Film Review - Alien (1979)

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Alien is a Sci-Fi horror film with the simplest of plots going. A bunch of people are trapped with a monster, the monster slowly picks them off one by one. Such a simple idea in the right way creates something iconic and long-lasting, which has been ingrained in our psych and probably will be for a very long time. 

Ridley Scott the director of 'Alien' managed to create an environment which wasn't like other futurist films out in the period. instead of creating a positive, utopian idea of space travel he managed to create a space which was inhabited by rough miners in a civilization completely comfortable with space travel and long periods of isolation, this is continuously brought back to focus. "Scott, aided by his special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, and many others who deserve to be mentioned but can't be, creates in the confined space of his main set a sweaty little world on its own that responds ideally to his obsessive close-ups and restless, magnifying style. Hurt has said that it was more a matter of reacting than acting, and one can well understand what he means." (Malcom. 2017)

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"What’s especially interesting is the materials art director Roger Christian drew upon to help create the Nostromo. Instead of filling the ship with blinking, unfamiliar doodads that hearken towards a dated idea of space-age technology, Christian and director Ridley Scott drew upon World War II bomber parts to create the interiors and outdated cathode ray tube TVs to serve as the ship’s displays. Combine the grimy, shopworn look with the film’s abundance of natural lighting—and the many shadows it casts across the ship’s narrow corridors—and you’ve got a realistic setting that helps achieve the sense of claustrophobia Scott hoped to conjure." (Colburn. 2017)

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The preliminary Sketchwork and concept for the film began exactly in the same way but on a much smaller scale. This is an interesting point, the original idea was for there to be a small ship, a small planet, small crew and a medium sized creature. Aspects of this have been exaggerated in the final cut, the Nostromo is gargantuan, 800 feet long. this environment is huge, especially for a crew of only 7 including the cat. This makes the set seem daunting, ominous and terrifying because it is unknown and isolating. The creatures environment, which is the planet and the crashed ship which dwarfs the landscape is like a religious icon paid to this creature. What have they let themselves in for? There is a clear divide between these two worlds. "When a draft was handed to artist Ron Cobb for preliminary sketchwork, he described it thus: "A small, modest little ship with a small crew land on a small planet. They go down a small pyramid and shake up a medium-sized creature. That's about it." And that was about it, except with "small, modest, little" replaced by "fucking huge": the ship, commercial towing vehicle Nostromo, ended up being 800 feet long, and the "small pyramid" became a derelict spacecraft as big as a skyscraper." (Newman. 2017) 

Bibliography:

Malcolm, D. (2017). Derek Malcolm's Alien review from 1979. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/oct/13/derek-malcolm-alien-review [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Newman, K. (2017). Alien. [online] Empire. Available at: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/alien/review/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Colburn, R. (2017). Cite a Website - Cite This For Me. [online] News.avclub.com. Available at: https://news.avclub.com/let-s-take-a-moment-to-appreciate-alien-s-set-design-1798262027 [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Illustrations:

Figure 1 - (Alien, Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips, Movie Poster 1979)

Figure 2 -(Alien, Ridley Scott, Movie Still 1979)

Figure 3 - (Alien, H.R. Giger, Concept Art 1979)