Ridley Scott has made precisely two great movies in his career: Alien and Blade Runner. He's made other movies that were good, but none of them were great in the way his second and third feature films were.
Will Scott ever make another great film? It's interesting that his two best films were both science fiction pictures, a genre to which he never returned subsequently until the upcoming Prometheus which is set in the same narrative universe as Alien. (Rumour has it that he will also return to the Blade Runner universe immediately afterwards.) Could it be that science fiction was always Scott's first, best destiny, and that his return to the genre might herald a belated return to greatness? It might simply be that Scott produced his best work near the start of his feature film career, as a hungry young director obsessed with getting his vision exactly as he wanted it, in which case there's no particular reason to believe that Prometheus will be any better than the consistent mediocrity of the last couple of decades.
I happened to rewatch Alien several times recently. I hadn't intended to watch it several times; it's more that although I already regarded it as one of the greatest genre movies of the past four decades, I was taken aback by just how good it was, and ended up watching it three times in as many days. Remarkably, every time I watch Alien its qualities seem even more apparent than before. Although people sometimes bandy around the assertion that a certain person or product "only gets better with age", it's rare to find cases where this is literally true. Perhaps in the case of Alien it's more that the quality of contemporary movies deteriorates, serving to spotlight the craftmanship of films that hail from an era in which direction and editing were better.
Of course, this might just be a case of me mistaking the subjective for the objective: maybe I just like the construction and rhythms of the movies I grew up with, and find myself wearied by more recent output because pop culture has moved on and left me behind. This is certainly possible: with music as with cinema, the products aimed at people who are twenty years younger than you should not always be expected to hold the same appeal as the ones aimed at you when you were their age. Am I just another Bosley Crowther, grumbling that movies ain't what they used to be? Maybe, but I think there are certain genres where you just can't get the quality these days, and horror is one of them.
The thing that really amazed me about Alien, and which sets it apart from almost all contemporary movies of a similar genre, is its pacing. I had certainly noticed before that Scott (and his editor, Terry Rawlings) allow certain scenes to breathe by using long takes, and by letting key scenes develop at a sedate pace to allow the atmosphere to build. What I hadn't realized before is the extent to which this principle is followed in the movie.
Let's recap briefly on the structure of the movie. Ridley Scott has often described Alien as "Ten Little Indians in space". Once the monster is unleashed, it gradually whittles down the crew until only one crew member (Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver) remains alive, and she must face it alone and defeat it. I'm going to ask you a question about the movie, and you shouldn't think about it too much. If I tell you that the original theatrical running time of Alien is 107 minutes, how many minutes do you think it takes from the first crew member's death to the moment when Ripley is left alone as the only remaining human on the ship?
Got your best guess? Okay, good. I'll tell you the answer.
Kane becomes the first crew member to perish when the creature implanted inside him bursts from his chest. Brett is the next to go, surprised by the (unexpectedly huge) alien life form in the cooling tower. Dallas is killed or abducted in the air vent. Ash is discovered to be an android and destroyed. Finally, the alien attacks and kills Parker and Lambert while they are collecting supplies for the escape shuttle. All of this happens within the space of 35 minutes. To put it another way, the "ten little indians" aspect of Alien - the part that people think of as being the core of the movie - takes up barely 30% of its running time.
So what is the movie doing the rest of the time? Well, a lot of the time it's stretching its arms out lazily and allowing you to spend time in its world, just letting the ambience wash over you. In several scenes this is particularly striking. The most obvious of all is the scene where Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) goes looking for Jones the cat, thinking that a tiny alien critter is on the loose in the ship, only to find (at a lethal cost) that the toothy nipper who emerged from Kane's innards mere hours before has grown at a horrifying rate and now towers over him in his final moments. The build-up to this scene is spacious in the extreme. Brett spends over four minutes just walking and standing among the jangling chains, letting the dripping water cool him off. From a certain point of view, nothing is happening during this scene. If Scott cared only about moving the plot forward, he could have condensed the entire sequence (from Brett agreeing to go after the cat to his jaw-snapping demise) down to around ninety seconds. Instead, he lets the tension mount while Brett moves slowly through the disquieting environment, simultaneously letting the viewer explore the beauty and craftsmanship of the artificial narrative world he has created.
Brett's death is far from being the only "unnecessary" scene in the film. At the start, Scott allows four and a half minutes for the ship to come to life from its state of sleep, without a single line of dialogue. One of these minutes consists of nothing other than Kane (John Hurt) opening his eyes and returning slowly to consciousness while Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful symphonic theme ("Early to Rise") accents the spring-like feeling of rebirth.
After allowing us to meet the characters and finally allowing dialogue to establish the film's scenario (the necessity of investigating the mysterious signal from the planetoid), the movie moves into another of its extremely spacious sequences: the unhooking and descent of the Nostromo to the planet surface. This takes almost five minutes, and although there IS dialogue during the scene, there is hardly any essential plot development other than some minor damage occurring to the ship that will necessitate repairs later. Again, in the hands of a less patient director or editor, this scene could and probably would have been completed in little more than a minute. But the scene simply isn't there as a means to the end of moving the plot forward: it's there as an end in itself, something beautiful and hypnotic, like a futuristic ballet. Scott wants you to enjoy the experience of being in this world, even if nothing particularly important is happening.
All of which brings me to the key thing I realized about Scott's two science fiction creations. More than anything, Alien (and his next movie, Blade Runner) are about experiencing a world. Many people discuss the Freudian significance of Alien, or the philosophical implications of artificial life engendered by the replicants of Blade Runner. But these are secondary to Scott's phenomenal skill at making you believe you're seeing something shot on location in a parallel universe, and, through expert use of framing, set design, lighting, editing and music, to enjoy that experience.
Indeed, this may be the single most important reason why these films bear so many repeated viewings. To some extent, any artistic construct that has a plot will suffer from the law of diminishing returns when read/viewed multiple times, because the surprise and novelty of the first viewing can never be recaptured. Other art forms such as music and painting do not suffer to anything like the same extent, because novelty is not a key part of the experience. Indeed, in the case of music, familiarity and expectation become one of the pleasures; most symphonies and pop albums are more enjoyable on the fifth listen than on the first.
By having a relatively slight (but still thrilling) plot buttressed by an incredible sense of atmosphere and immersion, Scott made Alien one of the least wearying movies ever made. It is suffused with beauty and (perhaps counterintuitively) a soothing tranquility. It's an incredible film.
