261 Days of Horror, Day 24: Alien
Feb. 2nd, 2007 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiAlien. 1979. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Dan O'Bannon. Released by 20th Century Fox.
There are certain horror classics that transcend the genre. Films like Whale's two Frankenstein movies, Browning's Dracula, and Hitchcock's Psycho aren't just great horror movies. They're masterpieces that all moviegoers owe it to themselves to watch. Ridley Scott's Alien belongs on this list as well. I don't intend to cover more than one of these a month*, as these are such well-knownclassics that a traditional review is pretty much pointless. But films this good deserve at least some mention amongst all the crap I write about here.
Is there anyone who really hasn't seen this?
Okay, I'll keep the recap brief. The spaceship (space towboat, really) Nostromo gets a distress signal, and sends a few folks down to a planet to check it out. One of the crewmembers, Kane**, stumbles across a colony of strange looking eggs. As he stares at them, one of the eggs slowly opens, and a giant bug-like thing latches itself to his face!
Although Warrant Officer Ripley warns that Kane could carry an infection and shouldn't be brought on board, Science Officer Ash*** overrides her, and Kane, now in a coma with a giant bug on his face, is loaded onto The Nostromo. Attempts to remove the bug show that its "blood" is actually acid, and that it's so integrated into Kane's nervous system that removing it would kill him. Things look bad for Kane until suddenly, without warning, the bug falls off, apparently dead.
At dinner that night, however, Kane starts convulsing, and a tiny little alien creature bursts out of his chest and runs away! The members of the crew attempt to track the creature down with a motion detector, but between the narrow airshafts and the ship's cat, they have trouble finding it. But Engineer Brett does manage to track it down, for values of "track it down" that include "having a now full-sized alien bite your head."
Captain Dallas bravely enters the airshafts with a flamethrower in an attempt to kill the creature or drive it away from the rest of the crew, but he instead gets bravely eaten.
Ripley learns that the never-named Company for whom they all work actually wanted Kane to get infected, because they wanted an alien specimen. Oh, and Science Officer Ash turns out to be an android working for the Company, and he almost kills Ripley before Head Engineer Parker decapitates him.
Parker and Navigator Lambert head off to get some supplies, and Ripley prepares the shuttle for launch so that they can just blow up the Nostromo and the Alien. But the Alien kills Parker and Lambert. Ripley almost escapes, but then goes back onto the ship for the cat, and the Alien sneaks onto the shuttle while she does so. A small fight ensues, but Ripley uses a grappling gun and the vacuum of space to get the Alien outside the ship; she then nails it with the ship's engines. She settles down for a nice suspended-animation nap, confident that she'll never have to face any more aliens again.
Alien certainly isn't a masterpiece because of the plot. As others have noted, it's from the long line of monster/slasher movies that sees the cast members picked off one-by-one. The added element of corporate malfeasance, although certainly not as embedded in the filmgoing tradition, is the theme of practically every other movie of the '70s.
Part of why Alien works is that it rebelled against almost every mainstream filmed vision of the future that preceded it: it made the future bleak. Even the big screen dystopias -- Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, etc -- contained worlds filled with wonder (often in Technicolor), and the space operas filled with laser battles and lots of mingling aliens were as lively as '50s musicals. In the Nostromo, Alien gives us a cavernous ship that resembles a warehouse more than a sleek sci-fi Vehicle of the Future. We get minimal lights and amenities, because, well, why would corporations waste money on such things?
Of course, one can't discount H.R. Giger's incredible design for the Alien itself. Giger's vision has been so widely mimicked that folks take it for granted nowadays, but few creatures in film history are as well-designed and truly scary (that second mouth!) as the titular Alien.
And the solid cast -- featuring Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartright, Tom Skerritt, and (of course) Sigourney Weaver handle their roles without falling into the overacting trap that many sci-fi and horror actors step into. In fact, Weaver (a last-minute choice for Ripley) creates one of the great leads in horror movie history, taking the Final Girl archetype and shredding it****.
And the nature of the Alien itself -- a creature who emerges from a human host, making all its victims, essentially, other humans -- plays on the fear-of-self already found in the Body Snatchers movies, the zombie genre and in possession films like Rosemary's Baby. That theme might be recycled, but its use in a space setting is a major chunk of what subverts the "happy future" archetype, as we remain our own enemies even when we escape the planet.
All of this is brought together by the superb direction of Ridley Scott. His vision of a dark and dreary future (something he'd bring to his next film, Blade Runner, as well), as well as his sense that space and the unknown, no matter how much they might have to offer, are immensely terrifying, influenced dozens of future filmmakers, including, most notably, James Cameron. Dan O'Bannon's screenplay (supposedly extensively re-written by Walter Hill, and eventually the subject of an A.E. van Vogt plagiarism lawsuit) ) provides a good setting and cast of characters, and the gothic set designs of Ron Cobb and Jerry Goldsmith's fine score create the perfect environment of claustrophobia and fear.
I'm not a huge fan of overanalyzing the classics. If you haven't seen Alien, you need to see it, period. It's one of the most influential horror and science-fiction films of the last forty years. If you have, watch it again.
*In fact, my goal is to kick off each month with a review of a classic, and to finish the year up with one as well, giving us twelve of them (since Doom, the one I started January with, need not apply for "classic" status).
**Yes, this is one of many genre works featuring a character named Kane. And yes, it's an annoying trend. But it was fresher back then.
***Housewares.
****I'm still not sure if the cutting-room-floor scenes -- featuring Ripley and Dallas making love, and later her having to kill her alien-infested lover ---would have added or undercut her ability as an on-screen heroine. But for today's review, I'm looking at this movie based on the cut released by Scott and Fox originally, not taking deleted scenes from the DVD into account.
