"In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream"

Alien:
I like to watch movies. Some people are music people, they keep up with all of the latest tunes, always listening to the radio, downloading music, owning two iPods, that sort of thing. Other people, like myself, would rather immerse themselves in movies and television. As my friend Peter says, we are media junkies. Personally, I’m more of a movie guy than a TV guy, in the sense that I won’t spend much time sitting down every week to catch a show. The TV shows that I watch are usually on DVD, such as Smallville, or Lost (soon) and 24 (very, very soon).
Yet, despite my love of media in general, and movies in specific, I somehow manage to not see the major sorts of films that ‘everyone’ has seen. For example, I only watched the Godfather in the past year. Even before I watched it, I was familiar enough with it to catch most pop culture references to it, and to enjoy outright spoofs, such as the movie Mafia (really funny). But I had not seen it (incidentally, I really enjoyed it, even the much maligned third movie).
Another such movie is Alien. This is, along with the original Star Wars, is the quintessential Sci-Fi movie to see. It was hyped enough that I went into it fully expecting to be disappointed. Fortunately, I wasn’t. Right off the bat, I will tell you that I really liked it.
There are a few things that appealed to me. First of all, the alien is hardly ever seen. And it’s not like it’s there, but just off screen all the time. Often it’s not even around. Rather than going for cheap thrills, they instead chose to just let the tension naturally build. They were constantly looking for this creature, and so rarely finding it. There weren’t a great deal of false scares, where the music gets really nervous, and they look around the corner the music plays the scare beat and…there’s nothing there. That is such a cheap scare that it doesn’t even work anymore. The worst is when they do that, and then when they are taking a sigh of relief, the monster is behind them. This movie had none of that. If they were expecting to see it, then it was there. If they were looking for it, then there was tension, and it kept getting higher and higher until something happened.
Second, when the alien is seen, it’s done artfully. It’s only shown briefly, ably hiding the fact that it was 1979 and there was only so much people could do with special effects and rubber suits. If the movie was made now, the alien would be seen running and crouching and all of that kind of stuff. But they couldn’t do that back then, so they just kept it mostly hidden. Many of the shots of it, the alien is simply not moving, just standing there being all intense. They especially liked the close-ups of it’s double mouth, the big one with the small one inside of it. That was done really well. I especially like that there was always slime (sweat? water? something) running down its face.
Third, the acting is well done.
Heck, even the special effects are pretty good for the time. An explosion at the end is pretty cool looking. It would be much better these days, much cooler looking, but back then, it was all they could do. It was still pretty nifty.
The movie wasn’t perfect, of course. There are things that obviously date it to the late 70s. For example, the black guy (only one of course) has a very stereotypical 70s black guy beard. Nowadays it would be a well groomed goatee. Some of the shots just looked like they were from the seventies. I can’t really explain it exactly, but they were the kind of shots that looked, well, seventy-ish. It’s like how every movie made in the eighties somehow looks the same, and it’s not just fashion. It’s just a look. As soon as you see a movie from the eighties, you can tell that’s when it was made, even if you’ve never seen it before, and there is nothing that would really indicate that. You can just tell. The effects are pretty good. There isn’t much besides the space-ships themselves, and they look very much like the spaceship shots from the original Star Wars, which still hold up very well I think. Also, like I said, the explosion definitely would be better now, but it was still very well done. And the computers were old. They still had keyboards, and there was basically no pictures, just words and numbers.
Frankly, I think more Sci-Fi movies need to be done like this. Because this is harder to simply categorize than current space movies. There are no stereotypical one liners, no lasers and, well, basically no conventions of the genre. It seems that all Sci-Fi movies now are either in the Star Wars mould, or just entirely too cheesy. Which is too bad.
There were some things that crossed my mind as I watched it. For instance, the last three survivors are a black guy and two women. That’s unusual for now, let alone back then. Also, the alien was alone with a cat, and didn’t eat it. My only guess is that it doesn’t like Chinese food (oh, snap!). And, I decided that the worst thing about everything being completely computer generated in science fiction is that the people who make steam come out of, well, everything in Sci-Fi movies are out of work, because it can be done digitally now. Why is there so much steam? Is the internal combustion engine a thing of the past in the future? Have they returned to steam power? I just don’t know.
Plus, there were a couple of issues with setting/plot that I had. First, the crew of seven goes down to an alien planet on a shuttle, but later they say that they can’t escape on the shuttle because it doesn’t seat four (a few people were already dead). My only guess is that the escape shuttle was a different one, but that doesn’t really explain why they couldn’t use the first one. I imagine it doesn’t have the cryogenic freezing chambers that allows them to survive the months on the ship between systems. But they never really explain that. Second, the second guy who gets killed is eaten in a room that I just can’t find a reason for existing. It was a giant room (thirty foot ceilings) with a large console type thing coming down from the ceiling in the middle of the room. It looked like the gang shower in Main Men’s One (a dorm at the college I went to in Regina. Those that went there know what I mean). It reminded me of that because there was water falling from the ceiling. I have no idea what the purpose behind that room was. It just seemed to exist.
Stay tuned, because I am going to be reviewing the remaining three parts of this four part series. Incidentally, if anyone knows a word like trilogy that refers to a four-part series, let me know. I’m sure there is one, I just can’t think of it.