A horrible dream of... smothering?

Born from metal cocoons: the crew awakens
I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks going through elements of the Alien Quadrilogy Blu-ray set.  I haven't dug into the extras at any length, and I've generally avoided Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, about which I have -- at best -- ambivalent feelings.  But I've watched and rewatched the first two films, rightly acknowledged as masterpieces in their respective genres and in sci-fi generally, and both looking gorgeous in the new hi-def transfers.  Alien shimmers with all the beauty of its anamorphic widescreen imagery, rendered with the painterly eye of director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Derek Vanlint.  Aliens, originally shot on a grainy stock in the less-epic 1.85:1 aspect ratio (James Cameron has said he chose this because he was uncomfortable working with anamorphic lenses at that time), has never been as visually striking a film as its predecessor, but it looks here as good as it ever has: Cameron personally oversaw the digital transfer, and a judicious application of digital noise reduction has resulted in a clean, crisp image that sacrifices none of the image detail.

Alien and Aliens represent, collectively, one of the turning points in my young moviegoing life.  Like millions in my generation, I'd been deeply impressed by the first three Star Wars films.  When, in 1987, I saw the Alien films as videocassette rentals, it was as though I'd seen the next step in science-fiction movies.  If Star Wars was the ecstatic, childlike, whiz-bang Buck Rogers spectacle par excellence, Alien and Aliens were movies for grownups.  Dark, brooding, brutally violent, and characterized by H.R. Giger's sexually-suggestive bio-mechanical designs, the Alien films were like nothing I'd seen before.  Watching them as an impressionable, 12-year-old sci-fi geek (and budding cinephile) was almost a religious experience.

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and an unseen guest

There are several broad strokes that stand out most strongly for me in Alien -- in its design, its plot, and its themes.  There is, of course, the now-famous "truckers in space" conceit, derived somewhat from John Carpenter's Dark Star: the inhabitants of the spacecraft are not your typical clean-pressed, uniform-wearing, uber-competent military operatives, but are blue-collar types, weary, interested primarily in money and their own day-to-day concerns.  These are characters we can understand and empathize with: they are not ultra-fit "Right Stuff" candidates, but regular working schmoes who happen to be in outer space.  Another major story current is the omnipresence of suggestive sexual metaphors, and of biology generally.  From the cracked egg on its poster (which oddly looks more hard-boiled than the actual version used in the film), to the riblike interior of the derelict spacecraft and the three lovingly-crafted life-cycle stages of the alien itself, biology and anatomy and reproduction are oppressively constant.  The overall tone of the film is organic in a way seldom seen in science fiction, though Alien's aesthetic has been copied innumerable times since its release three decades ago.  (Ridley Scott's ingenious use of actual animal innards to dress the facehugger makes it, to this day, probably the most convincing piece of alien biology ever seen in a film.)  Bodies, organs, fluids (that acid that almost rips through the ship), sex, and birth, are all depicted as innately threatening, foreign, and unnerving.  Although the alien is often depicted as a terrifying Other, at other points in the film strong parallels are drawn between its anatomy and our own.  The creative decision -- made, according to his commentary track, by writer Dan O'Bannon -- to keep the facehugger a fleshlike color, and the eerily humanlike character of its fingers, reinforce this similarity.  When we see the facehugger latched onto John Hurt's Kane, it seems oddly at home there -- not so alien after all.

Although the heroine, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), has her share of grim, sexually-charged close encounters with the beast (particularly in the climactic scene aboard the escape shuttle, where she strips down to her underwear, blissfully unaware that the creature's massive phallic head is nestled in the machinery right beside her), it's a male character, Kane, who experiences the most shocking violations.  In a sort of rape scene, Kane is overpowered by the face-hugger and has its tubular ovipositor thrust down his throat.  Later, he is torn apart in a grisly parody of birth -- a comparison made explicit when the android doctor, Ash, quietly refers to the creature as "Kane's son" (a line I had never noticed until this latest round of re-viewing the film).  The justly-celebrated dinner/birth/death scene retains its power to shock for several reasons.  The effects are convincing, but what really puts the realism over the top is Hurt's superb performance here.  A brilliantly accomplished actor, Hurt seems through most of his screentime in Alien to be merely "playing himself" (whatever that means); certainly it is a far less flamboyant, "actor-ish" performance than his justly celebrated turns in works like the BBC's I, Claudius, or 1989's Scandal.  But his depiction of a brutal seizure in this scene is absolutely convincing -- every twitch, groan, and scream, feels utterly real.  And that's an essential bit of acting to ground the whole sequence, which otherwise would become laughable.

Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Dallas (Tom Skerritt) react convincingly

The dinner-table sequence is also noteworthy for its effective use of reaction shots.  A point I constantly like to underline is the significance of reaction shots in establishing the emotional tone of a scene.  Audience members take their cue from the way actors are perceiving the events that unfold onscreen; without those cues we can be left suspended in a sort of limbo.  In this scene, Scott makes heavy use of the full ensemble, allowing them all to play off of the abominable carnage they're witnessing.  The reaction shots not only have the collective effect of enhancing our own horror, but they also quietly underline the dominant traits of several of the character: Veronica Cartwright's Lambert, expressing most purely the fear and disgust we in the audience fear, as a gout of blood is showered over her; Yaphet Kotto's Parker, immediately moved to violence, grabbing a knife and preparing to stab the newborn alien; and Ian Holm's Ash, more concerned than upset, taking pains to protect the creature and thereby foreshadowing his betrayal later on in the film.

Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) and Ash (Ian Holm)

The film's cast, of course, is superb; and another of the chief impressions you take away after a viewing is the way Scott is able to capture the sense of multiple people in a room, feeling the tension, strung out and worried, on the verge of snapping but trying to hang on.  Again and again Scott stacks the frame with big chunks of his distinguished ensemble, and the landscape of faces is invariably fascinating to observe.  After Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is killed in the white-knuckle airduct sequence, it's remarkable how quickly the walls seem to be closing in.  Where, before, we had a large enough ensemble that you could never quite fit them all into the same frame, suddenly you're left with four people in a single room, trying to find a way to survive.  The mid-second-act tone, of thoughtful individuals trying to solve a difficult problem, is replaced by panic and infighting and near-disintegration.

The crew of the Nostromo

There's lots more to write about Alien and its sequel; I'll be revisiting both films shortly.

 

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