A social media post gave movie fans a whole new way to look at Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic “Alien,” and once you see it, you can’t ignore it. One X user posted a theory suggesting that the film looks completely different when viewed from the xenomorph’s perspective, drawing a series of surprisingly convincing parallels to the beloved action film “Die Hard.”
“From a xenomorph’s perspective, ’79 Alien is basically Die Hard,” the post read. “He’s all alone. Everyone’s trying to kill him, including a guy with a beard. He’s crawling through air vents. It’s a Japanese company, and all we know is that it’s Christmas.”
Why does comparison actually work?
The links are more compelling than they may seem at first glance. In “Die Hard”, John McClane finds himself alone inside the Nakatomi Corporation building, crawling through air ducts and trying to outmaneuver a group of enemies while everyone tries to take him down.
In “Alien,” the xenomorph finds himself in a remarkably similar situation, alone aboard the Nostromo, crawling through vents and fighting a crew determined to hunt him down.The company’s connection holds up, too. The Nostromo was a ship operating under the umbrella of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a British-Japanese partnership, while the Nakatomi Corporation in “Die Hard” is a Japanese corporation. Both stories then unfold within an enclosed space owned by a company with Japanese connections.
Then there’s the matter of the bearded opponent. In Alien, that role falls to Arthur Dallas, played by Tom Skerritt. In “Die Hard” he appears in the role of Hans Gruber, brilliantly brought to life by Alan Rickman. From a xenomorph’s perspective, Dallas is as big an obstacle as Gruber was to McClane.
Seeing the monster as a hero
What makes this post particularly clever is the question it raises about perspective. When the Nostromo crew first encountered the alien ship, it was their interference with the eggs that set everything in motion.
The alien who eventually arrived aboard the Nostromo was, to some extent, simply reacting to a series of events he did not choose. By the time the crew began pursuing it, the creature was alone, outnumbered, and fighting just to survive.Recasting the xenomorph as the hero of Die Hard instead of a monster doesn’t change what “Alien” is, one of cinema’s most brilliant exercises in sustained dread, built on the simple but terrifying premise that in space, no one can hear you scream. But it offers a reminder that every story looks different depending on the eyes of the person through which you see it.
