I'm working my way through a self-created list of 200 movies I've never seen before. Check out the list
HERE if you missed it.
Alien
1979
Every movie ended up on my Never Seen It list because I had certain expectations for it. So the question week after week could be, if I wanted it to be, "Did this movie meet my expectations?"
My expectation for
Alien was that it was going to be a dense sci-fi adventure featuring a deadly creature from another planet. The creature was there, and he ("he"?) was indeed deadly and from another planet. But I think I was wrong in one key aspect. This wasn't a science fiction flick. This was a stone cold fucking horror movie.
Apparently, this had a lot to do with Ridley Scott's direction. When he got on board, he indicated that he was keen to make this movie "the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre of science fiction." There is plenty of jargon, sure, but the plot isn't dependent on it. No, the plot boils down to a monster, and the prey he is hunting, one by one. It's classic horror tropes with a backdrop of robots and spaceships.
I would even go as far as to say that the horror tropes are successful—are fresh and exciting—
because of the science fiction coating. As in any horror movie, there are
jump scares. But the most famous jump scare in this movie is not just a monster suddenly entering the scene. It's a monster entering the scene by
emerging from a character's stomach. There's a fictional scientific reason explanation for this incident, involving an alien attaching itself to the victim's face and implanting an egg, which eventually hatches. But that's not important. The gore is important. A character was fucking
murdered because an alien popped out of his fucking stomach! Holy shit!
Now, all that being said, I should probably admit that horror is probably my least favorite movie genre, and so my praising of
Alien's horror aspects comes with a very large grain of salt. It doesn't really matter if
Alien is a good horror movie when the viewer doesn't like horror movies.
In general, I think I find the concept of horror movies to be a little too simplistic or senseless. I want film, especially when I'm wearing my critical eye, to have some form of deeper meaning, something that I can chew on and mull over in the ensuing days. I typically find that the horror genre usually becomes "can these people survive?" and there is no rhyme or reason to it. This is reflective of our base needs as humans—the need for survival, for safety—but that's not enough for me in the context of consuming movies. On Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, horror is stuck near the bottom of the pyramid, while I'm just looking for some self-actualization.
Obviously, there are many, many exceptions to this (my favorite:
The Cabin in the Woods, in which a horror movie examines and deconstructs the very purpose of horror genres, doing my work for me). I don't think
Alien is an exception. It achieves exactly what it means to, and does it so, so well. But it still boils down to "this looks really cool and I hope the hero lives."
This is only the third Never Seen It entry and I feel like I've already said this four times, but here ya go again: I'm over-thinking this. That's the point. I am writing thousands of words about a movie I just saw. I want to be able to write more than "weaver in just her underwear was hawt." I want to examine under the surface level. And when a movie lacks anything below the surface, then I'm going to write about that too. I'm writing about it now.
Or maybe I'm just too stupid to see any deeper meaning. If there was a higher purpose than "this creature is terrifying and here's how he kills," then I didn't get it. That would probably be the worst thing I could do, blabber on about how this wasn't a very complex film, i.e. pretending I'm smart, but really I'm dumb and pessimistic.
It would be a hell of a lot easier to just sit back with a bucket of popcorn and enjoy the scares, so fuck it, let's just do it.
Alien was a thrill-ride. The tension during the incredibly slow build-up was palpable, and the scares were worth the wait. There was equal giddy pleasure in seeing the hero prevail as it was seeing the supporting characters get picked off one by one by an all-time bad guy. You became invested in this story without the movie having to hold your hand through it. The stakes felt real, even in the fact of late-'70s special effects and fantastical set pieces. I felt legitimate horror when a man's stomach exploded.
See? This is fun. There are some movies that should be watched like this. You don't need to watch
Alien to achieve some greater understanding of life. You need to watch
Alien for the adrenaline rush.
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Director and Writer
We mentioned Ridley Scott already. He was a director that I would've known by name, but would not have been able to say which movies he directed. As always, that says more about me than about him. We'll be seeing Scott again in a couple months, when we discuss
Blade Runner.
I don't think I'm at the point where I'd be able to point to specific parts of a movie and say, "Wow, the director did a really good job with that," but I can definitely say with full confidence that the movie as a whole was really well shot. As a horror movie skeptic, I'll say that a deft touch is required to at least make it worth it, because the best (or least bad) horror is the horror of the unknown. You need to be able to sense that the monster is around the corner, without actually showing him. Doing that successfully requires a good director. So as far as I can tell, Scott did a good job here. (The alien is on screen for a total of about four minutes, by the way.)
