Alien

This week in my Reading in Genre class, I got to watch the movie Alien. This movie is one of my all-time favorites, it is in my top 10 list. As usual, this movie delivered the suspense and tension that I have come to enjoy over the years.

My experience with Alien goes back to when I was a child in 1979, I was 12 years old. I remember the first time I got to see Alien and it scared the crap out of me. I still remember the movie poster phrase, “In space no can hear you scream”.

The movie starts peacefully with the crew being awakened early from being frozen in stasis for the long journey home. They are awakened because there was an alien signal detected by the ship’s computer. Long story short, they land on an alien planet and end up bringing an alien back onboard the ship. This alien’s offspring begins killing the crew.

This movie does a great job of pulling in the viewer right from the beginning. The mystery of the alien signal foreshadows the terror to come. Tension is effectively built as the plot moves forward to the climax of the story where there is a final confrontation between the protagonist “Ripley” and the antagonist “the Alien”.

Throughout the middle, the movie does a great job of building tension and raising the stakes as each member of the crew comes face to face with the Alien only to meet their death.

I enjoy the imagery of this movie. In particular, the alien planet is dark and mysterious. Much of the art concept came from an artist named H. R. Giger (https://www.hrgiger.com/). This guy’s art is out of this world, literally. It is dark, scary, and fantastical. On a side note, Giger also did the album cover artwork for the Emerson, Lake Palmer album Brain Salad Surgery, a great music!

When the ship’s crew first land on the inhospitable alien planet, the scene and atmosphere are perfect to set the mood and bring up from a light bit of gradual tension from the beginning of the movie and thrust us as viewers right into a feeling of impending doom.

One more thing that I loved about this story, and how it was told, was the false ending. Yes, a false ending. Just when you thought Ripley and Jonesy the cat have safely escaped on an escape shuttle from not only the alien but also the self-destructing mother ship, boom! The alien is in the escape shuttle with them. This false ending, then calming lul bring us back to a calm state just in time to find out that the alien is there.