Alien

A space mining outfit on their way home to Earth is woken out of a deep sleep by an SOS message. They are required to respond, so they change their course for a distant planet. When they arrive, they move down to the planet's surface to discover the source of the beacon. They discover some exotic, abandoned alien spaceship, and an enormous, ancient corpse of a creature with its chest bursted out. Deep within the spaceship, they discover an alien's nest. When one scientist examines an egg, it opens up, and the creature inside attacks him. It attaches itself to his face, and becomes unremovable. The other two crewmen manage to get him back to the ship but Ripley the ship's second officer in command doesn't want them to bring him aboard because of possible contamination. But Ash, the Medical Officer, opens the doors anyway, and lets the victim in. They put him in the infirmary, and learn that the hatchling is controlling his breathing patterns. After a while, the hatchling detaches itself.

Before going back into cryonic sleep, the crew decides to celebrate the recovery. But during the celebration, the victim goes into panic, and starts writhing in pain. His chest starts to warp, and then it bursts open, and a snake-like creature slithers out.

They begin searching for the creature, but before long, it has grown into a huge monster that resembles a 7 foot tall lobster with sharp teeth and claws, and it hunts down the crew, one by one. Ripley and Ash are two of the last survivors, and Ash attempts to kill Ripley, but Parker manages to bludgeon him, revealing that he's an android. When they get Ash's head working again, he reveals that his mission was to bring back a living alien for the Company to study.

Before long, Ripley, and a cat, are the only survivors. She decides to set the spaceship to self-destruct, taking the alien with it. The countdown begins, and she hurries to the escape pods, with the cat in hand. The pod ejects, back to earth.

Character mistake: When Ripley interfaces with Mother for the first time and sees the special order, an instruction reads as "Insure return of organism" rather than "Ensure return."

More mistakes in Alien

Ripley: Did you ever ship out with Ash before?
Dallas: I went out five times with another science officer. They replaced him two days before we left Thedus with Ash. Hmm?
Ripley: I don't trust him.
Dallas: Well, I don't trust anybody.

More quotes from Alien

Trivia: Ripley abruptly yelling at Parker to "Shut up!" is not in the script. Fans and industry gossip have long speculated that this was Sigourney Weaver breaking character in frustration and she was in fact telling Yaphet Kotto to "shut up" so she can finish her lines. The sequels 'Aliens' and 'Alien 3' both feature scenes where one of the normally cooler-headed protagonists suddenly snaps at a ranting character to "shut up!" in apparent reference to this moment. (01:16:50)

TonyPH

More trivia for Alien

Question: A bit puzzled as to why Ash tried to kill Ripley by stuffing a rolled up magazine in her mouth when he could have strangled her in seconds.

Answer: I believe this was another subtle way for the film to depict that Ash was malfunctioning or at least not fully processing correctly and having problems. It was showing a brutal savagery to his motions as well as an artistic choice for the moment.

Quantom X

Answer: This is just one possibility among many, but Ridley Scott suggested Ash may have been developing latent sexuality that he was not equipped to handle through his programming, and perhaps not physically either; his use of a rolled-up magazine may have come about because he was not constructed with a penis (I had to stop myself from making a pun about "hardware").

TonyPH

I always wondered about this. It always struck me as a little Freudian. Also, notice the picture of the topless lady on the wall - an interesting detail when combined with the phallic paper.

Jack Vaughan

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