The writing helps too—but again, I'm not at the point where I can say "this particular section of the movie was a success due to the writing, not the directing." Anyways, a dude named Dan O'Bannon wrote the script, or at least received screenwriting credit. Screenwriter Ronald Shusett collaborated (he was the one who came up with the idea of the alien in the stomach).
I did get a kick out of reading how excited these guys were to be writing this script. O'Bannon later admitted that he "stole from everybody" when writing this, but I didn't take this to be a malicious thing. I think he meant there were sci-fi tropes, and that he took them and made them new. Nothing wrong with that.
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Actors and Actresses
I think I prefer movies where I don't have much to say in this section. Knowing/loving/hating an actor is only a distraction. Give me a movie with all unknowns, and I'll love it.
This is a crazy thing to say with someone like Sigourney Weaver in the cast, but that's how it goes when you're reading bullshit from someone like me. Looking over her filmography, there's definitely a few movies I've seen before (hey, there's
The Cabin in the Woods again... she was in that?), but nothing that I can definitively say that I remember her from that movie for certain. Except one... but we'll get to that in a different section.
I wonder if it's fair to say that she is best known for
Alien. I can only say what her Wikipedia page says, and they agree: "She is primarily known for her role as Ellen Ripley in the
Alien franchise." So there you have it.
It's interesting in retrospect that Weaver doesn't get top billing in
Alien. That honor goes to
Tom Skerritt, who plays Dallas. I have no idea what movie-biz mechanisms determine billing order, but apparently Skerritt was offered the role before Ridley Scott was made director, and only after a second offer did he accept. Maybe that second offer sweetened the deal with top billing. Or maybe it's because this was Weaver's breakout role, and she hadn't earned that top billing yet.
In any case, it seems like people are way more likely to know Weaver than Skerritt these days. Apparently Skerritt was in
Top Gun, but man, that movie kind of sucked, and I don't recognize him from that probably because the characters were wearing faces masks for a large chunk of the film. He was also in
M*A*S*H and
Steel Magnolias, both of which we'll get to!
John Hurt plays Kane, the misspelling who has the alien pop out of him. A couple interest tidbits. First, he plays Ollivander in the
Harry Potter movies (if I EVER miss any of the HP cast during this series, let me know!). Second, he apparently reprises his role of Kane in
Spaceballs, which features the line "it's happening again!" before another alien pops out of him. Sounds like I made the right choice keeping
Spaceballs off the Never Seen It list...
Ian Holm, the asshole-turned-android, sounds like an actor I should know, right? Ah, okay, he was the Hobbit. Not interested. (Apparently he is in
Garden State as well.)
Finally, did you know someone actually played the role of "Alien"? The actor's name was Bolaji Badejo. He was six-feet-ten, and a member of the casting team met him at a bar, figuring his height would make him perfect for the role. Shit's crazy—this was his
only film credit. He returned to his home of origin, Nigeria, after acting in
Alien, and he never returned for any of the sequels because they used puppetry and animation in the sequels.
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Finding Dory
We've only seen
Alien once, but Pam and I have seen
Finding Dory about 42 times, so we were kind of shocked to discover that
Finding Dory has a very explicit
Alien homage. Remember the scene in which the Alien is being tracked by Lambert on the computer screen, and she screams as she realizes that it's heading right toward Dallas? That's parodied in
Dory (in that movie, Kaitlin Olson and Ty Burrell are whales who do the screaming).
It's always so strange to find out that something you are intimately familiar with has been a parody all along. I don't know how many people on earth have seen
Finding Dory 42 times before seeing
Alien, but I am one of them. I can't decide whether this cheapens the
Finding Dory scene (nothing in children's movies is original, apparently), or makes it even stronger (knowing that a children's movie is referencing a very gory adult movie).
I suppose I should've guessed that there would be an
Alien reference, though, since the disembodied voice at Dory's aquarium is voiced by Sigourney Weaver (playing herself, as in "I'm Sigourney Weaver, and welcome to the Marine Life Institute," and so on).
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Connections to Other Movies from the Blog
I thought about making this an ongoing bit, where I try to find connections between the current movie and the previous movies covered for Never Seen It. But then I realized that by the time I got halfway through the project, I'd be trying to compare each film to one hundred other films, and that would be impossible, right?
But let's see how long we can keep the conceit going before it gets too unwieldy. How is
Alien connected to
Ace Ventura? I guess they both deal with secret identities in some sense—Ash being exposed as a robot in this one, and in
Ace Ventura... well, we already talked about the poorly handled transphobia. And
Alien vs.
Airplane!? Both feature an aircraft crash-landing...? Okay, this is a lot harder than I thought.
