Alien explained (1979)

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What is Alien about?

Alien is pretty punk rock. It uses the sci-fi setting to frame the story of a murderous alien as commentary on corporate capitalism’s exploitation of laborers and the abandonment of morality in the pursuit of profit. References to the story of Cain and Abel as well as a Joseph Conrad novel reinforce these themes of good versus evil and the corruption of the spirit. At its core, it’s a story of independence and rebirth, as Ripley goes from someone beholden to corporate structure to a full-blown rebel warrior who has faced death incarnate. And won.  

Movie Guide table of contents

Cast

• Ellen Ripley – Sigourney Weaver
• Ash – Ian Holm
• Parker – Yaphet Kotto
• Lambert – Veronica Cartwright
• Dallas – Tom Skerritt
• Brett – Harry Dean Stanton
• Kane – John Hurt
• Alien/Xenomorph – Bolaji Badejo
• Mother (voice) – Helen Horton
• Written by – Dan O’Bannon
• Directed by – Ridley Scott

The ending of Alien explained

Recap

The end of Alien begins with the revelation that the company, Weyland-Yutani, had prioritized bringing the alien back and that the crew was expendable. We get the showdown with Ash. That leads to the remaining trio—Ripley, Parker, and Lambert—agreeing to set the ship to self-destruct then evacuate via the ancillary shuttle, the Narcissus. It doesn’t go to plan, as the alien takes out Parker and Lambert. Ripley boards Narcissus, with Jonesy the cat, and they launch. The Nostromo explodes and Ripley believes she’s safe. But there’s the xenomorph just trying to take a nap. 

Ripley wakes the alien up by using a console to blast gas on it. She watches it crawl out from its makeshift bed then inexplicably turns around. When she looks back, it’s right behind her. She opens the hatch directly to space and the vacuum sucks the monster nearly out of the ship. It hangs on but Ripley shoots it out. Except it still finds a way to cling to the ship then starts trying to climb back in through one of the rear thrusters. So she puts the ship into drive and that finally causes the creature to let go. Off into space it floats. 

Finally safe, Ripley logs the final report for the Nostromo. “The other members of the crew, Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing-off.” She and Jonsey go into cryosleep. 

Meaning

Narratively speaking, Alien is pretty straightforward. An unnamed company hires a crew to run the Nostromo from the planet Thedus back to Earth. Somehow, the company knows planetoid LV-426 is home to a ship with a special life form. It plants Ash aboard the Nostromo as a Science Officer in order to ensure the crew lands on LV-426, encounters the alien, and brings it back to Earth. Ash plays dumb the whole time. Except the company underestimated the deadliness of the xenomorph. Ripley finds out about the secret mission, that Ash is an android (synthetic), then, ultimately, defeats the monster. That’s it. 

Thematically, there’s a bit more. The Nostromo had an AI system officially known as MU-TH-UR 6000, aka Mother. That’s a bread crumb. With that in mind we should look for other details that connect to the idea of motherhood. And what do we find? The facehugger lays a larva in the stomach of a host. A little while later, the new xenomorph explodes out from the torso. It’s a violent twist on pregnancy and birth. There’s even a line of dialogue where Ash calls the alien “Kane’s son.” That’s two more crumbs. 

Mother was originally supposed to protect the crew of the Nostromo. The AI’s main responsibility is managing the ship when the crew is in cryo. They literally trust it with their lives. But the order from the company prioritized the life form over the crew, explicitly stating the crew was expendable. Twice, characters turn to Mother for help. First, Dallas, then Ripley. Both times they feel abandoned. This parent-child relationship culminates with the scene where Ripley tries to stop the self-destruction procedure. 

In this story, Ripley isn’t a mother-figure. She’s a child. So is the xenomorph. And they embody different values. Ripley prioritizes life. Which is what we see with her trying to follow procedure earlier in the film when she refused to open the airlock to bring Kane on board. It may cost Kane his life but it would have saved the rest of the crew. She also makes sure to rescue the cat. Ripley embodies a positive humanity. Then you have the xenomorph. It’s human-like in its build, a biped. But seems to be the embodiment of death and negativity. It and Ripley are on opposite ends of the spectrum. 

That brings us back to the line about the alien being Kane’s son. In the Old Testament, Cain and Abel were the first children of Adam and Eve. The story goes that God favored Abel so Cain slew his brother. It’s the “first” murder. So Cain is often symbolically associated with evil. 

