For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Day 4 prompt was Set in Space. There are not a whole lot of good scary movies that are set in space. Sure, we could have picked Jason X of The Cube, Event Horizon, or maybe one of the classic outer space Scifi’s, but we went with the one and only, Alien (1979).
Storyline
In the distant future, the commercial spaceship “Nostromo” crew is on its way home when the crew picks up a distress call from a distant moon. The team must investigate, and the spaceship descends on the small planetoid afterward. After a rough landing, three crew members leave the spaceship to explore the area on the planetoid. At the same time as the crew discovers a hive colony of some unknown creature, the ship’s computer deciphers the message to be a warning, not a distress call. When one of the eggs is disturbed, the crew realizes that it is not alone on the spaceship and it must deal with the consequences.
Our Thoughts on Alien
Firstly, it has been a very long time since I have seen this movie. Right before watching it, we watched an episode of Aksoka and the difference is night and day with the aesthetic. Alien is gritty, grimy, wet, and just old and dirty-looking. That is the intended theme but also makes it tough to watch. It’s dark on the screen. Maybe Ridley Scott did it that way to cover up the inadequacies at the time with sets, props, etc.
To me, the movie just does not stand up well to the test of time. So much has been done in the movies, and I am not talking about CGI. In this movie, the plot is rather drab, the character development is okay but not top-notch. Of course, Weaver’s character will get a huge boost in the sequels that follow this one it was just a bit blah.
I say all of this because I am a big Ridley Scott fan. I like most of his work and I am looking forward to the Neoploean film layer this year.
5.5 out of 10
Trivia
To get Jones the cat to react fearfully to the descending Alien, a German Shepherd was placed in front of him with a screen between the two, so the cat wouldn’t see it at first. The screen was then suddenly removed to make Jones stop advancing and start hissing.
Ridley Scott cites three movies as the shaping influences on his movie: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for their depiction of outer space, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for its treatment of horror.