I should also mention that I've already talked about another Ridley Scott movie,
Gladiator, though that conversation didn't even touch on who directed it (whoops). I also spoke about
The Last Boy Scout, which was directed by Ridley's brother Tony Scott. That was probably the worst movie I've watched for any reason connected to this blog, so the less said about Ridley Scott's brother, the better, I guess.
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Connections to Real Life
Pam and I immediately sat up when Weaver started mentioning "quarantine protocol," during the section when they bring Kane back with an alien attached to his face. When Robot Ash let Kane in anyway, against protocol, it hit pretty hard, since we've been "quarantined" for weeks now, and I'm definitely at the point where I'm judging people HARD for not following social distancing. We've been making sure not to get near people on the slight chance that they have an invisible virus. Imagine not giving a shit if you are near someone on the 100% chance that he has an alien attached to his face! Fuck Robot Ash!!!
I'll throw in my regular anti-capitalist statement here as well. Note how the characters keep referring to "the company" that they all work for, the faceless monolith that is calling the shots. Note too that it is eventually revealed that this company values profit over human life (bringing back an alien is more important than human safety). The circumstances might be exaggerated, but is this different than any other corporation in real life? Do you really think employees' safety is the top priority of every goddamn company that sent you an email claiming as much? Do you really think that CEOs would blink twice if the economy was reopened too soon at the cost of millions of lives?
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Sequels, Spin-offs, Etc.
There is a lot of bullshit I could write about here, but I'm a little reluctant to, honestly. I didn't love
Alien, but I liked it enough that I think there's a possibility I'd watch some of the other films in the franchise. Let's go through them very quickly, though. Just know that I purposefully didn't do much research.
Aliens was the first sequel, in which Ellen Ripley goes back to that moon they found the alien originally, and fought a whole bunch of other aliens (directed by James Cameron).
Alien 3 featured Ripley fighting another alien completely, and dying to prevent her employer from bring the alien back to earth (sounds like a continuation of that subtle anti-capitalism theme I saw in
Alien). Fuck... I spoiled that for myself.
There's more. Ripley was cloned and brought back to life in
Alien Resurrection, all so that she could... fight more aliens, I guess. There are two
Alien Vs. Predator films, but I'm afraid to even touch those links, because
Predator is on my Never Seen It list, and I don't want to spoil ANYTHING.
Finally, there are two prequels. The first was
Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott, and written—intriguingly, I might add—by Damon Lindelof, the showrunner for
Lost,
The Leftovers, and
Watchmen, all of which I loved deeply. So out of all these movies, I'd probably watch
Prometheus first. 73% on Rotten Tomatoes? Seems about right for a Lindelof project—plenty of people loving it, but a sizable portion absolutely fucking hating it.
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IMDB Trivia
Holy shit,
there is a lot of so-called trivia for this movie. I can't read it all, I'm sorry. But I read enough to pick out the best and the worst. I'm also adding one other section, called ALMOST CASTED (WHO THE FUCK CARES), because every single IMDB Trivia section features a few "___ was originally considered for the character of ___" and I really don't give a fuck.
BEST TRIVIA: "The blue laser lights that were used in the alien ship's egg chamber were borrowed from the Who." This is the most badass thing the Who ever did, besides drinking themselves to death, and
escaping child pornography charges.
WORST TRIVIA: "The scene where Ash is decapitated caused an usher in London to faint." Citation needed.
ALMOST CASTED (WHO THE FUCK CARES): "Harrison Ford turned down the role of Captain Dallas." Who the fuck cares?
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Book Club
After I wrote the introductory paragraphs above, I found myself talking about this movie as part of a discussion at book club. The book in question was
Bowlaway, which has absolutely nothing to do with
Alien. However, I was the only one that enjoyed the book, which put me in the weird position of having to defend it against everyone. And I found myself explaining that I liked the book for the same reason that I
didn't love
Alien.
The ultimate question becomes: Is it enough to just enjoy an entertainment because it tells a fun story, or does there have to be something extra, something below the surface, something that makes you think? I made the argument above that when it comes to film, maybe just telling a gripping story is not enough.
Alien was fun, but it didn't say anything deeper than "this is scary and I hope Weaver wins."
Same with
Bowlaway, but I made the opposite argument, that
Bowlaway was just a simple story about a family through the generations, owning a bowling alley, and my god that was
enough for me. But why is it okay for
Bowlaway and not for
Alien?
Honestly, I think it comes down to the medium for each. I give books a pass because I read a lot fewer of them, compared to watching movies, watching TV, listening to music. The critical eye is not turned toward books as much as it is for other media. I'm content to just sit back and enjoy a good novel. I'm less content to do that for a movie, especially if I'm going to turn around and write three thousands words about it.
