It's true, see cause there's a vacuum in space, see, and sound can't exist in a vacuum... nope. Genre: Sci-Fi Horror Thriller / Sci-Fi Action Thriller Starring: Alien: Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas In The Mist • Snow White: A Tale of Terror), Tom Skerritt (The Dead Zone • Top Gun) Aliens: Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas In The Mist • Snow White: A Tale of Terror), Paul Riser ("Mad About You" • "My Two Dads") Directed By: Alien: Ridley Scott (American Gangster • Gladiator) Aliens: James Cameron (Titanic • Terminator 2: Judgment Day) Overview: During their voyage back home, the team on the mining ship Nostromo are awakened from cryosleep to investigate a signal being transmitted by a nearby moon. What they find is anything but friendly. Though the films' details are not really discussed, this whole post assumes you've seen Alien and Aliens. Though not full of spoliers per se, it's more for people who've seen them or...
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Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
 | Sound (3)2.9 Plot (3)3.5 Cast (3)3.8 Special Effects (3)3.3 Length & Pace (3)3.2 Cinematography (3)3.6 |
Synopsis: A mining ship, investigating a suspected SOS, lands on a distant planet. The crew discovers some strange creatures and investigates.
Tagline: In space no one can hear you scream.
Classification: PG for sci-fi violence/gore and language.
Release date: 25 May 1979 (USA)
Running time: 117min
Language: English/Spanish
Awards: Won 1 Oscar - visual effects. Nom. for 1 Oscar - art direction-set decoration.
Categories: Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
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It's true, see cause there's a vacuum in space, see, and sound can't exist in a vacuum... nope.
Genre: Sci-Fi Horror Thriller / Sci-Fi Action Thriller
Starring: Alien: Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas In The Mist • Snow White: A Tale of Terror), Tom Skerritt (The Dead Zone • Top Gun)
Aliens: Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas In The Mist • Snow White: A Tale of Terror), Paul Riser ("Mad About You" • "My Two Dads")
Directed By: Alien: Ridley Scott (American Gangster • Gladiator)
Aliens: James Cameron (Titanic • Terminator 2: Judgment Day)
Overview: During their voyage back home, the team on the mining ship Nostromo are awakened from cryosleep to investigate a signal being transmitted by a nearby moon. What they find is anything but friendly.
Though the films' details are not really discussed, this whole post assumes you've seen Alien and Aliens. Though not full of spoliers per se, it's more for people who've seen them or read the franchise's comics or roleplayed a marine for the Aliens game or something geeky like that.
From perverse pic to classic content
It has many names: Alien, Xenomorph, Ripley's Alien, The Giger Alien, The Aliens Alien... Peckerhead...ok that's mine... then there's the really hardcore names like Linguafoeda acheronsis ("foul tongue from Acheron") and Internecivus raptus ("deadly abduction").
Rather than blathering on about how utterly perfect this film is, I thought I'd instead talk about something you might actually not know and delve into the background of the many permutations of the parasitoid creature we've all come to love. Let us begin at the beginning. The inspiration: The Giger Alien.
Writer Dan O'Bannon worked with Swiss artist HR Giger on an adaptation of Dune that was never completed. When the go-ahead was given for Alien, Dan immediately thought of Giger for his designs. He presented director Ridley Scott with Necronimicon, a book of Giger's illustrations. Ridley Scott found the designs inspirational and chose Necronom IV, the psychosexual photo above, as the foundation for the antagonist of his moving picture.
Ridley Scott wanted the actor who would be in the Xenomorph suit to look as inhuman as possible and found the ideal candidate while sitting at a bar. A 7' 2" Nigerian named Bolaji Badejo. I wonder what his pick-up line was?
Let's explore the phases our little chum goes through. First the Facehugger, courtesy of the alien egg chamber on an alien ship. The alien ship the crew of the Nostromo visits was most likely a bomber, intended to drop eggs on planets in order to return later to reap the rewards of a clean dead planet. Nice biological warfare, however the alien race clearly suffered their own fate, given the condition of the deceased crew.