There are certain horror classics that transcend the genre. Films like Whale's two Frankenstein movies, Browning's Dracula, and Hitchcock's Psycho aren't just great horror movies. They're masterpieces that all moviegoers owe it to themselves to watch. Ridley Scott's Alien belongs on this list as well. I don't intend to cover more than one of these a month*, as these are such well-knownclassics that a traditional review is pretty much pointless. But films this good deserve at least some mention amongst all the crap I write about here.
Is there anyone who really hasn't seen this?
Okay, I'll keep the recap brief. The spaceship (space towboat, really) Nostromo gets a distress signal, and sends a few folks down to a planet to check it out. One of the crewmembers, Kane**, stumbles across a colony of strange looking eggs. As he stares at them, one of the eggs slowly opens, and a giant bug-like thing latches itself to his face!
Although Warrant Officer Ripley warns that Kane could carry an infection and shouldn't be brought on board, Science Officer Ash*** overrides her, and Kane, now in a coma with a giant bug on his face, is loaded onto The Nostromo. Attempts to remove the bug show that its "blood" is actually acid, and that it's so integrated into Kane's nervous system that removing it would kill him. Things look bad for Kane until suddenly, without warning, the bug falls off, apparently dead.
At dinner that night, however, Kane starts convulsing, and a tiny little alien creature bursts out of his chest and runs away! The members of the crew attempt to track the creature down with a motion detector, but between the narrow airshafts and the ship's cat, they have trouble finding it. But Engineer Brett does manage to track it down, for values of "track it down" that include "having a now full-sized alien bite your head."
Captain Dallas bravely enters the airshafts with a flamethrower in an attempt to kill the creature or drive it away from the rest of the crew, but he instead gets bravely eaten.
Ripley learns that the never-named Company for whom they all work actually wanted Kane to get infected, because they wanted an alien specimen. Oh, and Science Officer Ash turns out to be an android working for the Company, and he almost kills Ripley before Head Engineer Parker decapitates him.
Parker and Navigator Lambert head off to get some supplies, and Ripley prepares the shuttle for launch so that they can just blow up the Nostromo and the Alien. But the Alien kills Parker and Lambert. Ripley almost escapes, but then goes back onto the ship for the cat, and the Alien sneaks onto the shuttle while she does so. A small fight ensues, but Ripley uses a grappling gun and the vacuum of space to get the Alien outside the ship; she then nails it with the ship's engines. She settles down for a nice suspended-animation nap, confident that she'll never have to face any more aliens again.
Alien certainly isn't a masterpiece because of the plot. As others have noted, it's from the long line of monster/slasher movies that sees the cast members picked off one-by-one. The added element of corporate malfeasance, although certainly not as embedded in the filmgoing tradition, is the theme of practically every other movie of the '70s.
Part of why Alien works is that it rebelled against almost every mainstream filmed vision of the future that preceded it: it made the future bleak. Even the big screen dystopias -- Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, etc -- contained worlds filled with wonder (often in Technicolor), and the space operas filled with laser battles and lots of mingling aliens were as lively as '50s musicals. In the Nostromo, Alien gives us a cavernous ship that resembles a warehouse more than a sleek sci-fi Vehicle of the Future. We get minimal lights and amenities, because, well, why would corporations waste money on such things?
Of course, one can't discount H.R. Giger's incredible design for the Alien itself. Giger's vision has been so widely mimicked that folks take it for granted nowadays, but few creatures in film history are as well-designed and truly scary (that second mouth!) as the titular Alien.
And the solid cast -- featuring Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartright, Tom Skerritt, and (of course) Sigourney Weaver handle their roles without falling into the overacting trap that many sci-fi and horror actors step into. In fact, Weaver (a last-minute choice for Ripley) creates one of the great leads in horror movie history, taking the Final Girl archetype and shredding it****.
And the nature of the Alien itself -- a creature who emerges from a human host, making all its victims, essentially, other humans -- plays on the fear-of-self already found in the Body Snatchers movies, the zombie genre and in possession films like Rosemary's Baby. That theme might be recycled, but its use in a space setting is a major chunk of what subverts the "happy future" archetype, as we remain our own enemies even when we escape the planet.
All of this is brought together by the superb direction of Ridley Scott. His vision of a dark and dreary future (something he'd bring to his next film, Blade Runner, as well), as well as his sense that space and the unknown, no matter how much they might have to offer, are immensely terrifying, influenced dozens of future filmmakers, including, most notably, James Cameron. Dan O'Bannon's screenplay (supposedly extensively re-written by Walter Hill, and eventually the subject of an A.E. van Vogt plagiarism lawsuit) ) provides a good setting and cast of characters, and the gothic set designs of Ron Cobb and Jerry Goldsmith's fine score create the perfect environment of claustrophobia and fear.
I'm not a huge fan of overanalyzing the classics. If you haven't seen Alien, you need to see it, period. It's one of the most influential horror and science-fiction films of the last forty years. If you have, watch it again.
*In fact, my goal is to kick off each month with a review of a classic, and to finish the year up with one as well, giving us twelve of them (since Doom, the one I started January with, need not apply for "classic" status).
**Yes, this is one of many genre works featuring a character named Kane. And yes, it's an annoying trend. But it was fresher back then.
***Housewares.
****I'm still not sure if the cutting-room-floor scenes -- featuring Ripley and Dallas making love, and later her having to kill her alien-infested lover ---would have added or undercut her ability as an on-screen heroine. But for today's review, I'm looking at this movie based on the cut released by Scott and Fox originally, not taking deleted scenes from the DVD into account.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 06:12 pm (UTC)As far as #4 goes, I guess I just didn't feel that the clone plotline was interesting enough to really add to the mythos at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-11 09:08 am (UTC)