Watch It! The Terror from Beyond Space siometime. It’s by noted sf writer Jerome Bixby (responsible for the original story It’s a Good Life, upon which the Twilight Zone episode of the same name was based – the one with Billy Mumy as the Boy Who Can Do Anything, who puts people out “in the cornfield”. He also wrote the final script for Fantastic Voyage and several interesting yet forgotten SF movies, as well as a couple of episodes of the original Star Trek.
Alien basically rips off the plot of It!, but not as intelligently, and adds a bunch of ill-considered and not completely working plot elements. The many hands on the script show – originally it was going to be “Mother”, the main computer that was siding with the Alien against the crew, but later it was Ash the Android (whose nature and even the existence of such androids) was not at all properly prepared for. Later Ash’s siding with the Alien was retconned into the nefarious actions of The corporation (later named Wayland-Yutani). It’s normal for concepts in a franchise to evolve and gain detail as time goes on, but this one is extremely sloppy.
It’s not that I think everyone must love the movie. A nuanced understanding of some of its plot flaws, thinking that it has elements that are “not completely working,” makes sense to me. It’s the absolutist statements, like saying the setup “does not hold up to the slightest scrutiny,” or that “the scenario is constructed solely to make the audience jump and not think about it,” that strike me as obviously wrong.
Well quite. The crew of the Nostromo were not swashbuckling space pirates, fearlessly traversing the interstellar void, laser-cutlass in teeth. They were on a space tug hauling a refinery.
They were purposefully put in a situation that they’d never experienced, with a creature of incredible abilities, that they clearly weren’t well trained or equipped for (no guns at all?), and which was purposefully made worse by malevolent forces within and without.
How well would a modern container-ship crew deal with an equivalent situation? Questionably at best I suggest.
When I worked at the animal shelter, a co-worker was sent to the urgent care clinic for a bite wound and a drug test. He had seen the cage with the “DANGEROUS DOG” sign on it, doubted the sign’s veracity, and embarked on a scientific experiment consisting of sticking his hand into the cage.
When characters in movies do dumb shit, it does not break my suspension of disbelief.
When they’re outside the ship in their spacesuits you can see that some of them have sidearms strapped to their side. I don’t think any of them mention the possibility of using it against the alien due to it’s acidic blood though.
It’s hard to tell and I don’t think there’s any scenes where they really bring attention to it. There’s a still photo of Kane with his pistol drawn before he examines the egg but that scene didn’t make it into the movie. But, yeah, they’re ill-equipped and not at all trained for dealing with the alien that has an outer layer of protein polysacchardes with a funny habit of shedding their cells and replacing with with polarized silicon.
While O’Bannon happily acknowledged stealing “from everyone”, the only thing you can really say Alien rips off from I!TTFBS is that the action happens on a spaceship. The idea of a murderous alien from a derelict craft attacking a small group of people was already done in the 1951 Thing From Another World.
And clearly you differ from a lot of people in what is and isn’t ill-considered. The plot elements that were introduced - the spacers being truckers rather than explorers, the parasitoid nature of the creature, the lone survivor - are all improvements that work.
But really, the fact that you think you need to explain in detail to this crowd which episode of TZ the It’s A Good Life one was, is perhaps the most telling part of that whole post.
Alien Monster gets aboard a spaceship and starts killing off people, moving about through the (ludicrously large) air ducts and picking them off one by one. The monster is too big and strong to attack directly, so they try various strategems to get rid of it. These fail, sometimes subverted by the crew itself (unintentionally, in the case of It!) Eventually the remaining members of the crew get rid of it by putting on space suits and opening the hatch.
Articles in the magazine Cinefantastique pointed out the obvious similarities when the film came out (although their readership was doubtless aware f it). Screenwriter Jerome Bixby reportedly considered suing, but didn’t.
There’s some truth to O’Bannon’s statement that he borrowed from other places. The idea of a crashed alien spaceship with a giant skeleton aboard was used in the Italian film Planet of Vampires. The idea of an alien implanting embryos inside a crewman’s body was used in the Roger Corman quickie Night of the Blood Beast. But by far the bulk of the plot comes from It!
The notion of a monster loose aboard a space ship seems to have first been used by A.E. Van Vogt in the short story Black Destroyer, but its plot is wholly different from It! or Alien. A slightly later story by Van Vogt – Discord in Scarlet, features an alien implanting its eggs inside a living astronaut. Both stories were combined with others to form the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle. But O’Bannon struck me as more of a movie guy, and I think he got huis ideas from the movies named above rather than from Van Vogt.
That’s … not actually what got rid of the xenomorph in Alien.
“Some truth” - as in, a lot of it.
The plot of Alien and the plot of It! are very different, unless you reduce the plot of both to “Alien gets on board spaceship and murders people” and ignore all the elements like what kind of ship, how the alien gets on board, why it’s on board, who lives, and how it’s finally killed.
More importantly, while Alien isn’t by any stretch an “idiot plot” as RC claims, nobody raves about the movie because of its brilliantly intricate plotting. The plot is serviceable but not really memorable: after having seen it twice, I don’t remember much of the details. We’re not talking Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects or Gone Girl or some other movie where the plot’s the star of the show.
What made Alien stand out wasn’t the plot, or the acting, or the intricate characterizationm, all of which were fine just fine. It stood out because the setting, the mood, and the monster effects were so effective. The monster design especially was not copied from It!, and if folks remember just one thing about the movie, that’s it. And I don’t know if It! had anything like the claustrophobic dread that Alien had, but the snippets I’ve watched on Youtube don’t suggest that it did.
I choose to believe that O’Bannon’s most direct influence (re: an alien loose on a spaceship) came from a scene he himself previously wrote and acted in.
Starlog and Cinefantastique and other fantasy film magazines at the time were pretyty unanimous in drawing the comparisons. Cinefantastique devoted many pages to it, in fact.
If you didn’t think the small, classically cylindrical spaceship in It! didn’t have the claustrophobic feel attributed to Alien (which took place in a freakin’ HUGE ore-processing ship), then I think we were watching different films.
I, too, thought of Dark Star when I saw Alien. . In fact, when I first saw the first trailer for Dark Star (which didn’t show you that it was a dark comedy) I thought that it was going to be a serious monster-loose-aboard-a–starship movie. it turns out that all the scenes with the “Beachball” with Pinback (played by O’Bannion" were actually “padding” that was shot after most of the rest of the film in order to bring the length of the originally student film up to a commercial length. I have to admit that I love them, though.
