is for Ash and alien B is for Bishop and aliens in Alien 3. call appears in Alien Resurrection and Prometheus gets at D and David in the film we learn that Ash is working for the company and that he's been instructed to bring back this xenomorph the crew is Expendable and he doesn't mind getting his hands dirty to get rid of them throughout the film there are some clues that he's well aware of what's going on and after Kane is attacked by the face I got we catch him watching a monitor this is him scanning Kane's body and he'd clearly be aware of the alien embryo inside of him as soon as he realizes Ripley's there he turns this off almost like he's an embarrassed teenager when their parent walks in the room this is to hide it from Ripley and he knows that questions will be raised if she sees what's going on now the knowledge of the xenomorph is also carried over to the chess burster scene Ash is the only one who doesn't initially get up to help Kane and we even cut to a shot of him sitting whilst the others help out Scott also said that when the group wake up Ash actually takes longer because he's almost like a computer starting up and this very much mirrors the system on the ship turning on in the beginning now when we go to Kane we can see Ash to the ride and you might notice that Ian Holmes isn't actually breathing at this point and it isn't until much later that he starts to do this now mother is the other bit of artificial intelligence that we meet in the movie she actually steers the ship towards the signal and he's also well aware that it's putting the crew in danger I know people have gone back and forth over whether this was the true Mission or not but I think this line about Ash actually gives it away did you ever ship out with Ash before I went out five times with another science officer they replaced him two days before we left thetas with Ash they were given the new science officer and Ash because the company wanted to put an Android amongst them that would obey the true Mission now the xenomorph itself was based on the artwork of HR Kiko with an acronym 4 being the piece that eventually evolved into the creature giga's work is full of phalluses and the movie itself is sexual and the tones to it which we'll get into later on in the video it's very much carrying the idea of male pregnancy through assault smothering and so on and so forth now in addition to phallic imagery we also get a lot of things that look like the JJ's you know what I mean mate can't say what it is because YouTube's doing stupid [ __ ] demonetization on anything slightly controversial anyway the Facehugger possesses this in their design and the original Alien X themselves also had it too Scott realized he'd probably get an x-raying if he went through with what Kika wanted though and thus they turn into opening almost like flower petals now there's very much this idea of the sleeping chamber being like a womb 2 and with the ship's Captain being mother we have this all time together early on we get a tour of the Nostromo and we can see that most of the shapes and structures are made up of tubes and openings when crafting the design Giga said that he wanted to create something biomechanical and this this idea throughout the machines in Alien are a mix of things you'd see in both man-made and natural beings we get the computer intercepting the distress call and then the crew wake up almost like they're opening their eyes for the first time after being born the pods are in a cylindrical shapes and the crew coming out of them is meant to be similar to the way an animal hatches out of an egg eggs of course play a major part in the film and in the opening we see lots of things that are related to them at one point we catch two nodding birds and then later as we go into the main section we see three egg models vibrating up and down this is the chicken coming before the egg which might be a rich now the way the papers flap around in such gives the idea that there's very much something moving through the ship watching over what's going on we don't know what this is but it's very much meant to be voyeuristic from here we cut into the sleeping quarters and watch the crew you very much being born birth is a theme in the movie too with the alien being born out of Kane who just so happens to be the first character we're introduced to we are supposed to believe that he is the main person that we should be following and for this initial act he very much is he's the one we focus on here the most and he's the one who leads everyone into the space jockey ship thus when he dies it's a major twist in the movie's dynamics that plants the idea No One Is Safe Dallas is also painted as one of the main characters too and it's a long time before we focus on Ripley now Ripley originally was a man in the script and interestingly Scott didn't end up changing any of the lines to fit the gender swap if we're sticking with the confines of a slasher movie then Ripley is very much the Final Girl archetype who navigates the movie by sticking to the rules she refuses to let Kanan when he's infected and very much goes by the book on a lot of the issues now we cut to them all eating around the table and we can catch Jones the cat there too in the film all of the characters are referred to by their last name due to being the best way to address them professionally and this is even the case with the cat too Jones is very much seen as a member of the crew as well and the animal is of course there to boost morale if you pay close attention to the scene you might also catch Ash reaching out and grabbing