The Perfect Organism

Hey, been slagging a bit on my updating duties, finals due left and right and such. Anyway, without further adieu, I present my humble homage to the greatest movie ever made. Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece, Alien.

Now, you can't just go and claim that a movie is the best ever without some kind of evidence to support your opinion. And no, "I just like it" doesn't count. As my readers may know by now, I'm currently enrolled at The College for Creative Studies, in the field of illustration. Now whether you're a fan of Alien or not, the film was highly instrumental in creating the field of illustration we now know as "Concept Art". In fact, I personally think that Alien single handedly created it. Now, of course, concept artwork was, or should've been, part of the process of every movie made. But never before, or after, in my opinion, has a film been so driven by the concept artists.

The first artist on board Alien was the incredible Ron Cobb, whose work really just speaks for itself. Cobb was a good friend of writer and creator of Alien, Dan O'Bannon, previously working with him on space stoner comedy Darkstar. Cobb was actually the one to conceive the Alien's now famous acid blood, in addition to all of his designs for the interior of the nostromo ship.

Next off, you have Moebius/Jean Giraud. Another amazingly imaginative artist, whose body of work is staggeringly immense. The amazing frenchman passed away earlier this year. Moebius also previously collaborated with O'Bannon on a comic called "The Long Tomorrow", which actually has the credit of being a major force in starting the whole genre of Cyberpunk. Blade Runner heavily borrowed from the comic.

And lastly, you have the demented swiss surrealist, H.R. Giger. Without his vision, Alien wouldn't have been the same film, and without Alien, the sci-fi movie genre, as it stands today, would cease to exist.

Alien is a movie completely driven by artists. Alien shows what happens when artists take control of a film. You get one of the most culturally significant films ever made, you get a amazingly cohesive design aesthetic, a film that's so modern that it doesn't fit in with any particular decade, and you get to see a movie whose impact has never been paralleled.

Can any other movie in history brag about movie goers fleeing the theater in terror in droves?

So, as it stands, without Alien, the career field I'm getting into may not have been the same, or exist at all. So, thank you Scott, Cobb, Giraud, and Giger, for one amazing film, for demonstrating to the masses who important concept artists are to the final product of a movie, and for countless amounts of inspiration.

Alien is © FOX
Artwork © their respective owners/artists.