Panida brings iconic sci-fi horror Alien to the big screen

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s hard to overstate how influential Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien has been to the sci-fi horror/action genres, or filmmaking in general. The “haunted house in space” thriller was unlike anything audiences had ever seen when it premiered in theaters — and it’s worth mentioning that Alien came to the big screen only two years after Star Wars: A New Hope captured the imagination of tens of millions of moviegoers.

Space was all the rage; but, rather than a good vs. evil struggle “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Alien threw audiences into a grim near-future right in our stellar neighborhood — so close, yet so far away, with a roughneck crew on the deep space corporate freighter Nostromo prematurely waking from their cryo-sleep as a distress call is received from an alien vessel.

Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) gets his grumbling underlings whipped into shape to respond to the call, which is coming from a nasty looking planet below. None of them are soldiers or even particularly athletic or altruistic — all they want is to get their pay from corporate and get home to spend it. Along for the ride are Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Kane (John Hurt), Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Lambert (Veronica Cartwrigth) Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and the android Ash (Ian Holm).

Few sci-fi ensembles have ever been as iconic, nor faced a more inimitable nemesis in the Xenomorph — the universe’s perfect killing machine, whose grotesque yet elegant aesthetic came from the singular surrealist mind of the late-Swiss artist H.R. Giger.

On its surface, Alien is straightforward: a small group of people are trapped in an enclosed, hostile environment facing a lethal enemy that has them outmatched on almost every level. But in Scott’s hands — and in the hands of his actors — Alien becomes a masterclass in suspense, style and mood, while hinting at deeper philosophical questions about what makes a “perfect organism” in the unfathomable reaches of the cosmos.

As the android-of-dubious-motivations Ash says of the titular “alien”: “I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.”

Alien’s tagline may have been “in space, no one can hear you scream,” and that may be true, but the film can make you think even as you’re chilled by cosmic terror.

Sponsored by the Naples Wealth Management Group at Morgan Stanley, Alien will screen Thursday, Aug. 14 as a $5 movie at the Panida Theater (300 N. First Ave.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the film starts at 7 p.m. Get tickets at the door or panida.org.