Alien Digest

I enjoyed watching the film Alien for the first time Monday. I had never heard anything about this movie, and didn’t know what to expect when watching. What I really enjoyed about the movie was storyline, and the way the movie was shot. I thought Alien was ahead of it’s time in the basic concepts and imagery.

The Suspense is Killing Me

When watching the film I really like how the filmmakers shot most scenes on the ship. During the whole film I was uncertain of what was going to happen next. I wasn’t sure who was going to die and how they were going to die. From the beginning we don’t know much about the characters on the ship or what their main purpose. Thompson writes “Unlike many of the films that I’ve examined, Alien does not use its credits sequence to introduce much information. We only know that we are somewhere in space” (Thompson 286). This leaves the viewer guessing from the beginning and puts the director in firm control of the audience’s emotions. When watching Alien, I realized I kept getting sucked into the plot because of the way the film was shot. There were a lot of scenes that had dark lighting and wide camera angle shots. This caused me to focus hard about what was happening next. So when something jumped out or happened u I was alarmed. The filmmaker used suspense perfectly. Thompson described how Scott did this with one of the scenes by saying “Sideways tracking shots close to the furniture and equipment reveal a limited amount of space onscreen at any given moment” (Thompson 287). Even with the cheesy special effects and settings, I was still into the movie the whole time.

Dark Lighting help with the suspense

The Female Protagonist

Another interesting part I liked about the movie was how Ripley was the hero of the film. She seemed to be the only one that was thinking logically about certain crucial situations in the movie. When more people were thinking with their heart, she was thinking with her head. For example, when she didn’t want to let Lambert, Dallas, and Kane back into the ship because they could have hurt everybody on board. While Dallas and Lambert were upset she still did the right thing. Mulhall talks about Ripley saying that “she acts consistently from the outset to preserve the physical integrity of the ship she briefly commands because she has understood all along femaleness in the terms that the alien seeks to impose upon the human species, and hence has always understood her body as a vessel whose integrity at all cost must be preserved” (Mulhall 24). Ripley was the one I agreed with the most and felt like she should have been the leader of the ship. Which makes since because she’s the one that survives and kills the alien.

Ripley as the protagonist in the film


Works Cited

Mulhall, Stephen. “Kane's Son, Cain's Daughter.” On Film. London: Routledge, 2002. 12-32.
Print.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Alien. 1979. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Thompson, Kristin. "Alien." Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
283-306. Print