In 2024, fans remember the 45th anniversary of the release of one of cinema’s great classics: Alien. A critical and box office phenomenon, the sci-fi horror film introduced us to one of the most feared, disgusting, and iconic monsters in cinema, as well as unforgettable sequences and a prominent female character, Ripley, who made Sigourney Weaver a star.

The plot and profit

With a script by Dan O’Bannon, inspired by a story between him and Ronald Shusett, in the 1979 film, we follow the seven-person crew of the space tug Nostromo, whose return mission to Earth is delayed when they receive a mysterious transmission from a nearby moon, interrupting their trip. As spaceship company policy demands that they heed the call, the crew explores the moon to find the source of the signal. In the process, they discover that it is not a distress message, but a warning. There is no escape and the return home turns into a fight to survive a deadly alien after it invades the ship and attacks one of the crew.

The original cast is made up of big stars: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto, and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Visual Effects, among other awards.

The enormous success went beyond influencing several similar works, Alien ended up becoming a successful media franchise of films, books, video games, and toys. It won three sequels – Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997) – a crossover with Alien vs. Predator and Alien: Romulus will soon hit theaters.

The connection to Dune

Interestingly, in one way or another, the entire creative team was involved with the film adaptation of Dune, a film that only hit theaters in 1984, five years after the phenomenon that became Alien.

The idea for the film came from a college project, at the University of Southern California. Student Dan O’Bannon made a science fiction comedy film, Dark Star, with director John Carpenter and concept artist Ron Cobb where the story included an alien who was the comic relief. Somehow, Dan finished the work to rescue the alien concept and use it in a serious plot, with touches of horror. Horror in space was still an unexplored field and as Dark Star planted the seed, he knew the dramatic potential of a “small number of astronauts” dealing with something devastating.

The screenwriter worked on 29 pages of the script that included what became the opening scene of Alien, at the time still called Memory, in which the crew receives a signal from a mysterious planet and decides to investigate. During this period, Dan O’Bannon still didn’t have a clear idea of who or even what the alien antagonist would be like, but he was on his way. He stopped the project for a while precisely to adapt the book Dune for director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

After six months in Paris and the shelving of their proposal, the screenwriter returned to thinking about Alien, especially because he now had a visual proposal for it, influenced by what he saw from the engravings of Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, and Jean “Moebius” Giraud. At this point, Memory had already been changed to Star Beast, only becoming what it ended up with – Alien – after admitting that it was the word that appeared most in the script and that it should be the name of the film.

Ultimately, the script became a kind of compilation of several ideas from other sci-fi films, including the legendary scene of the alien embryo that explodes one of the astronauts after sticking it to his face.

Alien would never have been produced if it weren’t for the space craze started by Star Wars in 1977 and the studios were eager to explore more of the universe. Walter Hill was the original director, but his unfamiliarity with the sci-fi genre and other commitments prevented his commitment. Peter Yates, John Boorman, Jack Clayton, Robert Aldrich, and Robert Altman, but they ran into the same problem. In the meantime, publicist Ridley Scott won good reviews for The Duelists and was hired, creating detailed storyboards for the film that proved to be the right name for the project. Ironically, the success of Alien put him into the development of Dune for a long time, but even he didn’t finish the script. But it’s more of a connection between the two stories.

Ripley: iconic and innovative

Obviously, a character that is just his surname and in the 1970s was not created with a woman in mind, right? If today Ripley is considered one of the greatest characters in science fiction films, she is certainly one of the most important female protagonists in history. And we must thank the brilliance of director Ridley Scott, who since joining the project decided to have a woman as the protagonist. In one fell swoop he created one of the most popular monsters of the seventh art and challenged the system and the “tradition” of having men lead science fiction, action, and horror works.

Another brilliant idea by Scott was to determine that his protagonist could not be an actress that the public would recognize immediately. The strongest name he considered was that of a still-beginning Meryl Streep, but as she was experiencing the drama of the death of her partner, actor John Cazale, she ended up not being in the film. With that, the team went in search of their Ripley, testing Veronica Cartwright (who remained in the cast, but with another role) and found the virtually unknown Sigourney Weaver, at the time 28 years old, on the Broadway stage. She was born a star.

Ellen Louise Ripley is the only character, besides the Alien, to have appeared in all four films, novels, comic books, and video games. Archenemy of the Alien, she is one of the most fascinating heroines in cinema.

A new stage for Alien

The prequel Alien: Romulus hits theaters 45 years after the original film, on August 15th. In the story, a group of young space colonists explore the depths of an abandoned space station and come across the most terrifying life form in the universe. We know this is just the beginning of the nightmare.

Now that it is tradition to have women leading the adventure, we will have Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) in the lead role, and she is joined by David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wulĺ, directed by Fede Alvarez

Can they recover the prestige of the franchise? After the original, only the 1986 sequel, written by James Cameron, was as successful. Seeing how Cailee also maintains the tradition of the female hero in space. Ripley’s shadow, we know, is not easy to deal with.

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