So the end of Alien isn’t just about a human versus an alien. It’s about good versus evil. But it goes a level deeper. After the crew wakes up (looking like newborn babes), they break their fast. The conversation quickly turns to money. Parker and Brett spend most of the early portion of the film worried about their contract, their bonus, not doing work they won’t get paid for, etc. Eventually, once the alien is loose, they stop worrying about such things. It becomes about survival. And what they’re trying to survive is the company’s precious cargo. 

So the xenomorph embodies evil but the film goes further and ties it to corporate capitalism. And the way capitalism doesn’t value human life. We see the direct effect company policy has on crew chemistry, on morale, and, ultimately on survival. It’s a movie that defamiliarizes labor exploitation. With this in mind, you can read Mother shifting prioritization from the crew to the alien as a commentary on the effects of capitalism on society. Corporate interests corrupt the systems that we trust to help us, to protect us, to guide us.  

Ripley “kills” Mother to set herself free. Then conquers the embodiment of evil corporate interests. That makes the end of Alien really about loss of innocence in a capitalistic society and the crisis between humanity and profit. 

The alternate ending 

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ridley Scott explained his alternate ending to Alien. 

This is how it would go: Ripley would board the shuttle but the alien is still on the ship. She escapes. Ship explodes. The end. 

For obvious reasons, Scott said that was flat and didn’t work. So they came up with the idea that the alien would be on the shuttle with Ripley. Then things got kind of gnarly. Ridley: “I think she hits the buttons and the alien holds onto the door, she harpoons it, it makes no difference, it comes forward and it slams through her mask and rips her head off… Then I cut to the desktop and the alien’s hand comes in and goes [mimics typing]. Then in a perfect mimic, mimics Dallas’s voice saying, ‘I”m signing off. Hopefully they pick me up.’”

That’s a far more shocking and cynical ending. Definitely the glass-half-empty version of events. 

The themes, message, and meaning of Alien

Corporate capitalism’s attack on humanity

When you zoom out and look at Alien from afar, the story is essentially: a corporation chooses business interests over the lives of its employees. It’s a very common story that could be told in a thousand different ways. For example, a mining company is told there would be an earthquake in the next week. Instead of shutting down the mine until the danger has passed, they don’t tell their employees and have them keep going into the tunnels. Then an earthquake happens and 50 people are trapped. 

Or a shipping company offers a crew triple pay to sail across the ocean, despite a raging hurricane, because a mysterious package needs to be delivered to Puerto Rico and it can’t be flown. Lightning strikes the ship. It burns as waves snap the hull. 20 sailors get swept away. Three make it to a liferaft, with the package. The ocean throws them all about. But they make it through the night and the next morning the sea is calm. Two of them eat the third. Then one of them eats the other. The lone survivor gets rescued. Except the rescuers are pirates who take the package then sink the raft with the survivor in it. They open the package and its an urn. Cut to the CEO receiving a call from an eccentric billionaire who demands to know where their father’s ashes are. The CEO says the ship sank. The billionaire says it’s ridiculous that his father was afraid of flying, but, whatever, at least the ashes got close to Puerto Rico. No one cares about the 23 lives lost. 

Ideally, the company would have informed the crew of the risks. It would have provided appropriate gear. And compensated them for their risk and the company’s reward. Instead, the company plants an android among the crew to ensure the alien makes it onboard. No one knows what’s going on and what danger they’re in. And when things go wrong, the AI running the ship is supposed to prioritize the alien over the crew. Beyond that, we’re told the food is awful. And it seems the crew has to pay for everything they eat. 

With this in mind, the xenomorph becomes this embodiment of how corporate capitalism preys on and exploits laborers. As Ash describes it: “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” 

Capitalism and families

It’s one thing to have a powerful AI on board a ship that’s supposed to assist the crew. We see that in 2001: a Space Odyssey with HAL 9000. HAL manages all facets of the ship. Which is why it’s horrifying when the AI has an existential crisis and tries to eradicate the entire crew. It’s become a bit of a trope. The difference in Alien is the name of the AI. Mother. A name like that is not a coincidence. Especially when paired with other references to parenthood. 

In 2001, HAL’s breakdown was in the context of humanity’s relationship with technology. The film’s first chapter establishes the discovery of rudimentary technology (using a bone as a weapon for hunting and self-defense). The second chapter jumps forward in time and shows humanity’s mastery over technology. Then the third chapter with HAL is about coming into conflict with technology. This thing that has aided us has advanced so far it can become a foe. 

