Read time:
After a long day of rat-killing—running errands, knocking out chores and generally getting things done, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Southern idiom—I kicked back in the recliner and rewatched the 1979 Alien last night, the whole thing in 4K, and found myself almost giddy at how beautiful it still is. After 47 years, that movie remains 100 percent pure eye candy.
The Nostromo, for those of you who don’t spend your spare time studying fictional spacecraft, is the enormous industrial towing vessel at the center of Alien—named after the title character of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo, an apt choice for a story steeped in commerce, exploitation and isolation. It carries seven weary commercial space truckers and a very bad surprise. The ship is still filthy and magnificent. The companionways seem to go on forever. The machinery looks as though it was borrowed from an oil refinery and somehow launched into space. You can almost smell it.
A brief warning to my regular readers: if you arrived here expecting one of my usual excursions into faith, theology, history or the troublesome business of trying to follow Jesus in a world that makes that considerably harder than it ought to be, you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. We’re going to space. More specifically, we’re going into the darker, steamier, more poorly lit corners of my geek life. I promise there is a point to all this. Eventually.
There was a time when I loved Alien so much that I spent several years researching its spaceship. Not a real spaceship. Not some obscure NASA project. Not even a particularly plausible spaceship. A movie spaceship. It was less sleek futuristic craft than interstellar tugboat, which was precisely why I loved it. The Nostromo isn’t merely a spaceship. It’s a visual feast of nooks and crannies, scrapes and dents, rust and oil stains, streaks and weathering. Nothing is pristine. Nothing looks newly installed. Even the machinery seems to have a history. Credit belongs to Ridley Scott and the design team who built a world that looked lived-in before a single character walked through it. They weren’t simply decorating a set. They were giving the Nostromo a past.
And I wanted to know what that past was.
I first saw Alien in 1979 at the theater, and then on VHS, courtesy of my local video rental store. Later I bought my first digital television largely so I could watch the 20th Anniversary DVD, with all its behind-the-scenes extras—a treasure chest of production photographs, interviews and glimpses behind the curtain. Naturally, I wanted more. So I watched Alien obsessively, stopping and starting the movie, studying backgrounds, comparing shots, trying to figure out where everything was in relation to everything else. I drew deck plans. I made notes. I tried to reconstruct the interior of the ship from the fragments the film gave us. I was doing forensic archaeology on a structure that had never been built. In other words, I loved that ship way too much. Which is how I know I am not completely cured.
In 1999 I launched a website called The Nostromo Files. Back then, behind-the-scenes information was scattered among a few books, magazine articles and whatever scraps could be dug out of the relatively primitive Internet. Nothing like the specialized wikis and databases that would eventually appear existed yet. So The Nostromo Files became an archive of sorts: a place to collect what information existed, catalogue it, compare it, and then occasionally extrapolate wildly about the universe in which this movie took place. And to provide links to other sites by geeks like me.
The site lived first on Yahoo! GeoCities, disappeared for a few years, and then returned in a WordPress incarnation until 2021. That is an embarrassingly long time to spend thinking about the interior of a fictional spacecraft that, in reality, existed only as a collection of sets, miniatures and clever redressing intended to imply a large, multi-level working spaceship.
I wasn’t running the Library of Congress for people who know what a Weylan-Yutani employee number means. I was a guy with a website and an increasingly elaborate collection of opinions about a fictional towing vessel. Yet the deck plans turned out to be useful—people playing the Alien tabletop RPG used some of them, and one of my plans wandered, uncredited but unmistakable, into that published project. I had dreams of writing a technical guide to the Nostromo, and a checklist I’d made previously for that came in handy for a deck plan project on a popular forum. I also researched and published an article about the movie’s computer graphics work, developed with help from two of the very men in charge of that piece of the production.
More valuably, I met some interesting people through the site: an Australian fan who’d go on to consult for the franchise itself, a gifted artist based in Reading, England, whose work later landed in major sci-fi properties, a fan from North London whose meticulous set plans could out-argue any production myth, and a Frenchman who built such astonishing replicas of the ship that a life-size “Big Chap” now lurks in his workshop. There was a Scottish fan whose writing on the production carried the zeal of academic rigor, more dissertation than fan post. And there was another Brit entirely, whose explorations of the film’s design, history and symbolism unfolded between treks for London cappuccinos.
Internet friendships have their own natural lifespan. Some continue, most gradually recede into memory. That is neither tragedy nor failure; it is simply how these connections tend to work across years and changing lives. I’m glad they existed.
