Alien

The context: the Nostromo and its crew

Alien takes place in an unspecified future in which commercial space travel is a routine reality. The commercial towing vessel Nostromo is hauling a mineral refinery and a payload of twenty million tons of ore back to Earth. The seven-person crew travels in hypersleep and is automatically awakened when the ship's systems detect a signal requiring attention.

The power structure aboard the Nostromo establishes from the outset a hierarchy that will prove crucial to the development of the conflict. Dallas is the ship's captain, a pragmatic man whose authority is subordinated, without his full knowledge, to the hidden directives of their employer, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Kane is the executive officer, second in command, a curious and relatively impulsive man. Ripley, the navigation officer and warrant officer, represents from the beginning the crew's most cautious and rational perspective, being the voice that applies safety protocols with the greatest rigor. Ash holds the position of science officer, a reserved and apparently neutral character whose true nature constitutes one of the film's central revelations. Rounding out the crew are engineers Parker and Brett, more interested in their wage bonuses than in the mission's objectives, and navigator Lambert, whose emotional reactions to dangerous situations contrast with the analytical detachment of other team members.

The inciting incident: the signal from LV-426

When the Nostromo's systems intercept what appears to be a signal of unknown origin coming from the planet LV-426, the crew is awakened from hypersleep before reaching Earth. The ship's central computer, affectionately called Mother by the crew, has determined that Company protocol requires investigating any signal of possible intelligent origin. Dallas, Kane, and Lambert descend to the planet to investigate the source of the signal, while Ripley, Ash, Parker, and Brett remain on board.

On the surface of LV-426, a hostile world battered by storms with an unbreathable atmosphere, the exploration team locates an alien spacecraft of colossal proportions and organic design. Inside, they discover the fossilized remains of a creature of unknown species, of great size, with its chest perforated from within, suggesting that something escaped from its body by violent means. Further below, in the hold of the alien vessel, they find thousands of organic-looking objects that turn out to be eggs. When Kane approaches one of them to examine it, the egg opens and a multi-legged creature — later referred to as a facehugger — leaps onto his visor and attaches itself to his face, rendering him unconscious.

The central conflict: protocol and an unknown threat

The crisis unfolds on two simultaneous levels from the moment the exploration team returns to the ship with Kane unconscious. Ripley refuses to open the Nostromo's airlocks, arguing that quarantine protocol requires keeping possible carriers of unknown organisms outside the ship for a minimum of twenty-four hours. This technically correct decision is overridden by Ash, who opens the airlocks and allows Kane and the creature attached to his face to enter. This moment establishes the first major internal conflict among the crew: the clash between Ripley's judgment, grounded in collective safety, and Ash's decisions, which respond to an agenda that remains hidden at this point.

On board, attempts to remove the facehugger from Kane's face fail: the creature has an extremely strong grip, breathes for Kane in a parasitic manner, and its blood is a highly corrosive acid that makes cutting it away impossible without damaging the ship. When the creature detaches on its own and appears dead, Kane wakes up with no apparent injury and the crew celebrates their relief with a shared meal. It is during that meal that Kane suffers violent convulsions and, before the terrified eyes of the rest of the crew, a small creature — the chestburster — tears through his chest and escapes into the depths of the ship.

With Kane's death and the certainty that a creature of completely unknown nature is loose on board, the central conflict is definitively established: the crew of the Nostromo must locate and eliminate the organism before it eliminates them, in an enclosed space from which they cannot escape, and with the growing suspicion that not all of their crewmates have the same interests at stake.