In Alien, Mother’s abandonment of the crew is in the context of the Weyland-Yutani company saying the crew is expendable, bringing back the alien specimen is the only thing that matters. Ideally, you would expect a mom to reject such an order. “The crew is expendable? No way! They’re my number one priority.” But that doesn’t happen. Mother stops offering support, even when Dallas and Ripley ask for help. 

So there’s more to Alien than just the exploitation of the work force and putting profit over human lives. The Mother character putting corporate interests over family opens up conversation about the relationship between capitalism and domestic life and the way in which parents prioritize work versus their children. Here we are, almost 50 years later, and we’ve seen America descend further and further into a “live to work” attitude. So it feels pretty ahead of its time, even if it’s a small part of the larger dystopian dynamic. 

Coming of age and independence in a corporate world:  

The AI being named Mother creates the symbolism that the crew are like the children. The first scene reinforces this as the entire crew wakes up, almost naked, and the room is completely white. There’s an innocence typically associated with newborns or toddlers. 

But Mother shifts her concern from the crew to the alien. We’ve discussed how the alien is symbolic of evil and how that extends into an association with corporate mercilessness. So you have two entities associated with the company. One, the parent-figure, the other a pseudo-sibling that was “born” from a fellow crew member. Early in the film, Ripley was the one sticking to codes and operating procedures. She was by the book. A good kid. But she loses her innocence along the way and is forced into the role of the rebel. To the point where she “kills” her mother then defeats her corrupted “sibling”. And in so doing rejects the wishes of Weyland-Yutani. When she gives her final message, it serves as a kind of death of the old Ripley, the one who was a child of the company. And it marks her independence from the corporate world. 

Interestingly, Ridley Scott’s next movie also focused on an abandoned child committing parricide. Except in Blade Runner it’s a “son”, Roy Batty, killing the father.  

Why is the movie called Alien?

The original title was actually Starbeast. From Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter): Well Starbeast is one of those titles you think of and then you throw them away. I was running through titles and they all stank, I didn’t like any of them. One morning at three o’clock, Ronnie’s apartment, I’m typing away, writing dialogue and the characters are saying “the alien” this and “the alien” that. Suddenly, that word, “alien”, just came up out of the typewriter at me. I said “Alien, it’s a noun and it’s an adjective.” I said “Yes, that’s it. I have the title.”

Ron Shusett [co-writer of the story]: It’s simple. It’s one word. And no one’s ever used it. And it never changed from that moment on. No one ever tried. The title stuck and that was amazing to us…

When Alien came out, sci-fi horror wasn’t really a thing. In 1958, there was It! The Terror from Beyond Space, a pure B movie. And 1965 had the Italian Planet of the Vampires. There was, of course, the terrifying HAL sequence from 2001 (1968). And the psychological tension of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). Jaws came out in 1975 and pretty much reinvented horror. 

So Alien was also en vogue in the sense that it was brief and punchy, especially relative to the more laborious titles of the previous decades. And also served the purpose of telling people “Hey, there will eventually be an alien.” That makes the audience a bit more willing to sit through the long-ish build up to the xenomorph. The chest burst doesn’t happen until 56 minutes. And the first visual of the xenomorph is about 67 minutes. That’s more than halfway through the film. If it was called something like The Last Voyage of the Nostromo then people might easily lose interest. 

Starbeast also had that promise of something ferocious. But it sounds like a boss fight from a Final Fantasy video game. Alien has that timeless elegance that just sounds right.   

Important motifs in Alien

Nostromo

In the original script, the ship was called, for some reason, Snark. After O’Bannon and Shusett sold the script, the new producers, David Giler and Walter Hill, re-wrote a bunch of stuff. In the final shooting script, the ship is now called the Nostromo. It turns out, that’s due to Ridley Scott. 

Ridley Scott’s first film, The Duelists, was based on a Joseph Conrad story called “The Duel”. Alien was the next film that he did and he brought some more Conrad influence. If you look at the shooting script, it even has an epigraph from Conrad. Quote, “We live, as we dream—alone.”

Nostromo was Conrad’s 10th book. He had already written his most famous works, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Nostromo’s the main character, an Italian guy living in a fictional version of Colombia, in a city called Sulaco. He’s this larger than life figure that everyone loves and respects. There’s this political subplot where one government could bring peace to the region but revolutionaries threaten that peace. 

Nostromo hides a bunch of silver that the revolutionaries try to seize to help them with the coup. And then rides through the mountains and brings a general who defeats the rebels. This leads to Sulaco becoming its own independent state. Nostromo should be a hero, right? Eh. Everyone kind of moves on and he becomes bitter. 

