Sunday night was the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic disaster and I very nearly gave into the idea of re-watching James Cameron’s Titanic as my Sunday Night Movie, but to do so I would have needed start about 8:00 p.m, because Monday morning comes early enough as it is.
Instead I slipped into the Playstation 3 Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien.
Alien is one of those truly ground braking and trend setting films that come along so rarely. I recall going to the theater in 1979 to see the film and being tense with fear as the film built and built and built.
Even though this film is more than 30 years old, it hold up so well it plays just the same today as in that summer on seventy-nine. One aspect I noticed in last night’s viewing was just how leisurely the pacing of the movie really is. The parasite escaping and starting prey on the crew doesn’t occur until the second half of the film. The front half of the movie is character, mood, and establishment, handled so expertly at the script level by Dan O’Bannon and at the direction by Ridley Scott that the first hour moves smoothly by without dragging, always engaging the viewer, but maintaining that sedate pace.
A second factor I noticed on this viewing was the average age of the cast. Too many filmmakers, particularly today, would have cast this movie with a bunch of very good looking twenty-somethings and called it a move towards audience identification, but this crew is an older cast, people who have been around and had life kick them in the teeth a bit. This works incredibly well for establishing a reality to the universe and movie that it should not be underestimated. The crew looks like working stiff who would be trusted with this job, not kids you would be junior members just starting out.
Speaking of job, let’s take a moment to look at the corporate sub-plot to the story. Dan O’Bannon is on record that he hated the evil corporate sub-plot and wished the producers had never grafted it onto his monster-in-a-spaceship script. While eliminating the sub-plot would make this story more true to it heritage going back through Planet of the Vampires, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, I think without it this film would have had modest success, not the cultural touchstone it became. That aspect, working stiff screwed over by the profit hungry corporation was a theme that resonated with people, and by that resonance, drew them in to the story, just creating that more reality to the fantastic plot. So, put me down on the evil corporate sub-plot even thought it got hammered to death over the next five movies.
One more aspect that was principally behind the scenes, but was evidence on the screen, was the choice of production designers, The film had three principal designers, two who worked on the human centered sets, props, and look, and H.R. Gieger who was responsible for the parasite and everything non-human. I think it turned into a stroke of sheer brilliance to have the production design broken up this way. Artists, like writers and musicians, have identifiable styles, this kept the styles separate, across the human/alien division, making the alien that much more strange.
This is a film I adore and could not recommend high enough.

Now I am prepped and ready for Promethus and hoping we’ll learn more about the space jockey pictured above.