In the early stages of the script writing, the question of getting the creature on board the Nostromo was answered with... well... rape. Adding a frightening element like having a creature forcefully impregnate their victim then burst out of their chest was both original and terrifying. John Hurt got the great honour of being faceporked - and kicking off his career into high gear.
Huggy the Host-maker!
But what about the physiology of the thing? Acid blood? What kind of monster predator would this thing have to necessitate having pressurized acid blood in its veins? It's never explained. How quickly does the creature grow? It's never truly explained either, but every time we see the old skin of the thing, we only see one, and it's really tiny. Then a 7-foot tall thing caves your head open two days after you saw a 12-inch long burster. Either way, there really isn't much film canon to explain the rates of growth backstory. Another interesting tidbit about our friendly neighborhood Xenomorph is that it's eyeless - hence blind - and not actually ever eating anyone. It captures people as hosts to more Alien Xenomorphs. The geek's theory is that these things are in fact carrion eaters, suited for dark dank undergrounds.
Bursty the Flesh-maker!
You know, in the grand scheme of things I think there's a couple plot holes left to be filled in regards to the Xenomorph physiology, but the look of every permutation is undoubtedly iconic awesomeness.
I'd like to give special praise to Chest Burster here. Every baby, even baby crocodiles are cute when they're born. Bursty here is no exception. So adorable!
Performance: 9 Cinematography: 9 Script: 10 Plot: 9 Mood: 10
Overall Rating: 94% (Or Cause Good Movies Don't MAKE People Scream...)
I'll hug him and squeeze him and name him George
Aftertaste:
Let me finish with a rant. For anyone who hasn't seen every Alien film ever made let me do you a favour as I explain the mental retardation happening in Hollywood.
Alien is set in the year 2122. It's the future. It's very much implied that the Nostromo's crew are the first humans to have a direct encounter with such a race as either the xenomorph bad-ass or the alien ship they found it in.
Fifty seven years later, we have Aliens, the sequel, set in 2179, ever more futuristic. Same planet, same alien, only more of them. Later still, we have Alien³, at this point retardedly futuristic when 200 years later, Alien: Resurrection shows us some stupid stuff having to do with the creatures.
Recommendations: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), Requiem for a Dream, Dawn of the Dead
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I recently watched Alien for the first time ever. Hard to believe, right? Well, despite my fondness for horror fiction, I don't care for spatter flicks, and I had the impression that Alien was one of those.
To my surprise, I found that it was a well-crafted film instead! Ridley Scott and crew brought to life a suspenseful tale which some have described as a haunted ship in space. The sets were beautifully crafted. I liked the Nostromo's interior, it looked like a Mayan tomb.
From the opening shots--a creepy set of the spaceship's interior with "emergency helmets" sitting ready(you feel the Nostromo is a derelict ship, until the actors are introduced)--we're captivated and drawn into the story.
There's not as much blood as I thought the movie would have. And the acting is superb. My favorite characters were Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, and Ian Holmes' Ash. Good and bad characters--they played the perfect part.
The Alien, an HR Giger-designed creature, was quite scary. More so for the fact that you didn't see it very well most of the time.
I had only two plot points that I felt took away from the movie's believability:
1) How could the Alien have grown so large in a matter of hours, with no food of any kind? The "shed skin" they find is about the size of a glove, and logically it would have needed to shed several time in order to reach adult size.
2) Why didn't the other crew members tell Kane what had happened to him while he was unconscious? They acted as if they didn't want him to know what was wrong. And yet, only one person would have the motive to do so.
But all in all, I give this film a very good grade. It set the standard for a lot of s/f and horror films.