a jug of milk which is something and he continues to drink throughout the movie later on when he's revealed to be an Android we see he has a milky substance instead of blood and this could be what's sustaining his synthetic body a shout out to the now playing podcast for saying that the entire crew are very much meant to be space truckers and in the 70s convoys and such were all the rage it adds his extra human element to them and we relate to them more because they just come across as Everyday People now he watches Dallas goes the mother which is a giant room of blinking lights and buttons though I've been talking about sexual organs a lot there are body parts laced throughout the designs of everything and mother is very much supposed to be a brain from here we go back to the crew and see them working at their stations at lamb bets we see a box with Balaji Imperial written on it and this is actually a brand of cigarettes it's solely for the movie later on we see Ripley's computer and you can catch a picture of Jonesy's a little kitten which is not it's nice isn't it I don't know I'm actually a dog person anyway Jonesy was actually portrayed by four different cats with one being used for holding the other for hissing and the other two for running off Lambert also mentions and astromo is close to Zeta to ratculi which is an actual star system that's one of the closest to her own the name Nostromo comes from the title of the 1904 Joseph Conrad novel which follows an Italian explorer who tries to plunder a silver mine the nostrama is also a mining vessel in the film hence why that name ended up being used and the crew end up traveling to lb46 and we see all the procedures that they have to go through in order to land the shuttle air when discussing the movie The screenwriters stated that they were so happy Scott actually put as much effort as he did into this scene as it shows how difficult it is to actually land on another planet whereas a lot of sci-fi movie shows being as simple as driving a car we see just how difficult it is here Star Wars wipes have become a thing where we just watch a planet being approached and then skip all this but I appreciate that they put all this effort into what could be a throwaway scene the environment here is extremely hostile and three members of the crew end up heading out into it in spacesuits these were apparently a nightmare to film in and in between takes the helmets had to be constantly taken off to them filling up with carbon dioxide Ridley Scott actually used some of his own children for a lot of the scenes in the suits and this was in order to make the scale and size of the areas look larger as they approached the ship you also see several things that pull from the human body and the two doors that the crew go up into look like the JJ's again sorry ladies and inside the walls also appear like rib cages now as canis ends into the ship we see the back of his helmet which has been purposely designed to look similar to the alien's body there's tubes protruding out of the back of it and these also look exactly like its tail now there's a skeletal feeling to the entire surrounding with his ship's pile of very much seeming like an extension of the chair you can't really see where it ends and where it begins making for a really eerie scene a screenwriter Daniel O'Bannon went over what was originally supposed to be in the space jockey scene and there were some things that he ended up explaining though Prometheus shows the series being how the space jockey Pilots the ship it was originally intended to be where the SOS Beacon was sent out from the team would then arrived there and turned the beacon off and during this moment they notice a triangle on the machine they then exit the ship and come across a giant pyramid which is where the Alien X were originally stored like them the space jockey and his crew adventured down to the planet searching for something and it's here where they went through something similar to what happened with the crew of the Nostromo and fox actually wanted to originally cut the space jockey due to the budget but Scott insisted that it was left in they of course went on to make two Prometheus movies and without Scott's persistence they never would have happened personally I I wish that it had just remained a mystery and like the thing prequel I think the imagination of what the ship is is way more interesting than than what we could have gotten especially when it's things like they designed the entire human race which moving on now the creature being Incorporated in the budget is something I'm so glad Scott got to do however he did concede that the pyramid was gonna be way too expensive thus they just put the eggs in the ship and they lie within the bowels of it as Kane carries out his descent he watches the walls once more act like a rib cage and it's almost as if Kane is descending into the nine circles of hell now upon approaching the eggs we can see that there's a laser light almost acting like a barrier that warns people not to cross it you might notice that his Cane moves his hand through it The Sound gets more and more high-pitched the closer that he gets just covering the eggs that react when broken now this is such a cool thing in the film but originally it wasn't supposed to be there the creative team actually wanted to have webbing blocking the way but they realized how difficult that was gonna be to produce they actually ended up going into the next lot and here they came across the who who were rehearsing for a concert they borrowed one of their lasers for the show along