5) “Alien” – “Ash Is A Goddamn Robot!”
Even though it’s obviously a sci-fi movie and set in the distant future, it doesn’t really cross your mind for most of “Alien” that there could be robots in this world. No one really talks about them, even when the shit goes down. And then suddenly, the film drops a huge bombshell, as science officer Ash (Ian Holm) goes crazy and tries to kill Ripley. Parker (Yaphet Kotto) comes to the rescue and ends up decapitating the man, revealing that he’s actually a milk-blooded synthetic, or, as Kotto’s character puts it memorably, “Ash is a goddamn robot!” It actually makes perfect sense, and never quite feels like cheating: Holm’s brilliant performance, totally controlled and a little shifty, lays the groundwork without needing too much set-up, and once more the brilliance of the design and the effects work makes you totally buy in. Synthetics would come to play an increasingly crucial part across the franchise (yay for Bishop and David! nay to Winona Ryder’s boring Cal!), but Ash, and the jaw-dropper of a reveal (and the interrogation scene after), remains the high-water mark.
4) “Aliens” – The Dropship Crash Aftermath
This is a slightly misleading header — the moment when a xenomorph kills the dropship that’s meant to pick up Ripley and the marines, seeing it crash and leaving them stranded, is fine, but it’s a plot device more than anything. But it’s what happens afterwards that makes it so memorable, with two different characters dropping probably the two greatest lines in the franchise’s history. First, we get Bill Paxton’s whiny surfer-dude marine Hudson yelling, despairingly, “Game over, man, game over!” (it’s all the more impressive that it’s endured, given that Paxton delivers it in the background of a shot as a throwaway). Then, barely five seconds later, little Newt (Carrie Henn), gives an ominous warning: “We’d better get back, cos it’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night, mostly.” It’s a brilliantly written line, capturing a child’s syntax in a way that often feels precocious in other hands, but it’s Henn’s deadpan delivery that makes it indelible. A shame, then, that she decided not to pursue acting and is now a teacher.
3) “Alien” – The Creature Revealed
H.R. Giger’s creature is now as much as part of cinema history as Rhett Butler, The Wicked Witch Of The West and King Kong, but imagine seeing Ridley Scott’s film for the first time, without trailers that had spilled the beans as to what the actual creature looked like. You might have had an idea, from the glimpses of Giger’s aesthetic in the facehugger and chestburster, as to what to expect, but when poor old Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) goes in search of ship’s cat Jones (who unblinkingly watches the carnage that follows with the cold eyes of a psychopath, like all cats), comes face to face in the engine room with the full-sized creature, you still likely can’t believe what you’re seeing: this sleek, jet-black, slime-dripping thing with more teeth than you have skin cells, that looks honestly like nothing you’ve ever seen before. We’d get better looks at what would become known as the xenomorph over time, but none quite as terrifying as this.
2) “Aliens” – “Get Away From Her, You Bitch”
Almost uniquely among the big sci-fi franchises, “Alien” is almost uniquely downbeat. It mostly involves characters being horribly murdered by a remorseless, inexplicable killing machine, and even if characters live to fight another day, they’re often dead by the time the next one rolls around. Even an act of self-sacrifice is undone. So it’s important to cling to a moment of triumph, and few action movies have air-punching moments quite as great as Ripley taking on the Alien Queen at the end of “Aliens.” The creature having snuck onto ship after the destruction of the colony and torn Bishop (Lance Henriksen) in half, Ripley is firmly outmatched, and with surrogate daughter Newt looks like a goner. But she evens the odds by stepping into a power loader (set up in Chekhov’s gun fashion in the first act) and staring the giant beast down as she screams, “Get away from her, you bitch,” a line so great it was straight-up stolen by J.K. Rowling in the final Harry Potter. As the now-bisected, but still online, Bishop goes on to say, “Not bad, for a human.”
1) “Alien” – “What’s The Matter Man? The Food Ain’t That Bad.”
It was close between these top two final scenes, but there could really only be one winner, and it’s one of the biggest shocks in movie history. Midway through “Alien,” Kane (John Hurt) has had the facehugger removed, and seems to be in pretty good health, all things considered. He’s laughing and joking at dinner with the rest of the crew, until he starts coughing and spluttering. And then spasming, in a way that suggests he really, really isn’t ok. You figure that he’s not well, but you really couldn’t imagine what was about to happen: a burst of blood from his chest, and then a decidedly phallic alien erupting from his chest and scurrying off. It’s an astonishing, horrifying surprise, but it’s the details that make it so memorable: the easy, relaxed banter between the crew; Yaphet Kotto’s joking line as Hurt starts to cough; attempts to put a spoon in his mouth to stop him biting his tongue, Harry Dean Stanton still with a cigarette in his mouth; Hurt’s horrific screams; the shocked silence after that first burst of blood; the utterly aghast, almost tearful look on Tom Skerritt’s face. It’s been copied many times, not least in the rest of the franchise, but it’ll never be done as well as this.
Even with only two genuinely great movies in the series, there are still plenty of other sequences that nearly made the cut. Among the ones that came close were: the slow, meditative appearance of the titles at the beginning of “Alien,” Ripley throwing the creature out the airlock in the same film, Vazquez’s explosive sacrifice in “Aliens” in the air-duct sequence, Newt being taken by the Queen in the same film, the unsettling opening in “Alien3,” the grisly death-by-fan of Murphy (Christopher Fairbank) in the same movie and Ripley’s dive in the molten metal at the end; David working out the engineer’s ship works in “Prometheus,” and the attack by the neomorphs in the wheatfield in “Alien: Covenant.”
Any others we missed? Let us know your favorite “Alien” scenes in the comments.