Buffista Movies 3: Panned and Scanned
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
The pacing was part of what made it so good. It's definitely slow by today's standards, though.
Yeah, it's hard to watch the original after having seen everything that's been influenced by it.
The ship looks like people actually live there and work there.
That was pretty awesome. I said out loud, "Dude, they had one hell of a set."
Alien was all "atmospheric" and "claustrophobic." It's most famous for the scene of the alien bursting from the guy's chest--back then it freaked people out. Now of course it happens all the time.
And I can finally appreciate the scene in
Spaceballs
! The actor did look familiar, and I checked, and they
did
get John Hurt for the parody, which is awesome. "Oh no...not again."
Also, the designs of the alien and the alien ship were done by H R Geiger, who has a very... distinctive style.
Oh, yeah. I definitely appreciated the design of things. Impressive for 1979.
(sneaking in, because I had a personal stake in Alien, and then sneaking out)
What Robin said. Also, hard to go wrong with the basic tactic: people in enclosed place with something that wants to kill them, and they can't leave.
Also? His characters weren't pretty. His actors weren't pretty. They looked like people. They looked rough and three-day-bearded and funky and they could be unpleasant to each other, and yet...
It's one of my favourite films on earth, for several reasons.
(slips back out)
I think the big thing was that Alien was for grown-ups. An R-rated horror/SF movie, 2 years after Star Wars solidified the impression that SF was childish escapism. And then Alien comes along with actual adult motives and conflicts and lots of paranoia.
Plus: scary.
It's (barely) worth seeing It! The Terror from Beyond Space just to see that there is occasionally some value in remakes. I mean, Alien is much better, but it's funny to see a cheesy '50's version of the same story.
And the monster does not look like a guy in a suit
Well, except for the big reveal at the end, which is such a let-down.
we don't get to see that city featured too often onscreen, unfortunately
What,
The Whole Nine Yards
didn't scratch that itch for you?
I just saw Hellbent. A pretty fun example of the horror genre, plus gay! I had figured "shocks, but no visual/impression to linger"
But then there was the thing.
If you have an eye squick, stay away. Otherwise, it's good fun, and the leads are all charismatic, and mostly pretty.
Janet Jason Leigh
This error is taking me to some strange places. That would be "Jennifer" not "Janet". Heh.
Oh, another notable thing about
Alien
is that we were all surprised by how long the Token Black Guy survived. Brother outlived the
captain.
What I like is how different
Alien
and
Aliens
are from each other, and yet still both good.
Concerning Ripley, keep in mind that this was the 1970s. Women did not have anything like social equality. The "women's lib" movement was still caught between "women who want equality with men want to BE men (the word dyke was used a lot)" and "hhheeyyy, the fillies want to have sex...."
Women's roles in movies had just started moving away from the helpless bystander/victim, but only in the non-genre movies. And then, the female characters were mostly portrayed as hysterical, neurotic, incapable. In sci-fi and horror, women were still the ones that screamed a lot and had to be protected. For all Lucas' other faults, Princess Leia actually gave a new type of female character to the sci-fi/fantasy world.
I mean, for other movies that came out in 1979, you've got
10, Kramer vs. Kramer,
and
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
It was only the year before that
An Unmarried Woman
came out, which showed (*gasp!*) a woman actually able to live without being married.
So yeah, Ripley's maybe not the most three-dimensional character ever, but props for the time.
What I like is how different Alien and Aliens are from each other, and yet still both good.
Yeah. I'm really anxious to see
Aliens
now, because I know I've seen parts of it at least (I have faint memories of Newt, and Bishop, and Ripley's final fight with the mother alien), but it was so long ago it hardly counts. I saw
Alien³
in a dollar theater back in the day, and I recall liking it more than everyone else does.
Alien: Resurrection
doesn't even feel like an
Alien
movie, when compared to the other three.
This error is taking me to some strange places. That would be "Jennifer" not "Janet". Heh.
D'oh! Thanks for catching that, Frank. I clearly wasn't paying attention, and was in the middle of like my third or fourth game of Literati.
I saw Alien³ in a dollar theater back in the day, and I recall liking it more than everyone else does. Alien: Resurrection doesn't even feel like an Alien movie, when compared to the other three.
I actually like Alien3 a lot, because it's Fincher's first film (or became his first film, about half way through) He inherited a mess, and did okay with it. I would have liked to have seen what he could have done with the franchise without the additional problems that came along with it.
I despise Alien: Resurrection. It's a horrible, horrible film, despite the fact that Joss wrote the script. Frankly, I think it's a franchise that wouldn't have benefitted from Joss' touch.
In particular, I don't know if the bit about the alien queen getting human DNA, and giving birth to that "humanoid" alien was Joss' idea, but if it was, that was the stupidest part of that movie.
One of the primary components that made aliens scary was the queen reproduced like an insect, laying hundreds or thousands of eggs at a time. Changing that so she gives birth to one dumb, slow, ugly one was LAME!
