Smoking on a space ship? Really?
Anyway, it was a pretty decent thriller movie. All along I thought that the alien was supposed to pop out of Sigourney Weaver’s torso. That’s what I have always been led to believe.
I liked the movie overall. It really was like a scary movie genre, and not so much sci-fi.
I haven’t seen the sequels. No spoilers please.
Nah, it’s Sigourney Weaver’s torso that pops out of her underpants. 
Glad you had good experience. You’re right that it’s more of a monster movie than a sci-fi movie. The second one is good but very different. I’m one of the few people in the world who really likes the third one and I think the three make for a very good trilogy.
The fourth one I think of as a “fun silly story that kinda takes place in the Alien Universe”.
Most people absolutely hate it, but c’mon it’s got Dan Hedaya and Michael Wincott!
Smoking on a space ship? Why not? The Nostromo wasn’t the Enterprise and the crew certainly weren’t fresh faced Star Fleet Academy cadets. Nostromo was a flying industrial site (oil refinery, iirc?) and the crew were blue collar factory drones.
Given the size of the ship and the fact that the crew was held in stasis most of the time, the smoke off a few ciggies doesn’t have enough impact on the life support systems to matter.
I’m happily surprised if only because any topic starting with “I saw classic movie…” almost always ends with “…I hated it and it was terrible”
As mentioned, Aliens is well worth watching but a genre departure from the first (horror to action) but is still an iconic film. Alien 3 was my first experience with crushing movie disappointment – I saw Aliens about a million times as a kid and was so excited when a new one was coming out. Bleah.
You can nitpick a ton of “space stuff” about the movies and likewise fanwank explanations for it. Ultimately it boils down to a spaceship giving a sense of isolation that you’re not going to get anywhere else as a horror (as opposed to sci-fi) setting. Even a ship at sea is still on Earth and you have airplanes and other ships and stuff that you don’t get out of the vastness of space.
And Leland Orser!
As I’ve remarked on this Board before, I prefer the 1950s Jerome Bixby movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space to Alien. The plot makes a lot more sense, and Alien ripped off most of its plot from that film (but had a much better monster suit).
Nevertheless, they had smoking on board the ship in It!, too.
They also had firearms and grenades (!) on board the ship. And used them (!!!) For some reason, people had no problem with firearms on board a space ship back then – Robinson Crusoe on Mars had one. So did Robert Heinlein’s novel Rocket Ship Galileo. It boggles the mind. The last thing you want on a space ship is a device for rapidly making metal structurally unsound – never mind that they were necessary for the plot.
To my mind Aliens, James Cameron’s follow-up to the original Alien, is the best film of the bunch, and to my mind, the series ought to stop there. I wasn’t fond of the later entries (although the CGI aliens look a lot better, and they do look cool swimming in water). Little as I love the immediate sequels, I hate the two “Alien Vs. Predator” films with the heat of a thousand suns.
See, the Alien actually is just a metaphor for lung cancer. You didn’t pick up on that?
Thirty six years later, and I’m just now getting that.
The things I learn on the Straight Dope!
Thanks, lieu!
The Nostromo had a mixed gas atmosphere like the Earth’s. Smoking in it wouldn’t be that much of a no-no. And the cigs were probably rationed; it wasn’t like any smokers could make a dash to the corner store when they ran out.
Generally speaking, before Alien was made, space travel was antiseptic and sleek. Full of scientists and engineers and usually either military or science-based.
Alien treated these ships like freight trucks. Space travel was no big deal and space ships were dirty, full of blue collar workers and worked for a profit.
It really changed the paradigm for space movies. And that’s not mentioning the horror story (which is excellent) at all.
Actually, the movie that changed space travel from sleek and antiseptic to grimy and lived-in was Dark Star. You could argue that the film wasn’t widely released and had no big effect, but then Star Wars came along in 1977 and bulldozed the genre, giving us a lived-in future with beat-up hovervehicles and “piece of junk” spaceships. Alien came out two years later.
At the risk of sounding like a chauvinistic male pig, Sigourney was kinda hot. I just Googled her. She’s 65 and is STILL kinda hot.
I’m not sure what that says about me…
Why do we need to make this about you at all when it could be about Sigourney Weaver and how she looked in her space panties?
Don’t forget all the dripping, and leaking and steam escaping…that stuff shouldn’t happen on a spaceship.
That stuff shouldn’t happen on a space ship like the ones we have managed to build so far…and, technically, it wasn’t happening on Nostromo, either. *Nostromo *was analogous to the tractor portion of a tractor-trailer truck or to a tug boat. All that dripping and steaming was in the refinery. The refinery was a separate, self-contained unit that Nostromo was delivering. Oil companies today are known to have, shall we say, slovenly habits. Why would their future versions necessarily be any different?
You could fanwank that without giving yourself a headache - say the ship is old, and when it was built it took a lot more crew to run it (maybe before hypersleep was perfected or something). So there is a lot of room that isn’t needed. The dripping is just the air handler. Maybe that’s why they can smoke and have steam releases - there is so much air volume that the system doesn’t even notice.
Now all that unused volume is just perfect for aliens to hide.
This is deliberate, and something that most people who saw the movie later missed out on. At the time it was released, everyone in the cast except Weaver was an established star, which led people to believe that she’d be the red shirt who was just there to die first, and that the Last Man Standing (and of course there would be only one) would be one of the bigger names. So when each of the bigger names got picked off, one by one, it heightened the drama. Nowadays, though, most people know that Weaver was the star, and have forgotten the rest of the cast, so we expect her to be the survivor.
And what still thinking she’s kind of hot makes you, Leaffan, is a healthy heterosexual male (I think, unless you’re a healthy homosexual female). I mean, she’s obviously not as hot now as she was at the time, in that it’s now possible for her to actually register on a hot-o-meter instead of just pegging the needle, but yeah, she’s aged damn well.
Well, the Nostromo was damaged on landing.
Could be all the excess “environmentals” were a result of that damage.
I always just assumed that, in the future (or Alien’s future anyway) ships were being built in space as a matter of course and design specs changed based on the different needs and not having to launch it into space from Earth. So the Nostromo could not only be built heavier (thick walls that wouldn’t be damaged by a bullet for instance) but you’d want it to be since you have people hauling cargo around in there and don’t want everyone to die the first time someone gets sloppy with a forklift. Big ole heavy duty ships could withstand some sloppy engineering or lack of perfect maintenance (steam condensation, etc).
This is going back to my original comment about fanwanking but it does make some sense to me versus comparing space travel in that universe to today’s concerns about making every ounce count during a shuttle launch.
Here’s a really excellent and detailed article about typography and symbology in the movie Alien. Symbology as in the pictographs on the set, not the symbolism of the film. The tremendous amount of care taken in the set design helps make the film a classic.