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Alien (Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979) – Film Review And Essay

In the wake of news that Ridley Scott has started work on “Prometheus”, the movie prologue to “Alien”, it’s timely to revisit the movie that started the whole series and made Sigourney Weaver a star. The idea of mixing science fiction with horror was not new in 1979 when the film was released and some of the ideas in “Alien” can be traced to various sources including a story in the British TV science fiction show Doctor Who “The Ark in Space”, broadcast a few years before “Alien”, in which an alien lays larvae in human hosts asleep in capsules in a space ship. What Scott brought to “Alien” that makes it stand out from its influences and from other science fiction / horror films before and after is its use of atmosphere, backgrounds, characters and plot to create a fusion of haunted-house horror, slasher flick and a survival film. The alien’s life-cycle becomes a central part of the film’s horror and this together with the alien (played by Bolaji Bodejo) itself have come to embody human fears and misunderstandings about sexuality, pregnancy and birth.

In the distant future a company cargo space transporter, the Nostromo, is bringing a refinery and various minerals back to Earth when it intercepts an apparent SOS from a spaceship on a distant alien planet. The crew of seven is awakened from deep sleep and on discovering the signal, land on the planet to investigate its source and provide assistance. The signal is traced to a crashed alien ship and the crew, led by Dallas (Tom Skerritt), sends out a rescue team. One of the team, Kane (John Hurt) is injured during the search, and is brought back to the Nostromo. Too late his crew-mates discover he has been infected by an alien parasite which has deposited a larva in him; the larva emerges in spectacularly erect fashion in the communal dining-room – it always has to be a dining-room for the yuck factor – and zooms off to hide in the Nostromo’s various labyrinthine networks, holding bays and other nooks and crannies. From then on, the movie is a mixture of hide-and-seek / cat-and-mouse game as prey becomes hunter and the hunters become prey, and along the way audiences learn more about the true nature of the SOS signal and how the crew’s employer exploited them and put their lives in danger by not advising them of the true nature of the rescue mission.

The seven actors who make up the crew had considerable experience in theatre, film, television and other forms of drama when they were cast, and their performances as ordinary technical service personnel with all their concerns about pay, work conditions and treatment by their employer are good if perhaps not exceptional. Weaver as Ellen Ripley the unimaginative stickler for rules and regulations and Ian Holm as the Nostromo’s overly detached science officer Ash who harbours a secret deliver the stand-out performances with Yaphet Kotto as the would-be hero mechanic and Harry Dean Stanton as his laconic partner not far behind. Perhaps the best scene with respect to acting is Weaver’s scene where she confronts the alien directly and fights to control her emotions as she draws the creature towards her so as to position it for blasting into space via decompression: it’s equal parts cool-headed heroism, an unyielding will to survive and the fear and horror of violent death all feeding off one another.

The Nostromo should receive an acting credit as well: its labyrinth-like interiors in which the alien hides provide major opportunities for the simple plot to advance and the alien to bump off individual crew members. The colours of the Nostromo’s interiors are dark and shadowy which give the film’s early scenes a moody, suspenseful, almost film-noir atmosphere. Flashing lights, bursts of smoke and siren sounds in its narrow corridors in the film’s later scenes build up tension towards the climax in which Weaver’s character Ripley will meet the alien. Probably the only criticism to be made about the sets is that the ones that feature computer technology were becoming dated even at the time of the film’s initial release. Film crews, even ones with great imaginations, can only look so far into the future and guess at what technologies might be popular.

Where “Alien” really excels is in its careful detailing of the alien planet’s landscapes, the crashed ship’s strange, organic shapes and interiors, and the alien’s sexually suggestive appearance based on artwork by Swiss artist H R Giger who had a cult reputation in the 1970s. The very alien-ness of the film’s early scenes, in which the rescue team investigate the crashed ship, helps to set the mood of dread and mystery for the action to come. Once the alien is out and about and has got rid of a few victims, the tension starts to ratchet up steadily and the noir-like mood gradually disappears to be replaced by a new atmosphere of competitive, urgent struggle as Ripley decides to blow up the Nostromo and sets its self-destruct mechanisms in place.

