Alien

Kane with the "face-hugger" attached

Alien starts off showing the large panned out view of the mother ship and then slowly moves in and throughout the ship. As the camera finds the crew on board awakening, Kristin Thompson mentions in her chapter on Alien that Kane’s “waking first is also a way of making sure we can recognize him, since he spends most of his time in a space suit or in the concealing grip of the face-hugger” (288).

I found this opening interesting while at the same time confusing. It was interesting because it was silent with a large amount of ship detail being displayed. The opening allows for the viewer to have numerous thoughts enter their mind about the setting before reaching the cast asleep in the ship. However, at the same time it confused me because of the non-traditional nature the producer went about developing the characters. I felt that there was no one main character, which Thompson touches on in her piece about the Alien when she says, “The casting is quite ingenious, in that it avoids using any stars who would obviously be expected to survive to the end” (284).

The crew on the unknown planet where the alien is found

Alien is an intriguing film because the audience does not realize that the cast

will begin to die until over halfway through the film. It keeps the audience guessing which character, if any, will survive. According to Thompson, this type of plot “presents a challenge to filmmakers, in that audience involvement depends to a considerable degree on both suspense and surprise” (284). In the case of Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, who did an excellent job of attacking the challenge until the alien killed Dallas. At this point, I realized that Ripley would be the only remaining survivor because of her intensity in dealing with the situation when everyone else seemed overwhelmed by it.

Alien discription

In my opinion, the alien’s depiction is quite strange because of the way it is formed. The face-sucking alien that attaches to Kane’s face is not the alien that appears in the remaining scenes of the film. The alien is reproduced within Kane’s body in an unordinary fashion and Stephen Mulhall speaks about this in his response to the film when he says that “in order to reproduce, it must insert a long, flexible member into the host’s body through one of that body’s orifices, and deposit a version of itself within its host’s torso where it develops to the point at which it must force itself out again” (20). This act is not expected because all the other characters feel that he is fine until the alien forces his way out of Kain at the dinner table. This is the first time the audience sees the alien and when they do they see this very tiny, evil looking object. One thing I found interesting about the alien in the film was that it never had the same appearance. For example, the alien comes out of Kane as this tiny object then in the air ducts when Dallas tries to kill it, it appears as this massive round object with this large face. Furthermore, at the end of the movie when Ripley is in the small ship alone after the explosion, the alien appears hidden in the background but has these long tentacles similar to an octopus. These different looks that we see from the alien adds to the suspense of the viewer because they are not sure what will appear or when exactly it will appear.

Cinematography

The camera views in the movie also intrigue the viewer. I noticed camera angles in situations where the music would get intense and the characters would become more aware and freightened that the angles would increase. By increase I mean pan out down long hallways to see the character at the end then zoom in real close to the face to see the expression on their faces.

Also, the camera view was in first person at the end of the film when Ripley is looking for the alien. This was a way for the director to say that this person is now filming because they are the only remaining human alive.

One last camera angle I want to touch on is the wide-angle shot that we see when the mother ship explodes. It is an angle that allows for the entire explosion to be seen, which looks like a nuclear bomb exploded. Then at the end we see the small ship with Ripley just disappear into a vast space that exists in the universe. This shows that a small ship compares in comparison to the massive amounts of endless space.

Mulhall, Stephen. “Kane's Son, Cain's Daughter.” On Film. London: Routledge, 2002. 12-32.

Print.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Alien. 1979. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Thompson, Kristin. "Alien." Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

283-306. Print