with some dry ice and that's how we got the effect now the eggs in the face are some of the most memorable things about this movie and they use dead animal entrails for both the Facehugger was made up of a shellfish and the stink of it got so bad on set that the casting crew were apparently vomiting after getting close to it I went crafting the script Ron shushid said that one of the big problems they faced was how they actually got the alien off the planet and onto the ship they needed to do it in a way that didn't make the crew look like idiots and they realized that the only way to do it and I quote was have the alien [ __ ] someone now they actually do something that messes with your head a bit and when Kane approaches it we can see moisture droplets on the top dripping upwards Against Gravity this is to disorientate us and make us get the feeling that we don't quite understand the surroundings the top of the egg then opens up and Kane decides to do the scientific thing and stick his face directly in it the name of science I will put my base in it it all happened so fast and I love how Scott takes his time actually showing what's happened to Kane we see the crew come back to the ship which is difficult to make out and even the airlock is covered in smoke with a focus on Dallas and Lambert instead of Kane after the helmet is removed we see this spider-like creature wrapped around Kane's face the tendrils are designed to look like fingers with it almost crushing Kane's head another point they're now playing brought up which I think is really important is that typically in movies if something bleeds we tend to see as being a weakness streets we can kill it this isn't the case with these creatures though and even their blood is a defense mechanism we see that the creature spouts acids from its wounds and this is strong enough to melt through the hull of the ship it's got a wonderful defense mechanism you don't dare kill it conceptual artist Ron Cobb came up with the idea for this because they ran into your problem with the third act in which they knew audiences would ask why they just didn't shoot it so this was a workaround and it made it so that every attack on the creature could cause more damage to the crew and ship we then get more bias shots and come across Ash clearly looking at the embryo inside Kane as mentioned earlier he turns us off when Ripley comes over and originally in the script she was gonna ask what the black mass in his lungs was but I think this would have given the game away as to what could be coming on the first viewing we're supposed to believe the titular alien is the Facehugger and this question that there's something else might ruin the dinner surprise but that she does ask the right questions here and it gives the game away with Ash a bit you also forgot the science division's basic quarantine law that I didn't forget oh I see you just broke it unfortunately by breaking quarantine you risk everybody's life maybe I shouldn't have left him outside maybe I've jeopardized the rest of us but it was the risk I was willing to take a big risk or a science officer not exactly out of the manual is it now Ripley wanted to quarantine the group and if he was truly a man of signs he'd understand why that's so important but instead he went against protocol and this tips his hand a bit that he wanted the creature on the ship he once again drinks milk and we cut to Dallas learning that the creature is now of Cain while the film is brilliantly here is that it actually lures you into a false sense of security we had the crew looking for the creature and the little jump scare when the corpse of the face like a lantern Ripley's shoulders we are supposed to think that the alien is dead and Kane waking up in good spirits makes us begin to relax as an audience I love the line about him having a nightmare about smothering and he's very much repressed this trauma again this carries the themes of assault and people very much hiding the memory from themselves because of the horror that it carries Stella O'Kane moves on and we get the dinner scene which is once more put in place to make us relax it mirrors that first scene we've already sort of been through something similar and we know that nothing bad can happen however it's at this point that we're treated to one of the most memorable scenes of all time in which the alien makes a a big entrance now one of the myths about this movie is that none of the cast and crew knew this was going to happen and that it was all a surprise that's not strictly true as they of course had this script what they didn't know though is that they'd be sprayed with fake blood so that's very real and it's why Veronica Cartwright looks so caught off God if you listen to the score here it's also like a heartbeat thumbing away as we see the horror play out now Parker goes to snap out the creature but Ash is the one who says not to touch it which spares it from being killed on a second watch this is very much him playing his hand and I love going back through the movie and spotting these little moments now the alien looks a bit goofy now but I honestly find this little xenomorph a bit cute and it's funny watching it skate off like a remote control car Also earlier in the scene we can catch in Mr Fusion at the table and this would later pop up in Back to the Future as a prop from the film anyway Kane's funeral is Swift and almost emotionless adding to the sterile and solitary feeling that one would likely experience when moving through space whereas in most horror movies we see as people we follow low attempt to get