A suspenseful and highly effective sf thriller. (Alien (DVD))

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	Alien (DVD)
Date:	22/06/01 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ingenious use of suspense to maximise audience anticipation, use of shadow to make the creature seem real and alive, the intrinsically appalling designs of H.R. Giger.

Disadvantages: Computer readouts are impractical, central computer room is implausibly designed, familiarity has lessened the effect of the Alien over the years.

‘Alien’ is a film whose plot follows one of the standard archetypes of the horror genre: a group of people within a confined and claustrophobic space are gradually killed off by a murderous foe until only one of the group is left. This final group member then manages to escape, often killing the murderer who has stalked him / her throughout the film in the process. The transposition of standard horror genre tropes into science fiction is also not a particularly original innovation, especially since the two genres are inextricably interlinked at the sides anyway. The fundamentals of Alien are combinations of factors which had been seen before; it is in the execution that Alien proved far superior to what anyone had seen up to 1979, and began the process of launching one of the most successful sf / horror film series ever.

The deep space mining vessel Nostromo is returning to Earth, its seven crew in hypersleep hibernation, when it intercepts a pulsating signal which could be a sign of intelligent life. In accordance with Company regulations the computer awakes the crew, who land on the stormy and inhospitable planet from which the signal is emanating. Whilst the rest of the crew remain behind to make repairs and monitor the situation, three of the crew decide to walk the 2km to the signal origin; once there, one of the crew is assailed by a strange lifeform which jumps from a pulsating egg and clamps itself to his face and neck. Back at the ship, surgery to remove the creature fails, but the creature eventually disappears by itself and dies. Unfortunately, the crewman has been impregnated with an alien, which explodes from his chest one meal time and escapes into the ship. Once there it expands considerably in size and stalks the ducts and tunnels of the ship, with humans as its prey…

The plot, as one can instantly see, is simple enough for a film which lasts not much under 2 hours. But, as we will see, this gives the film a freedo
m to develop at its own pace rather than have to rush to fill in each plot point within a specific amount of time, which actually works very much to the film’s advantage.

For, as director Ridley Scott himself has pointed out, very little actually happens in the first three-quarters of an hour of the film. In fact, this film seems very consciously aware of the value of waiting, of making an audience grow accustomed to the characters of the film as a group, of making the audience in a sense familiar with the typical lifestyle of the people onscreen so that the shocks, when they finally arrive, seem all the more poignant for having shattered that lifestyle and status quo. It is perhaps not coincidental that several other sf / horror productions, most notably the 1951 classic ‘The Thing [from Another World]’ which have utilised a similar outlook have remained similarly popular over the years. If an audience is allowed to imagine the terrible nature of what they expect to appear at any minute, and the tension onscreen is retained and even tightened over time, then when the monster finally does appear half of its job — to scare the audience witless, essentially — has already been done by the audience to themselves, and the film has a much greater chance of success.

Hence, for the opening section of the film we wait, becoming more familiar with — and therefore more emotionally invested in — the group of people which comprise the crew of the Nostromo. Here is where the advantages of a good script and a good crew really show, and thankfully what we have in this opening section is both subtle and believable, the shipboard society which exists nicely designed an layered, with even the usual class system of above and below decks nicely hinted at and the fact that some characters get on well together and others do not shown but not laboured to the point of absurdity. Thankfully, just because we have little plot advancem
ent during this time the film does not feel compelled to revert to soap opera tropes or the illusion would be shattered.

Of course, an actual lack of screen action cannot account on its won for the runaway success of Alien. At the end of the waiting there must actually be something impressive and scary for the audience to see or else they will feel cheated and the film will be derided. In this arena Alien once again comes up with the goods, and the reason why Alien is even better remembered than its worthy stablemates such as The Thing becomes clear; in The Thing, the initial suspense was well rewarded, the film’s monster bursting suddenly and without warning through a door, the shot expertly conceived with the shadows exquisite. Afterwards, however, the monster is seen a few too many times for its own good, and it cannot be hidden that what we are watching is a man walking around jerkily in a suit (of course, the realisation that what that monster is meant to BE is a walking carrot does not help, but that is another matter).

In Alien, the monster is actually shown plenty, but each shot has been conceived so that the deficiencies in the special effects (i.e. that we are still looking at a man in a suit, even if a more elaborate suit than available in The Thing twenty-odd years previously) are hidden. The first time we see the full-size Alien, we see mainly its head, which of course is distinctly non-humanoid, its sleek, shiny, wet-looking surface evoking images of insects and arachnids in a manner guaranteed to get the skin crawling on first viewing. Afterwards, we see the Alien, but part of its body (very deliberately and calculatedly) are hidden in the shadows; when the beats falls out of the nook it has crammed itself into in the lander at the end of the film, it falls in such a way, the shadows and highlights engulfing and reflecting from the creature in just such a way as to imply more limbs than actually exist. In general, the creature
moves in a fluid and fast manner — implying power, belying the necessarily humanoid structure of the costume and managing to be genuinely unnerving.

Basically, Ridley Scott is aware of what he and his crew are capable of, and keep to it. He is all too aware of the consequences of clearly stretching beyond what the resources allocated to a project allow — he has owned up to not filming certain sequences in the script because the budget would not stretch to it — and this is a lesson other director’s would do well to learn in future if we are to see a reduction in the number of modern films suffering from appalling and unbelievable CGI which not only fails to add to the effect of a film but which can actually kill any tension which the film has already managed to build up previously stone dead.

As I stated earlier, it is in the execution where Alien truly shines, and this execution is generally flawless throughout. The sets are still very impressive to this day, no doubt leant a modicum of realism by the fact that the crew had salvaged much of what we see onscreen from obsolete British military equipment and simply painted the result. The computer readouts (and the central computer room in which one talks to Mother, with its white spotlights surrounding the occupant) have dated the worst, but since these elements are not vital to the functioning of the film this is not such a major flaw after all. The actors are believable rather than thesping it for all they are worth, and this was essential in a project of this nature … if the audience does not believe what they are seeing, or do not genuinely believe that the characters they are watching are themselves scared, then they will not be affected by what they see. This is another reason why many modern horror films replete with CGI and poor actors fail miserably at the box office.

Of course, no review of Alien would be complete without a look at the designs of H.R.
Giger, the fine artist who designed the Alien itself, the extraterrestrial spacecraft, the planet, and a substantial amount of other disturbing sets and artefacts. Giger’s work is concerned with the fusion of technology and biology, with the creation of organically-designed machines and mechanoid lifeforms, and the fusion of the two together in the same image, often in such a manner that the distinction between the two is largely lost and the viewer is forced to ask where one piece of the puzzle ends and another begins.

Giger had not trained for cinema work, and prop builders on this film have often remarked that his designs were difficult to implement because he had not used the conventional perspectives and three-dimensional indicators of a traditional film designer. But there is no doubt that these images are fundamentally alien to humanity and provoke unease in whoever sees them — humans do not like to be penetrated to the extent that Giger’s images seem to propose, a phallic aversion which is an intrinsic part of human nature. Because of this, Giger’s designs add yet another layer of unease to the film, already considerably grim and horrific due to the reasons talked about earlier, and the film would have been poorer without them.

Altogether, Alien is a fusion of many elements, each of which is executed in just the right manner and integrated into the whole in just the right way for the overall effect to be a cinematic masterpiece. This is one of the cinematic templates for science fiction horror films, and I suspect that it popularity will be successfully maintained for many years to come.

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