Alien (1979)
Directed by Ridley Scott
During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed.
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What critics compared Alien to
The evidence presented regarding details George Lucas may have stolen for “Star Wars” is unconvincing, though O’Bannon, concept artist Chris Foss and Giger did go on to collaborate on “Alien,” extending a relationship that started with “Dune.”
Jodorowsky enlisted an elite group of artistic mercenaries, including French comic book artist Moebius, who illustrated the storyboards; Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and artist H.R. Giger; and sci-fi paperback illustrator Chris Foss.
Conceived as epic and outrageous, the Paris-based international production was to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali, with music by Pink Floyd and production designs by the great French comic-book illustrator Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius), science-fiction paperback cover artist Chris Foss and Swiss painter H.R. Giger (later famous for "Alien").
In the case of Jodorowsky, elements of his “Dune” can be found in any number of movies — from “ Star Wars ” to “ Alien ,” which O’Bannon wrote — that changed movie grammar forever.
He hired Dan O’Bannon, who would later write a little something called “Alien,” to handle the visual effects.
Instead, he credits Jodorowsky with assembling a visionary cadre of "spiritual warriors," a crew of misfit geeks who together went on to create Alien with Ridley Scott, and whose groundbreaking concepts for Jodorowsky's film found their way into countless sci-fi classics.
Whenever director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. isn't blurring the line between referencing and replicating John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing (itself a remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 film The Thing from Another World), he's borrowing liberally from Ridley Scott's claustrophobic Alien.
Almost thirty years since the release of John Carpenter's superb 1982 sci-fi thriller "The Thing," it remains one of the great so-called "monster movies" in cinema history, comparable in sheer mastery and creepiness to Ridley Scott's 1979 classic "Alien" with one key location change (Antarctica rather than outer space).
All three "Things," along with everything from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to "Alien," owe their central ideas to the Depression-era story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr. There's a rock-solid notion in that tale, that of an alien being able to take over a human body and cause pure paranoia in the populace.
…shocker a la "Alien."
It's Alien meets 30 Days of Night when a crew of Americans and Norwegians dig up something otherworldly in the Antarctic ice.
Though it pays “creative homage” to a number of films (the opening credits sequence is practically lifted from the 2014 version of Godzilla ), it owes its biggest debts to Alien , Aliens , and the collected works of Paul W.S. Anderson, the sci-fi deathtrap B-movie maestro behind Event Horizon and the Resident Evil films .
Too many films have drawn inspiration from 1979’s Alien over the years, including countless C-list rip-offs not worth mentioning.
Following up on his 2014 brainteaser The Signal , William Eubank's Underwater lets viewers know what they're in for from the start: If its title treatment's faint echo of Alien doesn't tip you off (with letters materializing onscreen out of order against a ghostly expanse), a credits sequence heavy on newspaper-headline exposition may remind you of recent Godzilla reboots, in which humanity's hubris awakened terrible creatures from the deep.
There’s no doubt that Kristen Stewart has been styled to evoke Weaver as Ripley in Underwater , to the point of collapsing the character’s various incarnations into one package: She’s got close-cropped hair (shades of Alien 3 ), carries a big gun (á la Aliens ), and spends a significant amount of time running around in her underwear (as in the climax of Alien ), all while projecting the same terse toughness as her inspiration.
While my initial impression was a combination of Aquaman’s The Trench and Alien, and yes, there are some nods to the latter franchise, Underwater brings so much more to the table.
"Life" is destined to be eternally compared to Ridley Scott's 1979 space-set, face-hugging horror classic "Alien," and the parallels between them are decidedly apt.
Life’s shapeshifting monster owes a debt to Ridley Scott’s Alien — what self-respecting sci-fi creature feature doesn’t — but as is the case with the best tributes, director Daniel Espinosa and his team steal rather than borrow.
The claustrophobic International Space Station setting is immediately reminiscent of Alien, its plot verges closer and closer to Gravity as it continues, while the patter between its characters and use of scientific jargon recalls The Martian.
And while it shares more than a few commonalities with Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien, director Daniel Espinosa’s thriller gives audiences a seriously cool monster and a sinister twist on a survival-of-the-fittest theme.
How do you pay tribute to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic “Alien” while breathing fresh air into a long-collapsed narrative lung?
Alien’s infamous John Hurt chest-eruption scene is matched for gruesome relish if not shock value by a sequence in which the creature force-feeds itself to a key character.
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The most obvious comparison to Pitch Black has to be Alien since both begin with freighters drifting in space with crew in hypersleep, a leading lady as captain, and survivors fighting for their lives against a bloodthirsty alien creature.
Pitch Black is Alien without the distraction of real characters.
At second glance, this is still true, but you notice something else: Despite its rip-offs (mostly of "Alien" ), "Pitch Black" delivers not only on thrills and suspense, but on artistic direction and clever plotting.
If at times it is reminiscent of "Alien", "Mad Max" or of countless hilarious straight-faced science fiction B-movies, "Pitch Black" takes itself as seriously as it needs to and embraces every cliché it comes across like an old friend.
Alien, the now-classic 1979 Ridley Scott sci-fi epic, is possibly cinema’s most cloned movie.
Incorporating disparate genre archetypes (the movie mixes "Swiss Family Robinson" with "Ten Little Indians" by way of "Alien"), "Pitch Black" provides a thrill ride from its chaotic opening scenes (in which a transport vehicle is forced to make a crash landing) to its surprising outcome.