Remember that silver? It turns out everyone believes it sank into the ocean when the revolutionaries came after Nostromo. But he had managed to bring it to a nearby island and bury it. Now, he sneaks to the island and digs it up to fund his life. There’s a whole thing about Nostromo losing his way and being a lot more conniving, greedy, etc. It eventually leads to the former hero’s death. Sneaking around in the night, trying to dig up silver, he’s shot. The end. 

The most relevant bit for Alien is Nostromo’s relationship with wealth. Initially, he’s a decent, good person. A noble, inspirational figure. While money doesn’t corrupt him it is the source of his downfall. The arc is similar in Scott’s film. The ship is honest in the sense that the crew do what they were hired to do. But the whole thing falls apart when the company gets greedy and prioritizes the alien over the crew. The alien is the silver. Going back from it brings the whole thing to ruin.  

The word “nostromo” is Italian. It refers to a boatswain. Boatswains are pretty important. From Britannica: Before the Royal Navy was established, the term boatswain was applied to the expert seaman on an English merchant vessel. Each ship had a master, who was proficient in navigation, and a boatswain, who was second in command. The boatswain was responsible for the masts, yards, sails, rigging anchors, boats, and cordage. 

We see in Alien that Ripley is the one who is looking after everything and acting as second in command. Her official title was Warrant Officer. But here’s a fun fact from Wikipedia: In the U.S. Navy, the ship’s Boatswain is a Warrant Officer…

So the ship’s name characterizes Ripley and refers back to one of the main themes in Conrad’s novel. 

Saving the cat

The xenomorph murders everyone. It doesn’t value life. That’s a direct contrast to the humans who not only try to save one another but who also look out for Jones the cat. Ripley could have left the cat behind, but she goes out of her way to bring Jonesy onto the shuttle. That act of decency and humanity is what makes her so much more admirable than the corporate who would throw away the lives of the crew in order to secure the alien specimen. 

Ash

If we were to look broadly at Alien, you have the crew versus the company who wants to exploit the crew. Historically, that could lead to a standstill, because the laborers were in charge of production. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t work, nothing would happen. But in a sci-fi film, you’re able to look into the future and see how that dynamic can change. In this case, AI in the form of Mother and Ash actually manipulate the crew to essentially sacrifice themselves. Mother deploys the crew to LV-426. Ash breaks protocol and allows Kane back on board even though Ripley’s attempting to stop it. 

A human Science Officer may have followed protocol regarding Kane. Or warned the crew about what was happening. But Ash wasn’t human. He didn’t have a conscience. Meaning he was a perfect tool to undermine crew resistance and ensure the company got what it wanted. 

This feels very prescient. In the 18th century, machinery became much more prevalent and led to massive refinements in manufacturing. This industrial revolution went from the 1700s all the way through the mid-20th century. And then we got computers. And that changed everything again. Science fiction began to speculate heavily about robots and AI, especially in relation to the workforce. Sometimes they were just benevolent, lovable additions. Other times, they were HAL 9000 or Ash. 

We’re actually just now in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, listed these as characteristics of this new evolution: “…artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.” 

In 2020, Time magazine published an article titled “Millions of Americans Have Lost Jobs in the Pandemic—And Robots and AI Are Replacing Them Faster Than Ever.” One crazy paragraph: Now, as automation lets companies do more with fewer people, successful companies don’t need as many workers. The most valuable company in the U.S. in 1964, AT&T, had 758,611 employees; the most valuable company today, Apple, has around 137,000 employees. Though today’s big companies make billions of dollars, they share that income with fewer employees, and more of their profit goes to shareholders. “Look at the business model of Google, Facebook, Netflix. They’re not in the business of creating new tasks for humans,” says Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist who studies automation and jobs. 

While Ridley Scott wasn’t responsible for Ash, it is worth noting that his next film, Blade Runner, involved the plight of artificial humans (not androids) who became the primary workforce in hellacious off-world conditions. Not only that, decades later, Scott made Prometheus and formally connected the universe of Alien with the universe of Blade Runner by having the CEOs of each film’s evil company be friends. So this idea of labor exploitation and manipulation via technology is one that Scott has returned to over and over again, especially in these respective franchises. Ash is just a very early version of it.    

Questions & answers about Alien

Is Alien connected to Blade Runner? Are they set in the same universe?