Anyways, about half of the (five or so) people who are reading this probably also attended that book club meeting, so I figured it was worth mentioning.
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Unique Perspectives
This section won't show up in every Never Seen It blog post, but hopefully it will for the majority. I want to get someone else's take on each movie. Nothing too involved, just a little back and forth about something that I wouldn't normally write about.
I leaned on Pam again for her perspective, and our short conversation on FB messenger briefly covered two wildly different ideas.
Joe: I thought it was interesting how this became more of a horror movie than a sci-fi movie, and I wanted to ask this question before we get to any of the more traditional horror movies on my list. And I'm asking you because you've admitted to being afraid of horror movies in the past. What made this movie scary to you?
Pam: I actually wasn’t scared of this movie, as it turns out. But when I thought I’d be scared (before they actually showed the alien) I think the setup was scary, with the music and set design that they used. I felt the same way with the movie
Signs. They did a really good job of making it spooky, but then once they showed the alien, it wasn’t scary to me anymore.
Joe: So what makes a movie typically scary, then? Is it the fear of the unknown?
Pam: Yes probably fear of the unknown. Also, like, how likely could what is happening in the movie happen to a normal person? (yes I know they are movies) but I’d more so be scared of a demonic possession movie or an alien invasion of earth movie than a movie about astronauts in space because that would never happen to me... does that make sense? Or even something like
Jaws for that matter... since we go in the ocean haha. That would be scary to me. Jumpy scares too... but everyone gets scared by that stuff, right?
Joe: Well let's ask the opposite then. Why do you think someone who claims to not get scared of scary movies doesn't? Is it just an act, and they really do get scared? Or what? I'm asking as someone who doesn't usually get scared of scary movies, but I'm interested your opinion on that.
Pam: I believe them... I’m just a wuss. I have a very active imagination... maybe that’s why I scare more easily. Plus I guess(?) I believe in ghosts and stuff, so someone who doesn’t could easily just be like, this is completely fake and would never happen because ghosts aren’t real.
Joe: I don't think you're a wuss, and it's great to have an imagination. I guess I'm wondering whether someone who lacks the ability to be affected by a movie like this on a visceral level is missing out. There were parts of
Alien that were gruesome, exciting, surprising, etc. But I was never
scared. Would I have had a better experience with it if fear was part of this too?
Pam: Perhaps... I mean being scared can be fun. Who has more fun than at a haunted house? The people who give into the scares or the ones who are like, "you can’t scare me!"? I’d say the first group of people.
Joe: That's why it's almost embarrassing to say "That didn't scare me," because, like, you just sound like an asshole if you say that. I want to have fun. And I did with
Alien, but I still held it at arm's length a little bit, I think. If I was legitimately worried about Sigourney Weaver's life, then maybe it would've been a better movie. I dunno. Anyways, anything else you wanna talk about?
Pam: Can we talk about Sigourney Weaver’s underwear?? Like... how can anyone find wearing underwear like that, running around a spaceship, kicking ass, comfortable?! Like I literally just ordered different underwear because my ass is too big for them and they fit in the same exact manner as Sigourney Weaver’s did. GARB. Maybe it’s just me. The sensation of any article of clothing falling down (strapless bra, underwear, socks) is just completely irritating to me.
Joe: I could talk about Sigourney Weaver in her underwear all damn day. Maybe cryosleep chambers make you gain a little weight.
Pam: Oh yea her ass was just so fat from the cryosleep chamber her underwear just wouldn’t stay up. Good theory. GARB. If anything that would probably make you lose weight... don’t people actually do that—like cold chambers for their “wellness benefits” aka nothing LOL. they debunked that on that show I watched
How to Cheat Death or something...
Joe: Okay, alright, bad theory. It just caught me off guard that someone would have something bad to say about S.W.'s butt.
Pam: Not her butt...just the way the underwear fit. So her butt...crack, really LOL
Joe: I wonder if that was a conscious choice by the costume department. Let's say it was—what does that tell us about Ellen Ripley?
Pam: Maybe it was a 70s thing...?
Joe: Unfortunately,
the history of underwear stops at the 1950s.
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Final Thoughts
It's interesting—I came away from my experience with
Alien thinking that it was a smart and gripping but ultimately shallow thrill ride. It's possible that I still think that. But I have to admit that
Alien has stayed on my mind since I've watched it a few days ago, and that
has to say something about the movie.
Maybe it's just because I needed to write all this, and that's why I've been thinking about it. If that's the case, then fine. Great. I have an excuse to appreciate a movie more than I normally would. Sounds good to me.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
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NEXT TIME: We watch
American History X, which has something to do with Nazis I guess, which should be a fucking blast putting in the context of today's politics...