away from the killer who watches the crew instead go on the hunt so far all I've experienced the small creatures like the young xenomorph and Facehugger and thus they believe that they can kill it with ease we get the old animal fake out scene which at the time wasn't really a cliche and it wants more Lewis us into a false sense of security also worth pointing out that Chevy Chase actually wore the same cap that Brett does in Fletch so a bit of trivia and the thumbs up buttons right there now Brett comes across some skin which in hindsight we know is due to the creature shedding he goes off into one of the ventilation rooms and if you look at the recess on the four main structures you can see that several of them look like the aliens head and tail as he lets water drip on his face we can actually also hear the faint hits of this anymore of hanging just above him foreign then drops down and attacks before taking bread away we then get a quick hit of Jonesy as the cat watches things playing out this is a technique that Scott would use in Blade Runner and we cut to tyrells out as his murder played out Blade Runner actually reuses several Graphics from this film including many things that we see on computer screens and the tongue with the tongue gives a morphallic imagery and it very much has to penetrate its prey to stun them now from here we go to Ripley and Parker saying that the alien took bread up into the air shaft but how they know never gets fully explained in a theatrical cut oh we're in the director's cut we see they run in and get covered in blood as they look up at this point Ash refers to the creature as Kane's son this little [ __ ] is huge I mean it's like a man it's big okay and son it's such a creepy time to talk about the creatures being Cain's son and it shows he's more sympathetic towards it than the rest of the crew normally you you wouldn't refer to a monster like this as being someone's Offspring but he does it because he has a different appreciation for it than the rest of the crew does now this whole airlock scene is another standout moment in the film that pretty much defined the genre I remember a couple of years ago I was really excited for alien isolation because it was recapturing the look and feel of this film however IGN they gave it a 5.9 out of 10 and I decided not to get it which I'll never forget I will never forget mate anyway it went on sale a couple of years later and I picked it up and I was blown away by the game igen were wrong hashtag never listen to IGN and the reason why I'm talking about it here is because there's actually DLC for it involving the Nostromo crew and in that you have to crawl through the vents like what we see here it's just as tense playing as it is to watch and if you're a fan of horror games in this film then you'd definitely have to pick it up and what makes the scenes so tense is that we spend a lot of it in darkness with only Dallas's light to show us the way again we have images of body parts with the closing shutters being like a butthole look I Never Promised the breakdown would be high bro yeah you can also see them as an iris I suppose with them opening and closing and the horror here is so simple and Scott uses sound perfectly to create a terrifying atmosphere I'm sure now playing mentioned that the motion tracker was made by using a football game on an Atari 2600 but whatever it is the Simplicity is what gives the scene its Terror rather than being a 3D map it's just two dots moving across the screen with the beeps mimicking our heart rate as the creature gets closer in most confrontations like this when two dots line up you'd expect there to be a big jump scare or something but in this movie nothing actually happens this throws the audience in Dallas completely off guard because we now know that the creature is close by we still can't see it though and thus your mind starts to wonder and the crew are terrified for him well all except for ash who once more calmly observes it because he wants to see what will happen after he's taken Ripley has given his privileges as she's the next in line for command Lambert wants to take her chances in the shuttle and as we see this ends up becoming the plan later on anyway at this point they want to push it into the airlock and blast it into space and originally there was a scene along these lines involving Ash that also played his hand the deleted scene had the creature just about to go under the airlock and the crew watched over on monitors just before it stepped through Ash sounded the alarm and it startled as anymore of which then fled things would have given the game away far too early and I can definitely see why they ended up removing it instead Ripley says Ash [Music] any suggestions from you or mother no we're still collating you what what you're still collating I find that hard to believe I've got access to mother now and I'll get my own answers thank you this is Ash once more lying and thus Ripley goes directly to Mother upon learning the truth Ash appears and we get one of the most graphic scenes in the film if you go off the subtext now when discussing the scene on the commentary Ridley Scott said that this is very much a metaphor for sexual assault with Ash shoving a literal adult magazine down her throat and also the audiences upon explaining it he said that being an Android meant that Ash didn't have the parts that men do and thus he'd build up frustration over the voyage this was him very much assaulting Ripley and the only way he could the director said that Ash didn't actually want to kill her in this moment it's something