With Prometheus looming in the very near future, Carlos suggested revisiting Ridley Scott’s original Alien, so I watched that film for the first time since 1979. It still has impact, though thankfully I wasn’t as jittery after this viewing as I was after my first. And I hadn't realized how influential this film has been; I recognized many elements in it that I see regularly in today’s thrillers.
This time through, I realized that the movie is more a thriller with an outer space setting than a hard-core sci-fi flic. Scott combines the two genres by using the vastness of space, contrasty lighting, and claustrophobic quarters stuffed with lots of cables/hoses/wires/technogear to create the tension and dread in the mind of the viewers that we expect from thrillers. It's a smart, original use of the sci-fi setting we expect. The story of Alien starts slowly, introducing us to the tight, dark Nostromo and its squabbling, human crew, and when the close-ups and tight quarters have us breathing a little hard for air, we visit an alien ship that’s disturbingly organic (gold star for HR Giger’s design) and thus get introduced to a yet another element of tension. Of course, shortly after the tension jacks up with the visit, the alien gets loose on the Nostromo, the pace picks up, and the movie never looks back.
I've seen a lot about the economy of this film, and Scott does indeed focus on his storytelling and on our thrills while watching it. Alien has practically no exposition: We don’t know anyone’s background or the reasons for their behavior, and we don’t know much about the ship, its stated mission or the ulterior motives of the company. We don’t know anything about the alien and how it mutates either. And we don’t need to. Alien is a scary movie, and all we need to know is that the characters are in real danger from a very bad enemy. The movie works in a pure cinema space of frame, light, set design, sound, story and acting, and it’s this pure cinema that Scott masters to scare the pants off us.
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