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| Nathan Anderson |
Somehow, in attempting to fix the image in this post, blogger 1) wiped my draft when I tried to undo some wonky formatting 2) autosaved the wiped version 3) didn't autosave when I reversed that change, put all the text back, and exited the draft. So I had to dig through all the previous versions of my main gdoc to find it again and then re-do the final polishing. Eesh.
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Been a while since I did a rewatch post, eh? My partner and I had talked about doing an Alien marathon ages ago but never got around to it until now - we’re a one streaming service at a time household, and for some Byzantine licensing reason HBO Max had all the Alien films available through the end of May. When in Rome, die screaming alone and in space I suppose.
Breaking with previous tradition, Alien is the only rewatch of the lot of them: the rest are my first time (adjusting for osmosis).
Alien
(1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
Damn what a good opening. Cuts right to the heart of the thing in no time at all.
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Some small, interesting details:
- Antarctic Traffic Control
- “Out of the Solomons” - evoking the islands on Earth
- I didn't learn until fairly recently that the Nostromo is named after a book by Joseph Conrad.
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The Nostromo crew’s first question about the LV-426 distress signal is “is it human?”; That says to me that they expected the chance that it wasn’t, which is going to segue right into one of my major questions for this series going forward: what do people in the Alien universe know about alien life?
Because as we see later, they’re not really surprised by the crashed ship or the Space Jockey, but they’re not familiar with it either. This specific sapient alien is an unknown quantity, but the presence of a sapient alien doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary for the crew. Those factors combined aren’t even worth noticing for Ash (I can kinda buy the rest of the crew shrugging it off, if they exist in a space where alien life isn’t a huge deal)
This implication is in total violation with everything else in the setting, and I have a feeling that tension will remain for a long time.
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Alien is one of those works that is so aesthetically strong that it basically dooms all its successors to either rote imitation or jarring discrepancy. I think the latter can be navigated, but not when there's this much money involved.
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No time wasted in this movie, the cuts are masterfully done to show the passage of time without ever getting confusing. No filler anywhere.
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Always love an engineering estimate gag.
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The landing on LV-426 is masterfully tense. And even if unintentionally so, it's a response to the sci-fi of Star Wars and Star Trek magicking away the fact that even the basic functions of a spacecraft are going to be highly technical, deliberate, and very dangerous.
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Lambert: “I like griping.”
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I feel like Sigourney Weaver went and just created a gender in that shot where Ripley has her sneakers up on the cockpit dashboard.
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Details about the Jockey’s ship: it’s asymmetrical (which is weird, even the Nostromo is symmetrical despite being much bulkier), the interior looks like the exterior of a xenomorph, the Jockey is fucking huge, and it’s still warm down in the lower levels.
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Ripley somehow being able to identify the difference between a “come here” and a “go away” signal from an alien broadcast is a stretch, but I’ll let it slide. I wonder how long the thing’s been on, anyway?
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My partner, on watching Kane investigate the eggs: “My brother in Christ what the fuck.”
I agree. For a movie that has everyone being pretty competent at their jobs, this is a really weird oversight (but also necessary for the movie to work, and he had no idea what they were so he gets a pass.)
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Jesus that is a strong acid. Basically an alkahest. My partner suggested that it might be a predator-deterrent, rather than a generalized defense like Kane says, and I like that theory.
The acid also means that xenos are extremely weak to chemical bases, a tactic that I don’t expect to show up in later films. (Spoilers: it does not)
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They dragged Kane through a dry ice snowstorm with a massive hole in his helmet. The facehugger might be making a seal? It’d have to be pumping in the suit’s air supply rather than external air.
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Ripley grills Ash after he opens up the door and my partner pointed out that the conversation sounds like she’s fishing for programmed responses, like the tests in Blade Runner. I think she’s already suspecting him to be an android.
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So I heard it as “Datas”, but apparently the Nostromo was launched from Thedus (at least according to the wiki), which EU material has pegged as Epsilon Reticuli. I want to keep EU stuff at a minimum for now but this does provide a good segue for me to talk about Space Map Shit™.
So LV-426 is in Zeta Reticuli (hilarious), which is 39.3 LY / 12 parsecs away from Earth; at 10 months to get back home that gives an extremely neat cruising speed of ~4 LY / month or ~1 LY a week. Which is ludicrously fast, to the point of going plaid, but also the Nostromo is shot such that it always feels slow and ponderous to the observer despite going faster than light.
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Kane’s increased appetite makes total sense, but it also doesn’t seem to be necessary: he barely gets a few bites in before the chestburster explodes. Makes me think that it’s a reaction of his own body, rather than one triggered by the xeno.
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Chestburster! Weird lil’ guy screaming and causing a mess. Looks so goofy now, but in a very charming way.
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No one says anything when they give Kane his space funeral. That says a lot more than even a filler goodbye.
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Now is the circuit burnt out in the 12 module, or did it get chewed through?
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Well, at least they’re splitting up to save the cat.
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Speaking of Jonesy: that cat must be immune to industrial toxins or something, living on a refinery ship filled with giant rooms with no discernable purpose that are definitely hazardous to biological life. Like there’s enough space in there that the temperature variation is causing moisture to condense (DON’T DRINK IT, DUMBASS)
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Mother admits when it doesn’t have enough data to give a good answer, which is a decidedly optimistic view of artificial intelligence.
I also find it interesting how her voice is distinctly elderly - that’s not something you typically get in modern AI assistant ladies for drearily predictable reasons.
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I like how the breaking point with Dallas in the vents is as simple as Lambert freaking out and giving him bad directions. One slip-up triggers the domino chain panic-spiral.
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In light of special order 937 and Ash’s insertion onto the team, does that mean that the Company knew about the Jockey ship ahead of time? Or was he was just put on the Nostromo for an unrelated reason and special order 937 is just standing Company policy?
This sort of shell game of “so and so actually knew X the entire time” has never been appealing to me: it introduces so many additional questions that can’t get good answers and didn’t need asked in the first place.
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More movies should do the casting roulette that this one did. If nothing else it's a way to give people shots at a big break.
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Holy epilepsy warning, Batman! The constant flashing lights in the end sequence are the one major beef I have with the movie, they make it legitimately hard to watch.
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Jonesy must be getting real sick and tired of being manhandled and kicked out of all his sleeping spots. When he was in the carrier, did the xeno leave him alone because it gave up with trying to get him out, or was it using him as bait?
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It’s weird to see the xeno sleeping (I presume it’s sleeping) on the shuttle at the end. It's the one part in the film where it acts like an ordinary animal.
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There’s a lacelike pattern on the helmet seal of Ripley’s suit. We get a good look at it in one closeup.
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The destruction of the Nostromo should not have been visible from the shuttle, considering that the shuttle was still going at lightspeed and the Nostromo was very suddenly not. But who cares? Spaceship go boom.
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The xeno isn't burned by the shuttle engines, it's knocked into deep space by them. And is also a toy.
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And there we have it. Perfect movie. It could have been a one-and-done, and perhaps it should have been, or it could have been spun off into an anthology series, and maybe that could of happened. To offer a bit of a presentiment of the future, this post series is going to be a front-row accelerated time-lapse of franchise decay.
But, that's for the future, and the great thing about sequels is that they can't actually diminish the originals. Shitty "remasters", on the other hand...
