I've mentioned the "Blind Spot" blogathon in which various movie bloggers pick 12 movies they haven't seen before that people generally think movie buffs should see, and watch them over the course of the year. As always, I've stated that I don't take part in it mostly because I don't know when I'm going to get around to watching all of the movies if I don't currently have them on DVD and don't know when they're going to show up on any channels. But one of the movies that would have been a "blind spot" for me is Alien. It's been in the FXM rotation for a while, and will be on again tomorrow at 1:00 PM, so recently I watched it to do a post on here.
The Nostromo is a merchant ship plying outer space sometime in the distant future, currently carring 20 million tons of ore. The crew of seven is in stasis since the distances traveled in outer space are so vast. But they're woken up by the ship's computer, Mother, when Mother detects a distress call from a nearby moon. The ship's crew is mostly not happy about having to take this detour since it's not normally part of their work, and on top of that they're complaining about pay: this isn't a happy Star Trek-type crew.
When they get to the planet, the captain, Dallas (Tom Skerritt) assembles an away team including Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) and Navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), leaving behind Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who is nominally in command now, over Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) and technicians Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto), who have some repairs to do on the Nostromo.
Unfortunately, the away mission doesn't go well. Oh, they find the source of the distress call and see some sort of creature that's been dead for a long time. There are also things that look like eggs, and Kane is stupid enough to take a closer look when one of the eggs opens up. Bad idea, as something comes out of the egg and attaches itself to Kane's face the way octopi do to humans in cartoons. The space suit didn't even help as the creature ate through the shield on the helmet.
Dallas and Lambert take Kane, still alive, back to the Nostromo, and Ripley has the sensible view that Kane is going to have to be sacrificed because who the heck wants to let this alien life form onto the ship. Besides, it's policy from the company, so it's not as if Ripley is doing this out of malice. She has to think about the ship. Ash, however, opens the airlock and lets all three crew members in.
They try to get the life-form off of Kane's face; trying to cut one of its arms causes the form to bleed some sort of acid that goes right through metal. Amazingly, however, the creature detaches itself as quickly as it attached itself in the first place. After a bit of time to recover, the crew decides to have one more meal before going back into stasis. At this meal, Kane suddenly goes into convulsions, with an alien life form breaking out of his stomach just like what happened on the surface of that moon. The life form escapes.
All the time I was watching Alien, I couldn't help but think of the movie The Thing From Another World and its various remakes. Crewmembers take an alien life form into their own environment, and the thing escapes, tormenting them from places where they can't see it. Not that Alien is a remake, of course. It's a story line that's tried and true, and unsurprisingly, it works well here. Further helping things is that the characters are realistic people and not just archetypes or tropes, all with realistic motivations for what they do.
If there was one thing that bothered me, it was a plot hole involving the emergency lighting, which was all strobes and such designed to further the suspense for the viewer, but make things pointlessly difficult for the people on the ship. If they were facing an emergency, you'd think they would want a well-marked way to safety and not strobe lights going off. (Yes, I know fire alarms for deaf people use strobe lights, but this wasn't that sort of strobe light.) I'm really being picky, though, and that's a minor flaw at most.
If, like me, you're one of the few people who hasn't seen Alien, do yourself a favor and watch it.
No comments:
Post a Comment