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"I always think of space as being the great unknown," Goldsmith had said in an interview for 2004 DVD documentary "The Beast Within," "sort of an air of romance about it. And I approached ‘Alien’ that way ... I thought 'Well, let me play the whole opening very romantically and very lyrically and then let the shock come as the story evolves.’ It didn't go over too well." Goldsmith's original main title is a gorgeous cue that is indeed incredibly romantic, while still having an air of mystery, with a grand statement of his main theme, a far cry from the more obtuse and esoteric film version, which carries a more foreboding tone and uses wind and string effect influenced by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki originally intended to be used later in the picture. "I wrote a new main title, which was the obvious thing, weird and strange, which everybody loved. The original one took me a day to write and the alternate one took me about five minutes."

Where Scott and Rawlings agreed with Goldsmith however, was with the scoring on the alien planet and the discovery and subsequent investigation of the derelict ship. "It seems to play the DNA of some distant society," Scott remarked in 2004, and Goldsmith used his familiarity with acoustic and electronic elements to create that atmosphere, with the famous "alien wind" effect that was an Indian conch shell run through an Echoplex tape delay machine, which made the similarly haunting trumpet effect in his 1970 score for “Patton.” Once Scott heard the effect he began to ask for it in other cues, with it eventually ending up in the rewritten main title. Goldsmith used an array of intriguing instruments to create the sound for the alien and its world, including a didgeridoo and a serpent, a unique wind instrument that resembles a rather large snake, and the terror of the unknown world and the creature is elegantly brought across by these unusual sounds.

But when Kane is brought back onto the ship with the facehugger the music is literally brought back to Earth. For the scene where acid drips through the ship's decks after cutting the alien, Goldsmith wrote music for the scene twice—the cue was one of five re-scored—but both cues were rejected for a portion of his own 'Main Title' from the aforementioned “Freud.” This would happen again for the scene where Dallas is moving through the air vents looking for the alien; in that sequence three cues from “Freud” were cut together to form the score with all of Goldsmith's cue unused. While the cues were inserted by Rawlings and later bought by Fox, Goldsmith stated he had received letters saying "Starting to repeat yourself, eh?" As Scott and Rawlings continued, they used Goldsmith's score like library music and cutting and pasting where necessary to the point where only one or two cues are actually in the place in the film intended by the composer.

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