Alien

Alien shares one very specific device with today's first film: a crew member who is not human, whose true orders rank above the lives of the entire crew.

It connects to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the archive's 1968 slot. HAL 9000 must kill the whole crew to protect the mission; Alien's science officer Ash has orders to bring the organism back to Earth, and the instruction is explicit that the crew's survival is not a consideration. Eleven years apart, the most human-looking thing on board is never human in either film.

The second reason is genre. The archive holds eighteen films and not one horror film — the last entirely empty genre. Alien is the right film to close it with: it is both horror and science fiction, it was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2002, and it is generally credited with turning "science-fiction horror" into a recognised category.

The third reason is the thing most easily overlooked in the film: its protagonist is a woman, and the script never said so.

Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote every character as gender-neutral and stated it outright in the script: "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women." Ridley Scott initially imagined Ripley as a man; it was the producer Alan Ladd Jr. who asked why Ripley could not be a woman. The part went to Sigourney Weaver.

This draws a line to today's first film. In 1948, Spring in a Small Town sustained an entire film on a first-person female narration, which was highly unusual in Chinese cinema. In 1979, Alien let a character whose gender was never specified become one of the most famous survivors in film history. Thirty-one years apart, both films did the same thing in the same place: they handed the camera to a woman, rather than handing a woman to the camera.

商业拖船 Nostromo 正在返航。船上七个人，两千万吨矿石，一份按合同执行的运输任务。

然后，船上的电脑被一段信号唤醒。信号来自一颗没有名字的小行星，反复播送，不像是自然产生的。

按合同，遇到这种情况必须去查看。于是船长 Dallas 带着几个人降落到那颗星球上。他们在那里发现了一艘坠毁的巨大飞船——不是人类的。

船上确实有东西。他们带回了一件样本。

（这里不再往下说。）

It dirtied space first

After Star Wars broke out in 1977, 20th Century-Fox became interested in science fiction and pulled the only spaceship script on the desk — Alien — into production. And what Alien did was the opposite of almost every space film of its moment: it did not shoot space as spectacle. It shot space as a workplace.

The ship is called Nostromo, after Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel; the escape shuttle is the Narcissus, after Conrad's 1897 novella. It is not a flagship but a commercial tug. And the crew are not explorers but workers employed by a company — Roger Ebert's review seized on exactly this: these are not adventurers but people hired by a company to haul twenty million tons of ore back to Earth.

That choice determines everything. When the creature appears there is no fleet to call, no hero to step forward — only seven tired people working to contract, and a set of company orders none of them has read in full.

Giger: a transplant in design history

The creature was designed by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, working from his own painting Necronom IV. He was responsible not only for the organism but for the planetoid's surface, the crashed alien ship, and all four stages of the creature's life cycle. The human side of the design was handled by Ron Cobb and Chris Foss: Cobb drew the ship inside and out, invented an industrial symbol system (the Semiotic Standard), and coined the company name "Weylan-Yutani" — taken from the British Leyland car company and its Japanese neighbour, implying an Anglo-Japanese commercial alliance. The spacesuits were ultimately based on costume sketches by Moebius (Jean Giraud), realised by the costume designer John Mollo.

The adult creature's head was built separately by Carlo Rambaldi, with roughly 900 moving parts. The scene with the giant alien corpse (later known as the Space Jockey) was enormously expensive, and Fox did not want to pay for a set used once — so only one wall was built, and the corpse was seated on a rotating turntable.

The chestburster: one take, and the cast was not told

It is one of the most famous passages in cinema, and its most famous element is that the actors' reactions are real.

The shot used an artificial torso packed with blood and viscera, with John Hurt's head and arms protruding from beneath the table. The cast was told a creature would burst out, and had seen the puppet — but was not told that pressurised pumps would spray fake blood in every direction. The jet hit Veronica Cartwright directly; she fell and became hysterical. Tom Skerritt later said: "What you see on screen is real. She had no idea what was happening." The shot was done in a single take.

The design was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion; the writer Dan O'Bannon said the idea of the chestburster was connected to his own experience of Crohn's disease.

Restraint: it barely shows you the creature

This is the film's real achievement beyond its technique. For most of its running time the alien is not on screen — it is in the sound of the ventilation shafts, in the blip on the motion tracker, in the faces of the people describing it. When it finally appears it is mostly fragmented by strobe, steam and darkness.

Ridley Scott described his own film as "the Texas Chain Saw Massacre of science fiction", stressing horror rather than fantasy. He also did one more thing: the original script ended with the ship exploding and Ripley escaping in the shuttle. Scott conceived a "fourth act" — Ripley confronting the creature aboard the shuttle — and used it to negotiate extra budget and additional shooting days from Fox. The third act of every science-fiction horror film since starts at that negotiating table.

Modest on release, a landmark afterwards

Reviews on release in 1979 were mixed. It has since been repeatedly reassessed and is now regarded as one of the most influential science-fiction and horror films ever made:

• Best Visual Effects at the 52nd Academy Awards (1980)
• Three Saturn Awards: Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction (Ridley Scott), Best Supporting Actress (Veronica Cartwright)
• The Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation; the BAFTA for Best Film Music (Jerry Goldsmith)
• In 2002 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry for its "cultural, historical or aesthetic significance"
• American Film Institute, 2008 "10 Top 10": No. 7 in science fiction