Some thoughts on the movie Alien

[UnseenParticipant]

For entertainment, lately I’ve been watching movie reactions, and some of the best ones have been young or relatively young people watching Alien for the first time. I have some thoughts on their reactions and on the movie itself, too.

I’m going to assume that anyone here has probably seen the movie at some time in their life because we ar not the sort of people who live under a rock, or only watch comedies or rom-coms, or who find some movies too scary or disturbing to watch. So, hopefully this will stimulate a discussion.

First, a demographic observation. Younger audiences, while they like the movie, often comment on how “slow” it is. It’s like evolution of porn over the same period. Back when Alien was made, there was actually feature-length porn with plots and character development and in a 60- or 90-minute feature, there might be five or six sex scenes. In today’s porn, they can fit that many sex scenes into a 20-minute clip. Examples, of such movies, other than Deep Throat, were Behind the Green Door and The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Today, they often don’t even bother with titles. There isn’t even a plot.

So, the point is that today, the kids want to go straight to monsters and scares. The whole concept of building suspense seems lost on most of them.

Another observation is that they are amazed at how good the sets and effects were “back then.” Of course, all the effects in 1979 were “practical effects” like miniatures and in camera effects like these:

Shaky camera: Creating a sense of urgency or chaos.
Slow motion: Emphasizing movement or dramatic moments.
Timelapse: Showing the passage of time in a compressed manner.
Double exposure: Superimposing two images for a dreamlike effect.
Forced perspective: Making objects appear larger or smaller than they are.
Using filters: Adding color or light effects directly onto the lens.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects started playing a major role in movies a few years after Alien, with the movie Tron (1982).

Many people think that practical effects still often look better than the CG counterparts.

That said, it’s amazing that a movie made “back then” only gives away its age in two ways: 1) the aspect ratio of the film which was 70mm, not quite as wide as today’s typical widescreen movie; 2) the computer displays which are low-res with type so large it can be read off the screen from several feet away. While the aspect ratio is not much of a problem for the average viewer, the computer displays are laughable. Imagine, though, if Ridley Scott were to go in and update the displays to look more modern by today’s standard, which I think today’s technology could easily do, then the movie would like like it had just been made. Only if one knows how old the actors are (Sigourney Weaver is 74) would one be able to hazard a guess how old it really is.

Alien was Ridley Scott’s second film and both were met with critical acclaim, winning a variety of awards including an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for Alien, and award well-deserved.

All reactors comment on how terrifying the Alien creature is, and of course it was designed by the iconoclastic artist H.R. Giger (pron. GEE-ger) who specialized in creating images both disturbing and fantastical blending organic and mechanical shapes.  His alien creature had a mouth within a mouth that would pop out of the large-fanged main mouth to bite into, grab, and draw in its prey.

What made Giger’s creature all the more terrifying is how little you see of it. You only see the creature head-to-toe in the final moments of the movie. One sees glances of its head here and there seversl times and in situations where one can surmise it’s about the same size as a tall man, but beyond that one sees very little of it until the end.

Of course, one horror director (Wes Craven? John Carpenter?) said something like “All you have to do is throw a big scare into them somewhere in the beginning and they’ll be scared through the rest of the movie.” That’s a complete paraphrase, but I assure you it’s accurate.

The reactors notice some seeming anomalies that are apparent to anyone watching the movie. First, how does a creature that comes out of a man’s stomach about the size of a small ferret become the size of a human being in a matter of a day or less? And then, near the end Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is running from the Alien to get into the shuttle craft to escape and yet after leaving the main ship, she finds she’s sharing the shuttle with the alien. How is that possible?

I have a theory which you can only evaluate in case you have seen the movie. My theory is that two aliens somehow stowed away on the shuttle during their visit to the planet and returned to the main space craft along with the crew. One remained in the shuttle and the other found its way into the bowels of the space craft, starting to kill off the crew one-by-one. I don’t think any other explanation makes sense, unless you want to think that this creature could somehow grow to the size of a man in only a few hours.

For me, the biggest anomaly is that the crew on the ship has the benefit of Earth-like gravity and unlike the space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, it doesn’t create artificial gravity through centrifugal force.

For me, this remains THE definitive space-horror movie. It’s been aptly described as “as haunted house story set on a spacecraft.” Clearly, from the reactors I’ve been watching, it works just as well as it did back in 1979 (or was it 1980?) when I rented it on VHS and had to stop it halfway through so that I could try to get a night’s sleep. I finished it the next day during daylight hours and for several days after had to try to put it out of my thoughts in order to get some shuteye.

 

 

 

• This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  Unseen.

[UnseenParticipant]

One thing I forgot to mention about Alien is that was the first and remains one of the few space ship stories where the craft looks lived in and industrial with many scenes shot in cave-like low light. Compare with the well-lit spaceships in Star Wars and especially Star Trek.

[DavisModerator]

Totally, the alien is still utterly terrifying decades later.

[Author]

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