Science Fiction (SF) cinema warrants serious critical analysis. The genre thrives on terror, and society is full of fear-induced bigotry, intolerance and endless warfare.

By invoking fear, SF cinema can subvert viewers’ expectations and put sexism, racism and class warfare in stark juxtaposition. In a purely ideological context a violent, sexist narrative can become a profound expression of a generation that is terrified of the future which they are helping to create. Alien feeds off of those fears. Literally.

Alien was released in 1979, although it still feels chillingly contemporary. I never actually saw the film on the big screen; I was squeamish even then. My first exposure to Alien was via a video rental sometime in the mid-eighties.

I was unaware that Alien was considered a ‘feminist’ film. A virtual Alien cottage industry has sprung up around the film since the well-respected scholarly journal Science Fiction Studies devoted an entire issue to it back in 1980.

There are several recurring tropes presented in Alien:

1) it’s a feminist/humanist allegory; 2) a mothering fable; or 3) a Freudian/oedipal parable.

Take your pick. The story is loaded with visual metaphors, including birth, rape, motherhood, re-birth, gender role-reversal and female empowerment. There are far too many angles worthy of analysis in Alien to cover in the scope of this paper.

It must be noted that Ridley Scott, director of Alien, allegedly stated that the film “has absolutely no message. It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Scott’s comments have not deterred the number of critical analyses which Alien still garners in academic circles, however.

The research is copious and diverse.

Most scholars consider Alien a feminist film because of the gender-neutral culture it represents among the crew, where a woman can rise to the role of leader and be a hero: the sole survivor. But further examination reveals the film to be a far more complex, dark vision of the male’s anxiety in the face of feminism.

Alien sets up the conflict between the female protagonist and the “monstrous feminine” which propels the Alien series. Academic analyses of the film underscore the various themes that lead to feminist, Marxist, Freudian psychoanalysis and other readings within the context of a completely alien environment.

Most critics, scholarly and otherwise, ultimately conclude that Alien is a feminist film because of its representation of the vast cavernous spacescraft as a home to equality, where traditional gender roles have been eliminated.

The character of Ripley was originally supposed to be cast as a male in the original screenplay. The character that would later become one of the most enduring icons of female empowerment in SF cinema was inserted at a much later stage for the sake of the target audience [young males]. This is noteworthy.

With that simple act of gender-swapping, Ridley Scott converted a formulaic story of space-age horror into an incisive condemnation of contemporary gender politics. This dichotomy established Alien as one of the most politically progressive SF films ever produced. In the process, the film established the template for female protagonists to lay a claim to the patriarchal paradigm which still dominates the film industry today.

Much has been made of the final scene where Ripley calmly undresses in front of the camera while the hideous, phallic alien lies in wait. Some SF cinema scholars consider the creature to be “a potent expression of male terror at female sexuality,” but others find this scene ultimately problematic.

 Scholars disagree with an ideological denunciation of that scene as simply another exercise in conventional sexism on the part of the director.

But there’s something else lingering under the surface in Alien: fear. Not a fear of the indestructible alien, but the fear and anxiety of a future where sexual equality might lead to man’s downfall as the dominant sex.

What is ultimately revealed in Alien is the anxiety of a world where men are not fully in charge anymore.