Alien - Designed to Survive

my rating: Nathan's rating:

It's been far too long since I saw the original Alien to do any kind of analysis of what the "Director's Cut" (recently released to cinemas) adds to it. But I can say that it holds up quite well for a nearly-quarter-century-old sci-fi thriller. Thanks to the haze of being half-remembered, it's still suspenseful, it's well-acted, and it even still looks good, despite the raised expectations of a 21st century movie watcher. H.R. Giger's designs deserve much of the credit for its visually longevity. The movie was all-new to Nathan - who'd seen a couple of the later sequels - and he was suitably impressed with it.

The one aspect that kept reminding me that the film had been made in the 1970's was its treatment of computers. Here's a society with interstellar transportation, robotics, etc. and their ship's computer is barely distinguishable from Eliza (an artificial intelligence exeriment of the era in which the film was made) and the computer's displays look like... late 1970's computer graphics, with low-resolution, low-frame-rate wireframe images, and streams of characters, teletype-style. At least 2001: A Space Odyssey managed to transcend the technology of its era, by simulating computer displays - impossible with any reasonable budget at the time - using film-based effects. I don't get a nostalgic grin seeing that film, but seeing this one I couldn't help fondly recalling my old Atari.

Although the story isn't especially imaginative (and even in 1979, it was following a lot of established horror-movie conventions), it isn't overshadowed by lots and lots of action. The story begins very slowely, and the alien itself stays off-camera most of the time, which adds to the quality of the suspense... especially as contrasted with the focus on action, action!, ACTION!! in its sequels, and even "cerebral" fare like the recent Matrix sequels. On one hand, I want to blame Alien for helping to revive the sci-fi/monster genre, and leading to its sequels, Predator, and the like. But it did so by doing the genre well, and I can't really fault it for that.