Bodies and cave-scaling implements drop with loud cracks; portentous music telegraphs just about every surprise coming; the sightless goo-covered "crawlers" who live in the cave recesses (but who occasionally go topside to hunt) drop abruptly, with "Alien"-like grace, into the camera frame.
That general synopsis will probably sound like a very generic horror movie premise, and though director Neil ("Dog Soldiers") Marshall's influences are somewhat obvious, but veering more towards thrillers like "Deliverance" and "Alien" than out-and-out horror movies.
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
But the best way to illustrate the smashing success of The Descent may not be to compare it to a classic like Alien -- though this movie surely will earn a spot in the pantheon next to it -- but to last summer’s very similar, if desperately unscary, The Cave .
There have been a lot of comparisons to "Alien", but "Descent" is more like "Jaws" in a cave.
The final sections of The Descent which manage to evoke Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and even Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are bloody, brutal and tense.
…creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
Over its 115-minute journey, “Annihilation” steers a course from a brooding “Arrival” science fiction vibe into a kind of tense sci-fi/horror hybrid like Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” then finally to a kind of heady, hardcore science fiction of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” Stanley Kubrick variety.
Based on Tallahassee author Jeff VanderMeer�s novel, Annihilation on the surface is a dead-ducks mission like Alien with the Ripley factor times five.
Annihilation is a sci-fi film that works well as a straight-up horror film, much like Alien used a sci-fi premise to deliver the scares.
Annihilation follows the familiar form of science fiction horror found in films from Alien to The Cloverfield Paradox , with a cast of characters in isolation, slowly being picked off by a force they don’t understand.
Wearing its influences far too readily on its sleeve – virtually every spaceship movie made in the last fifty years, from Alien to last year’s far superior but criminally-underrated Life – The Cloverfield Paradox, despite a strong opening and a satisfactorily-downbeat ending, has little of real interest going on for the bulk of its running time.
It’s not a monster movie, it’s not a character study of a diverse group working together to accomplish a scientific goal that could potentially bring about world peace, it’s not straight-up horror (the terrifying bits do seem inspired by Alien which is pleasant to report), and it’s not a time paradox mind-bender; it’s all of the above and fails at them all.
A hodgepodge of everything from Alien to Event Horizon to an episode of “Fringe” to Back to the Future to an H.P. Lovecraft story to the classic 1983 television movie The Day After , to call this effort a mess would be massively understating things.
To name only a handful: Poltergeist, Evil Dead 2, Moon, Another Earth, Alien, Event Horizon and even Alien Resurrection seem to receive clear callbacks.
Essentially: Blame science, and take a page or three from the scripts for Alien, Event Horizon and Pacific Rim.
Manically riffing on “Sunshine,” “Interstellar,” “Alien,” and then “Event Horizon” in a mad dash to obscure the fact that the film looks like a basic cable episode of “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Cloverfield Paradox” illustrates the dangerous cognitive dissonance that can result from a painfully derivative movie about a situation where anything is possible.
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Many of the land-dwelling critters evoke the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise, which is unsurprising given that Pitch Black started life as writer-director David Twohy's script submission for Alien 3 at a time when Sigourney Weaver was refusing to reprise her role as Ripley.
There is an early scene in which he leaps into a pool in order to hide from flesh-hungry beasts and must maintain frozen posture while submerged in order to not aggravate the piranha-like eels that are slithering around him, inspiring a moment of tension that harkens us back to some of the best nail-biting moments of the “Alien” pictures.
An efficient, if decidedly derivative, space-set monster movie in the "Alien" vein, 2000's "Pitch Black" proved a small sleeper success, just about doubling its no-frills $21-million budget and creating a star out of Vin Diesel (who would go on to make " The Fast and the Furious " the following year).
Alas, here comes “Riddick” to follow 2000’s dull “Alien” rip-off and 2004’s dull sci-fi/action epic that makes less sense as it goes.
The first hour of the film is spent with Riddick in full survivalist mode as he tries to figure out a way past a poisonous hydra monster that looks like it was ripped straight out of Alien.
Swap a solar eclipse and Alien clones for a rainstorm and giant water scorpions, and the films bear more than a passing resemblance.
Their not-too-well visitor ups and dies, but not before a giant worm-like creature exits his body a la "Alien" (from a body orifice, rather than bursting from his stomach).
"Dreamcatcher" is mildly entertaining for a while; think "Stand by Me" meets "Alien," with a soupçon of "Starship Troopers" tossed in.
If you've seen any of the "Alien" movies, as King clearly has, you don't have to be told what's coming next.
The creatures (aptly dubbed “shit weasels”) feed off their human hosts from the inside out, using one’s backdoor as an entrance and exit; the film’s acute sense of the terror derived from penetration and expulsion—farting is used as ominous foreshadowing—is reminiscent of Alien.
A plot element lifted from "Alien" -- extraterrestrial invaders using humans to incubate their wormlike larvae -- jumps straight into a "Dumb and Dumber" gambit: Two guys find one of the worms in a toilet and try to keep it captive by sitting on the john.
In opposition to this lot is Col. Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), who, in a blend of Men in Black, Outbreak, and X- Files, has been secretly chasing aliens with his secret team of soldiers for 25 years, and whose solution to the residue they leave on human beings, a red stain nicknamed Ripley (after Alien), is to destroy all the residents of any given community whom the aliens have visited and "infected."