I never considered at all when watching the movie and I don't really like to think about that kind of stuff but I do think the directors intentions are important to talk about Ash spraying white fluid everywhere could be seen as well you know and this leads to the big reveal that he's a robot coming with his head being smashed like it's the like button it's also important to bear in mind that Ripley has a nosebleed here and she actually ends up getting one in every film from here to Resurrection and they put his head on the table and unfortunately they're leaving one of the worst Chum cuts ever as we switch from the dummy to Ian home I think on the whole at the effects in this film really hold it more than 40 years later but I really wish they just cut back to the crew and then to the switched our head instead of keeping it in the shot Scott even said that he hated this effect and said that the mold for ash actually ended up getting deformed due to conditions on set this left it looking slightly different on how home does and yeah it's not the finest moment in the film but they did win the Oscar for best special effects so we'll let you off there mate either way I'm nitpicking and I think the fact that Ash is in Android is the best twist in the film as it adds another enemy for the crew to have to work around unlike the alien Ash can talk in a moat and we hear about how he admires the creature they are very similar to one another in many respects as they both work for something bigger than them and will kill those that get in the way of that goal they also operate Basin instincts and programming that they don't fully understand now Ash drops the chilling line piercing and after he's burned the crew decided to take their chances in the shuttle there's only one life support chamber and limited oxygen and food but their odds are better there than they are on the ship they split off with Lambert and Parker going off on their own and I love how they use the piping and environments here to further evoke images of the xenomorph Ripley ends up returning to the ship after realizing Jones is there but the xenomorph attacks Parker and Lambert as they collect their supplies they have such an effective use of Shadow here with the xenomorph closing in and you might notice some little continuity errors here as we watch the tale going up Lambert's trouser leg we can also see that her pants are navy blue here even though in the previous shot they're white this is because this moment actually came from earlier in the movie and this is a scene from when Brett was grabbed Lambert's original death was going to involve her hiding in a locker and she'd then die of fried as the xenomorph moved around outside I think the switch here was done because of the sexual connotations that come with it but they also had to be mindful of how the suit looked in motion abalaji Bodega was hired by Scott after he saw him in a pub and standing at six foot and 10 inches meant that he was perfect for the role however in motion they realized that the suit looked pretty bad and this is why a lot of the shots in the film are of it standing still you do get a moment where it moves like a ballet but the creature was cut around due to how effective the suit looked in Motion in better lighting and in Alien Isolation we can also see that the creature has a skull and eye sockets within its head but it's difficult to make out in the film itself now Ripley ends up arming the self-destruct sequence on the ship now we get a scene in which he goes to the shuttle and then returns here to try and disarm it this doesn't work and thus she has to make her way past the alien this part of the film was also recreated in the early in isolation DLC leading to one of my favorite parts of the game again as she moves through the environment we see as certain panels in wall textures are put in place to mimic the alien but Ripley eventually manages to make it through now we discovered that the xenomorph is on board the shuttle and the set was actually built around Balaji in order to create this effect leaving it proved difficult though and the suit tore in multiple places a Ripley starts to sing Lucky Star and this was something at Sigourney Weaver just improvised on the day the song pulls from singing in the rain and unfortunately it added more money to the budget as the studio had to secure the licensing rights which no one was really happy about in the end though Ripley opens the airlock and she shoots it with a Harpoon Gun which gets stuck in the door as it closes and a nice bit of attention to detail this gun can actually be seen at the start of aliens at the same place that it was at the end of this film a time back to the themes of birth This Moment's been interpreted as a baby being pulled out of the womb with the wire acting like an umbilical cord finally the aliens cut free once Ripley blasts the engines and it sends it off into space I love how we can see that it's still moving and it shows just how difficult it is to kill you can't end it you can only get rid of it and we close out the movie with a shot of Ripley sleeping mirroring the crew waking up at the start this would later be repeated in aliens with Ripley and Newt closing out both films on positive note and that ends the movie I hope you've enjoyed this breakdown through this classic film and if you have we'd love to see at the channel again make sure you subscribe and on screen right now we have another classic movie breakdown for you to watch next without the way I've been your host Paul and I hope to see you next time take care peace