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Last updated: 2010-04-08 17:42:27 by kayhalo
I recently watched Alien for the first time ever. Hard to believe, right? Well, despite my fondness for horror fiction, I don't care for spatter flicks, and I had the impression that Alien was one of those. To my surprise, I found that it was a well-crafted film instead! Ridley Scott and crew brought to life a suspenseful tale which some have described as a haunted ship in space. The sets were beautifully crafted. I liked the Nostromo's interior, it looked like a Mayan tomb. From the opening shots--a creepy set of the spaceship's interior with "emergency helmets" sitting ready(you feel the Nostromo is a derelict ship, until the actors are introduced)--we're captivated and drawn into the story. There's not as much blood as I thought the movie would have. And the acting is superb. My favorite characters were Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, and Ian Holmes' Ash. Good and bad characters--they played the perfect part. The Alien, an HR Giger-designed creature, was quite scary....
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THE SCOOP
Director: Ridley Scott
Plot: A mining ship, investigating a suspected SOS, lands on a distant planet. The crew discovers some strange creatures and investigates.
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi/Thriller
Awards: Won 1 Oscar - visual effects. Nom. for 1 Oscar - art direction-set decoration.
Runtime: 117min
Rating: PG for sci-fi violence/gore and language.
IN RETROSPECT
Two years after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg wowed viewers and rejuvenated the science-fiction genre with Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind respectively, Ridley Scott scared the living hell out of moviegoers with Alien, perhaps the most terrifying (read: satisfying) sci-fi horror picture ever made. It spurned three sequels in which only James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) came close to eclipsing the original. Alien is, in my opinion, Scott’s finest achievement as a filmmaker and it is only his second feature. A few years later, he directed another sci-fi masterpiece called Blade Runner (1982), establishing himself as one of the genre’s supreme visual stylists.
Alien stars Sigourney Weaver who plays arguably the greatest sci-fi heroine of all-time - Ellen Ripley. She is part of a minimal crew on board a large deep-space tug called the Nostromo. Along the journey back to Earth, they intercept a distress call from a nearby space body and decide to investigate, unaware of the perils that lie ahead. Kane (John Hurt) is attacked by a ‘Facehugger’ which impregnates him. He then dies in the film’s most iconic scene - the chestburster sequence - in which a small, ugly creature pops out of his chest in gory fashion. It then escapes to somewhere in the ship where it sheds its skin and grows into one of cinema’s most terrifying creations, the grotesquely beautiful Alien.
Designed by H.R. Giger, the Alien is sparingly-glimpsed. Like the film’s characters, we are unsure how it really looks like and how evil it really is. This ‘Jaws effect’ approach, together with Scott’s slow, deliberate pacing and direction, adds considerably to the terror that it creates. The tension is incredible, especially in scenes when a character wanders off alone to his eventual doom. The creature’s savagery is matched by its instinctive intelligence. Even though it is all-powerful, the Alien chooses to hunt down each character one by one, playing on their fears as they see their numbers dwindle by the hour.
The film is brilliantly scored by the late Jerry Goldsmith who used musical cues to dictate the level of suspense. The art direction and set decoration is fantastic with influences from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is most evident in the interior design of the Nostromo which gives a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. The final quarter of the film is literally a dizzying blend of sight and sound. As Ripley races against time to escape the Alien, Scott brings the suspense to an unbearable high through the use of shaky hand-held cameras, flickering lighting, loud hissing sounds, and quick cuts.
Often compared to its direct sequel, Alien is in my opinion the better picture. Although Cameron’s Aliens is more epic, has a higher rewatchability and packs more thrilling action, the first installment is near perfect in the way it handles tension. It is as nerve-wrecking watching it the tenth time as the first. Not only is Scott’s film an excellent technical achievement, it is an artistic triumph as well. It is, I daresay, one of the greatest films ever made.
SCORE: 10/10
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Recommendations: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), The Visitor
Singapore's Most Prolific Film Blogger @ www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com
Last updated: 2010-03-18 19:01:17 by eternality_tan
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