The film makes insinuations about the future society that provides the context for the nightmarish scenario the crew find themselves in: for a company to be able to send large cargo ships into the far reaches of space to ferry ores, it must be extremely rich and must hold considerable political as well as economic power. The company also has a large human workforce, so large that a few missing, even killed deliberately, barely make a dint on the company’s occupational safety records. It prefers to keep valuable knowledge and secrets in a robot that lacks an inbuilt system or database of ethics, forces humans to follow company orders and spies on them as well. One would think a company that rich and powerful should be able to build cargo ships that are entirely self-operating and need no humans, not even in emergency situations where lateral thinking is required. Perhaps this company operates on thin profit margins that don’t allow it to continuously update its operations but manages with a mixture of old and new technologies. In such ships, humans are needed in much the same way as pilots are needed on airbuses and jumbo jets, mainly to land such vehicles and set them up for take-off, and to perform other jobs as the company requires.

The fact that Ripley and the other crew members address company headquarters staff collectively as “Mother” suggests the company plays a nanny-state role in its employees’ lives – among other things, it might provide housing for them and their families, schools and teachers to educate their children, and doctors and nurses to monitor their health and determine their fitness for company employment – in a way viewers would find highly intrusive and hard to understand. The company literally has the power of life and death over its workers. If on the other hand, “Mother” is taken to be the computer that controls Nostromo, then the computer itself controls the lives of the crew on the ship to the extent that it could deliberately allow them to die and profit from their deaths. That would still be very frightening for most people to think about.

Science in such a society becomes nothing more than a weapon or a mechanism which the company uses to enrich itself and its owners, and to expand its power. No wonder that the company sees value in obtaining the monster – thus its directive to Ash to preserve the monster’s life at any cost – to the extent that it would sacrifice the Nostromo’s crew. Ash admires the monster for its “purity”, meaning its lack of self-awareness that would require possessing some sort of moral code, a sense of right and wrong. The monster exists to survive and replicate itself in aggressive ways and the company wants to know what motivates this kind of behaviour in the monster. Anyone familiar with the way movie science fiction works can easily figure out what this might lead to: insane fascistic fantasies about creating hierarchies of human-alien hybrid soldiers and worker drones to colonise the universe. The mysteries of human sexuality and reproduction become an elaborate if mechanised form of mass factory production of the kind Aldous Huxley wrote about in “Brave New World” in which human embryos were customised by chemical and/or cellular manipulation to fit into particular pre-determined social and economic niches in the novel’s hierarchical society.

At least Ripley and the others discover who the real monster in the scenario is – and it ain’t the one hiding in the air shafts hunting them down. The film is not very subtle about that fact – indeed much of it plays out like a B-grade horror film – but in its set-up and characterisation that provide the basis for the plot, it makes assumptions about the future evolution of human society and its relationship to science and technology that would have most of us hanging our heads in despair.

(The original version of the review can be viewed at http://undersoutherneyes.edpinsent.com.)

Alien (Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979) – Film Review And Essay

1) The Ghost and Mr. Chicken:

This 1966 mystery/comedy film stars Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, a downtrodden typesetter at a little town newspaper. The meek and mild Heggs is suddenly elevated to town hero right after he spends the night at the reputedly haunted Simmons mansion for the chance to write a feature article. As the story goes, Mr. Simmons killed his wife and then himself in the now abandoned, spooky old home. A variety of towns men and women even claim to have heard the ghost of Mr. Simmons playing the old organ after dark. The night Luther stays there is the 20th anniversary of the murders and, of course, he sees plenty of strange issues, which includes the organ playing by itself at midnight. Luther’s news story gets the whole town talking . . .and inspires the Simmons’ nephew to sue Luther for libel. There are lots of laughs and only a couple of scary moments on the way to the film’s exciting and surprising conclusion.

two) Blackbeard’s Ghost:

This 1960s live-action Disney film with Peter Ustinov, Dean Jones, and Suzanne Pleshette is pure movie enjoyable. In the film, Jones plays Steve Walker, the new coach for the hopelessly bad Godolphin high school track team. The coach gets some unexpected (and really comical) aid when he accidentally conjures up the legendary ghost of Blackbeard. Apparently, Blackbeard’s soul has been suspended in limbo until he does a selfless and very good deed to make up for his wickedness in life. Now, the gruff but amiable pirate is determined to assist the Godolphin track team to victory, whether Coach Walker desires him to or not! Lots of humor and a small bit of romance and action make this a preferred for all ages.