Yes and no. Originally, not at all. They were separate stories written by disconnected authors.But because Ridley Scott directed both films and played a role in building out the worlds…things have gotten complicated. 

The first “major” crossover happened in 1999 via the Alien 20th anniversary DVD. One of the special features had bios for all the characters. The page for Dallas includes that he had worked as a Warrant Office for the U.S.C.S. Shusett, hired by the Tyrell Corporation. 

Eldon Tyrell is the guy in Blade Runner who invented the artificial humans known as replicants. His company seems to be the wealthiest in the world and he’s pretty much a god-figure.

In 2012, more than 30 years after Alien, Ridley Scott returned to the franchise with a prequel film, Prometheus, set in 2093 (versus 2122). In the Blu-ray extra (here we go again), there’s a visual of a message sent by Peter Weyland (of the Weyland-Yutani company). He says: 

A mentor and long-departed competitor once told me that it was time to put away childish things and abandon my “toys.” He encouraged me to come work for him and together we would take over the world and become the new Gods. That’s how he ran his corporation, like a God on top of a pyramid overlooking a city of angels. Of course, he chose to replicate the power of creation in an unoriginal way, by simply copying God. And look how that turned out for the poor bastard. Literally blew up in the old man’s face. I always suggested he stick with simple robotics instead of those genetic abominations he enslaved and sold off-world, although his idea to implant them with false memories was, well… “amusing,” is how I would put it politely. 

While the name “Tyrell” isn’t used, that’s all directly from Blade Runner. The Tyrell Corporation was in a pyramid-shaped edifice. In Los Angeles. And he had his head crushed by one of his own replicated humans. 

Blade Runner takes place in the year 2019. So there’s a huge gap between that and Prometheus. But Weyland’s character is older. So the timeline works. It’s just that all of the connections have been easter eggs that you can easily dismiss. It’s not like Blade Runner 2049 had a xenomorph. And Alien: Covenant didn’t have a replicant show up to fight the robot. So the connection remains more of a head cannon thing than something undeniably formal like when Predator 2 had the skull of an alien as a trophy on the Predator’s ship. Or, you know, the whole movie Alien vs Predator. 

Why was the cat in the locker?

Great question. There’s no direct answer. My best guess would be to blame Ash. He’s the one who was off designing the dumbest tracking device while the rest of the crew tried to get a grip after witnessing the whole chest bursting. He’s also operating on behalf of Weyland-Yutani and trying to bring the alien home. So maybe he put the cat in the locker in order to distract everyone and give the xenomorph time? Or some other reason. Or maybe he actually was trying to protect the cat from the xenomorph. Unlikely, but, hey, we can speculate. 

What is the “lucky star” song Ripley sings to herself?

Ripley escapes the Nostromo via the shuttle. But she finds out the alien is on board. When she’s getting ready for the final showdown, she sings to herself: You are my lucky star. You are my lucky star. You…lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky. Then proceeds to initiate combat with the monster. 

We have this from the Busy Beaver Button Museum: 

Written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown in 1935 for the MGM film, “Broadway Melody of 1936,” the song “You Are My Lucky Star” was released months before the film’s premiere to draw attention to the film’s production and stir up anticipation for the film’s premiere. This early version of the song, which was recorded by Lew Sherwood and the Eddie Duchin Orchestra, quickly became number one on the charts where it remained for several weeks. The song is used throughout the film, both vocalized by the main star, Eleanor Powell, and in instrumental segments when she is dancing. Other popular versions of the song were recorded by The Dorsey Brothers and Louis Armstrong, all of which were concurrent with the film’s release in 1935.

It was made famous again with the release of the 1952 film “Singin’ In the Rain” – this time as a duet between the movie’s stars, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds – and is probably the most well-known version. For the 1979 science fiction horror film, “Alien,” actress Sigourney Weaver had the idea for her character, Lieutenant Ripley, to be shakily consoling herself with the classic song’s lyrics when facing the alien head on during the film’s climax – a more literal take on the song and an intentionally stark contrast to its glittering Hollywood origins.

It’s especially poignant because in Singin’ in the Rain, it’s like…the climactic song that ends the movie when the two main characters finally acknowledge their love for one another. It’s the positive moment the entire audience is waiting for. Full of love and warmth. But in Alien, it highlights how alone Ripley is. There’s no one to sing with her. And there is no love. Just the antithesis of it. So it’s a nice callback to one of the more iconic films in movie history. 

Now it’s your turn

Have more unanswered questions about Alien? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!