In the early 1970s, an up and coming director named George Lucas received a two film deal from United Artists. The first of the two was 1973’s American Graffiti. Arriving in 1977, the second was… Star Wars. Star Wars cost approximately $11 million for production, but brought in over $400 million. Naturally, everyone sought to cash in.
20th Century Fox made their attempt in May of 1979 with Alien directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon. The film had been in development for many years and passed through many rejections and revisions. For a time, it appeared to be headed into camp film territory with Roger Corman, and then Star Wars happened and 20th Century Fox bit.
Considering that the film was intended as a Star Wars cash in, Scott’s Alien is unusual in a number of respects:
- Where Star Wars is a fantasy, Alien is reality/ science-based. This difference is best seen in how the characters travel. Star Wars characters jet around galaxies at the speed of light. The Nostromo’s “truckers in space” crew sleeps in suspended animation while their ships plods along at sub-light speeds.
- Where Star Wars follows the usual conventions of strong male archetypes rescuing helpless noble women, the men in Alien are victims and a woman is the hero. Most notably, one of the men dies giving birth to a monster following an assault. True, Carrie Fisher’s Leia becomes more assertive in the 2nd and 3rd SW films, but in 1977 original, she occupies a corner of the active plot. By contrast, Alien’s Ellen Ripley, played by 29 year old Sigourney Weaver, plays the hero throughout, but especially in the film’s second half.
- Where Star Wars is (mostly) family friendly with a PG rating, Alien is unapologetically unpleasant. The film earns its R rating with violence, gore, profanity, and loads of disturbing imagery.
The films are very different from one another, but if you ask someone familiar with both, I’d bet they’ll mention none of these. They’ll mention the Alien.
According to what I’ve read, Dan O’Bannon conceived of the Alien while acting on John Carpenter’s 1972 film Dark Star. The alien in Dark Star is a beach ball with feet taped to its bottom. O’Bannon, a member of the Dark Star crew, chases the alien around the ship in an ultra- cheesy comic relief segment. Not terrifying in the least, unless you really hate the beach.
O’Bannon had the idea of making a pitch-black, hard science film about futuristic blue collar workers trapped in space with a terrifying monster. He began writing the script following Dark Star and, as mentioned earlier, by the time it reached Ridley Scott’s attention six years later it had passed through many edits and editors. But the film still didn’t have a monster.
O’Bannon had encountered the works of Swiss artist H.R. Giger (1940-2014) a few years earlier while collaborating on Jodorowsky’s failed attempt to film George Herbert’s Dune. Giger’s work was and is unsettling, to say the least. At the time, a compilation of Giger’s work had been published in book form by an obscure Swiss publisher in 1977. O’Bannon brought the book to Ridley, who selected one of the images as the titular Alien.
This Alien separated this film from all of its campy, William Castle monster-of-the-week predecessors.
Why? What made it different?
Giger’s Alien was and is Evil.
Giger was born and raised in post WWII Europe. This means that he came of age in the (literal) fallout of that era, with the ever present possibility of total annihilation by nuclear devastation. Add to this that he was very much a child of the 60s- 20 years old in 1960, and as such deeply devoted to the principles of personal autonomy in all forms, but especially sexual and religious.
Giger’s friend Friedrich Kuhn died of alcoholism in the early 70s, and even more significant, his on-again off-again girlfriend Li Tobler committed suicide in 1975. These deaths, especially Tobler’s, strongly influenced the works collected into the book presented to Ridley Scott in 1978.
Mix these elements together (absolute personal autonomy + depression from deaths & suicides of close friends + the darkness and nihilism of war + the ever present specter of nuclear holocaust) and you have the Alien.
Giger’s source material was supposed to be bleak, confrontational, and depressing. It was also intended to be blasphemous. I have intentionally avoided naming Giger’s collected works because I don’t think it should be read or viewed. In my youth I was curious so I sought it out. Giger directly depicts Satan, and in some images shows the Evil One manipulating Jesus. Some of those images were adapted into material used in the Alien franchise, most notably James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens.
Also of note- the film franchise downplays the anti-Christian aspects of Giger’s material, but the comic books acknowledge it. Dark Horse comics released a sequel to Aliens (Outbreak and Nightmare Asylum) and in these works, a religious cult develops around the Alien. Worshippers call it their Messiah and sacrifice themselves to it, leading to the destruction of life on the planet earth.
The comics further explore the Alien’s nature. They’re parasitic, in that they cannot reproduce without using a host body. They are murderous, in that their reproduction kills those hosts, and in that the adult Alien is hostile to anything that is not Alien. The Aliens seek to spread their biology and subvert the natural order of whatever environment they encounter. They have a simple hierarchy, with drones serving a queen. They don’t create literature or art. They don’t develop technology. They’re more like bees than humans. Murderous, acid-for-blood bees, that is.
The Alien, in its original form, was intended as a manifestation of evil. We all know that art is open to interpretation, so I know the fine points can and will be debated, but what can’t be debated is the fact that the Alien is not a good, wholesome thing. It points at the darkness in the human soul, and directly depicts some of the worst aspects of our nature.
And this is the monster at the heart of Scott’s 1979 film. He chose well.
That might sound odd, considering my opinion of Giger’s work. But Giger’s material is only one component of Scott’s film. Look at it in its entirety. A crew of average, everyday blue collar workers are sent to complete a hazardous mission by their Corporation. They Corporation does not tell the workers that they are classified as disposable, or that this mission will likely result in their deaths. The workers complete the task and in doing so bring a murderous monster onto their ship. The monster kills all of them- except for Ellen Ripley.
At multiple points through the plot, Ripley strives to survive and at the same time, does not give up on her crew-mates. She tries to save them all, and continues to fight even after the Alien has killed everyone else. She values life– placing it above the cargo she was charged to protect, and more than the ship she was given to use. She values life and fights evil. She never compromises.
This is a direct imitation of Christ’s life and ministry. Jesus fought evil and never compromised, even after he had fasted for 40 days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). And even when the evil was proposed by St. Peter, the first among His followers. (Matthew 16:21-23)
The Christian theme is even more obvious in Aliens which introduces the character of Newt. Newt is a little girl, around 10 years old, that Ripley and a platoon of Marines find on an Alien infested space colony. Towards the end of that film, the Aliens abduct Newt, and Ripley goes to war to rescue her. Seriously, she gathers all the weapons she can hold, and seeks out the biggest, baddest Alien of them all and fights it head to head to rescue a child. The plot makes it clear she didn’t have to do so. At that point in the movie, the Aliens were doomed. Ripley could have abandoned the girl and left, and Evil would have died along with the girl.
Ripley risks her life to save a child from Evil. This is a fulfillment of Matthew 18:1-6, where Jesus praises children and commands His followers to protect them. It is also consistent with CCC 2261, which reads in part
…The deliberate murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere.
And CCC 2270:
Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.
True, Newt is an older child in the film, but Ripley still risks her life to save her. That’s still profoundly pro-life.
So Scott’s 1979 Alien and Cameron’s 1986 Aliens are both pro-life films, should you choose to view them as such. Ripley re-presents Christ to viewers, in seeking to defend the innocent and even offering her life to do so. And the incorporation of Giger’s material heightens this fact. The Alien is Evil. Ripley is Good. And as the Greatest Story Ever Told goes, Good protects the innocent and defeats Evil.
Michael Bertrand
Michael served as a priest in the Episcopal church for 11 years. He and his family were received into full communion with Catholicism in 2016. He currently works nights at an 30 day Alcohol and Other Drugs (AoDA) rehabilitation clinic in Monona, Wisconsin.