3) Wallace &amp Gromit: The Curse of the Had been-Rabbit :

This adorable 2005 British quit-motion animated production delivers laughs for the whole family members. Produced by Dream Works Animation, the film follows the adventures of the eccentric (and not too bright) inventor Wallace, and his significantly much more intelligent but mute dog, Gromit. The cute and entertaining story entails Wallace’s quest to save the village’s annual vegetable competition after a giant, mutated rabbit begins to terrorize the gardens and greenhouses. The cast of voices consists of Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter.

four) Scooby-Doo:

A 2002 live-action film based on the beloved 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Scooby-Doo. The cast includes Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Freddie Prinze, Jr. as Fred, Linda Cardellini as Velma, and Neil Fanning as the voice of Scooby-Doo. In the film, the Scooby gang has split apart soon after years of solving mysteries together. Velma works for NASA, Fred is a celebrity, Daphne is a martial arts professional, and Shaggy and Scooby are well. . .Shaggy and Scooby. The gang is surprisingly reunited when each of them is invited to investigate the strange goings on at a theme park recognized as Spooky Island.

5) The Moon-Spinners:

A 1968 Walt Disney feature film in which Hayley Mills plays an English teenager who finds romance and mystery while vacationing with her aunt in a village in Crete. The film is comparable to Alfred Hitchcock’s lighter fare with Mills’ character questioning just who she can trust in the puzzling affair of a jewel theft. There are a couple of darker moments in the film that earned it a PG rating, including a scene with a hearse and menacing masked paraders, a moment of danger in an underground crypt, and a hazardous ride on a windmill.

6) The Trouble with Harry:

This 1955 comedy/suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock stars John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Mathers. The story starts on a clear autumn day when a strange man turns up dead in a patch of forest land in a modest Vermont town. Three of the major characters mistakenly believe themselves to be responsible for the man’s death. Captain Wiles worries he may have shot him when he was out hunting. Miss Ivy Gravely thinks she delivered the fatal blow when she hit the stranger with her boot following he approached her in a threatening manner. And, the dead man’s estranged wife, feisty young Jennifer Rogers thinks she killed him when she cracked a bottle over his head. The hero of the film is Sam Marlowe, a neighborhood artist, who decides to assist his neighbors conceal the inconvenient Harry from the nearby authorities’ attention. In the course of the day, Harry is buried and dug up once again multiple times, as every new piece of evidence comes to light revealing that none of the three characters was guilty in Harry’s death. In the meantime, all this strange behavior catches the eye of Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs. The twist at the end is both humorous and surprising.

7) Arsenic and Old Lace:

Slapstick, madcap humor abounds in this delightful 1940s Frank Capra film starring Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre. Grant plays drama critic Mortimer Brewster, who ruins his reputation as a confirmed bachelor by finding married. On the day of the wedding–Halloween– Mortimer stops by the old family members residence in Brooklyn to share the news with his aunts, Abby and Martha, and his eccentric brother Teddy (who believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt and spends his time digging the “Panama Canal” in the cellar). Even though he intends to remain only a few minutes, Mortimer finds his honeymoon plans derailed soon after he discovers a corpse in the window seat of his aunt’s living room. It seems that Teddy isn’t the only crazy one in the family members—Mortimer’s nicely-meaning but insane aunts have been poisoning elderly bachelors whom they perceive as becoming in require of relief from terminal loneliness. To complicate matters even further, Mortimer should deal with the sudden appearance of his brother Jonathan, a sinister gangster, who wants to use the residence as a hiding place for his own murder victim.

The Wizard of Oz:

The classic 1939 American musical has just the correct quantity of scariness to make it Halloween suitable. Dorothy’s perilous journey via the strange and magical land of Oz has constantly been a childhood favorite, regardless of the film’s darker aspects. Adults and young children alike will appreciate the stunning sets, fun musical numbers, and frequent moments of suspense. The talented cast consists of Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, and Frank Morgan.

9) Darby O’Gill and the Little Folks:

This live-action Disney flick is a enjoyable tribute to Irish folklore, with a talented cast featuring a young Sean Connery. In the film, Darby O’Gill is the elderly estate caretaker whose job is about to be usurped by Connery’s character. O’Gill is naturally worried how he will present for his daughter as soon as his income is gone. His worries seem to be over, however, once he catches the king of the leprechauns. This film’s special effects are still quite impressive and the scene with the banshees is positive to have just the right quantity of spook for younger viewers.

10) Bed Knobs and Broomsticks:

This great fantasy/children’s film totally sparkles with wit and warmth. Angela Landsbury stars as an English spinster who takes a mail-order course in witchcraft in hopes of aiding the British Planet War II effort via spell casting. Her plans are interrupted, nonetheless, when she must take in 3 youngsters evacuated from London. The kids aren’t long in discovering her secret, of course, and the magical journey that ensues involves such great events as travel to an animated island ruled by animals, and a strange battle between German soldiers and armor that has been magically brought to life.