Alien (1979)

Not having seen Alien for perhaps 15 years, I was thrilled to see how visually stunning it is. Clearly, it was made under the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: elegant/intricate camera movements, long takes, visionary sets. The vision of technology might appear old-fashioned (lots of buttons, blinking lights, the odd rackets), but it rarely elicits laughter. I can't say I am worried about the technical details of the sets/the story. What matters is that the places the film explores, a battered and grimy-looking space ship, evoke just the right associations and feelings (of unease and disorientation, mostly). During countless moments, the camera tracks the movements of characters walking through the space ship's quirky locations. Sometimes, there are no character to follow, just empty space(s) and perhaps the dreadful whirring or almost-audible humming of machines. Alien has a fairly traditional soundtrack (slightly experimental classical music) but it is the details of the environmental sounds I like best. What is more, the film often builds suspension from silence. It is a cliché to talk about the sense of claustrophobia of course, but here that word is actually in place. More than a few traditional action movie storytelling devices is put to use (crackled communication; counting down for hurried take-offs, alluring chases etc.). Somehow these familiar cinematic routes are a good counterpart to the quieter moments.

The monsters we assume hide somewhere abourd the ship we have only a slight knowledge about; we don't know exactly what kind of creatures these are, we just know that they all look very different and perhaps that they can do unimaginable things, like bursting through a man's stomach. We don't know their origin, and we don't know much about their reactions either.  One could perhaps compare these creatures to the bugs Cronenberg takes such a liking to: the alien life form that has some strange and unknown connection to humanity, revealing some surprising aspects of human behavior. This is to say that it is not the aliens themselves that are of interest in Alien, but rather, it is the way humans react to them, are fascinated by them. It might not be that far-fetched to say that Alien has some connections to the string of eco-critical sci-fi movies produced in the seventies (some of which I have written about on the blog quite recently). The crew on Nostromo, a commercial ship, are workers, not adventurers. We know there is an official mission (to ship metals to Earth). But as a weird signal is heard, they land on a planet inhabitad by a desolated ship, in which there are tons of eggs. You know the rest of the story. What keeps haunting the viewer is that the circumstances of the mission and the detour are not really evident. Is brining the aliens to Earth in fact the real mission?

The film is marred by a bunch of silly-ish moments (the lengthy chasing a cat) and a very annoyingly stereotypical characters, the Emotional Woman (maybe the intention is to pay homage to the brilliant B-movies of the 50's, I don't know). Beyond that, Alien is what sci-fi should be; food for imagination, food for associations.