One of the most rewarding things I did with the site was an essay series built around contributions from people I’d met online through our shared obsession. There were 14 essayists from the USA, Mexico, England, Canada, Spain and Sweden. Most of those pieces were thoughtful, personal and beautifully written. They reminded me that the interesting thing about a fandom isn’t necessarily the object of the fandom. It is the people who gather around it.
Fandom, like any other human enterprise, has its territorial moments. What begins as “Isn’t this cool?” can eventually become an argument over whose fictional hallway belongs where, which source outranks which other source, and who had the idea first. At some point I realized I was spending more energy than I cared to on making a fictional spaceship behave itself. I eventually lost interest in the whole thing, and by then there were dedicated wikis doing much of what The Nostromo Files had once attempted to do, only better and with far more people contributing. So I signed off and deleted the site. And that should have been the end of it.
It wasn’t.
Because in 2025, apparently having learned absolutely nothing, I created a placeholder website for a proposed resurrection: The Nostromo Files [Redux]. Yes. I did this. I even worked up plans for collaborating with another Alien fan who had a respected Facebook presence. There were ideas. There was a plan. There was the possibility of rebuilding the whole thing in a new form. And then, just like that, I lost interest.
Which is embarrassing only if you believe every project you begin must eventually become something. I’m beginning to think that isn’t true. Sometimes nostalgia is not remembering your mistakes. Sometimes nostalgia is reinstalling them. The problem with bringing The Nostromo Files back was that I didn’t want to resurrect it merely because I missed it. It needed to have some relevance to bring to the conversation. But that particular ship had long since sailed—the Internet had changed, and other fans had already built better versions of what I once tried to make. Questions of original content and how ideas travel on the modern web also gave me pause. Neither prospect particularly appealed to me.
So The Nostromo Files [Redux] remains a placeholder, which may be the most appropriate fate of all.
One of the things that struck me last night, seeing Alien in 4K, was how much I had once treated the movie almost like a historical document. I wanted to know how the Nostromo worked. I wanted its geography to make sense. I wanted to explain the unexplained. Then the high-definition restoration came along and, in a sense, turned on the lights. And there they were. The seams.
Hardcore Alien fans quite reasonably like to call the film a masterpiece. As a horror film, I have no argument with that. The atmosphere is magnificent, the creature is terrifying, the production design remains astonishing and the movie understands the value of making you wait for the bad thing to happen. But “masterpiece” sometimes carries another implication. Everything was perfect? Well, no. Watching the 4K restoration, they glared right at me. There was a time when these sorts of discoveries would have sent me straight to the keyboard. I would have captured the frame, compared the footwear, consulted production photographs and perhaps drawn a diagram showing the probable location of the Nostromo’s shoe locker.
I don’t do that anymore. Mostly.
Ridley Scott wasn’t making an engineering simulation. He was making a horror movie. He wanted the Nostromo to feel like a place where people worked. He wanted it dirty and cramped and industrial and oppressive. He wanted shadows, steam, dripping water, machinery and miles of corridors in which a creature could disappear. And he got exactly what he wanted. We don’t watch Psycho because we are worried about Victorian-style architecture.
There is something else I’ve learned since The Nostromo Files went into the great server farm in the sky. I used to think preserving every detail of something I loved was a way of honoring it. Maybe sometimes it is. But there is a point at which appreciation becomes dissection. I had stopped simply watching Alien. I was endlessly dissecting it. That is probably the moment when a hobby becomes work.
The deck plans were worthwhile. The website produced friendships. The essays gave people a place to share their own responses to a movie that meant something to them. Some of the work became useful to other people. I’m glad I did it. I just don’t need to do it again.
The Nostromo Files [Redux] can remain what it became: an idea that had its moment and then quietly went back into hypersleep. I rather like that. We don’t have to finish everything we begin. Some things are allowed to have been worthwhile without becoming permanent institutions.
I can watch seven exhausted people wake from hypersleep, follow them into the derelict, watch the bad things begin and finally watch Ripley confront the thing hiding aboard the ship. Not because everything is perfect. Because it isn’t. And maybe that’s the point.
The Files are gone. The Redux is dormant. The maps have been jettisoned. The fictional spaceship is still flying. And after all these years, I think I finally remembered the proper way to watch Alien:
Sit down. Turn off the lights. Stop worrying about the deck plan.
And simply enjoy the ride.