Alien

The year is 1979. In the thriving metropolis that was Memphis, Tennessee, a 20 year old woman leaves her two year old daughter in the care of a babysitter and accompanies her husband to the movies for a date night. She will leave the theater in near hysterics, having been so unnerved by the film that she can’t finish watching it.

The woman was then Karen Anderton, my mother, and the film was Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Fast forward roughly twenty years into the future, and I had the opportunity to see the film for the first time myself. All my life, my mother had told me this was the most frightening movie she’d ever seen. Now, admittedly, my mother is a bit of a wuss, but she’s a tough cookie and she isn’t easily intimidated.

I was prepared to be terrified the first time I saw this film, both as a result of my mother’s conditioning and the fact that I’d found at least two of the sequels to be fairly scary flicks. What I came away with was more of a feeling of “That was it?” That was the film I’d hesitated at watching because of my mother’s violent reaction to it, and I found it barely scary, more a work of science fiction than pure horror.

Still, aside from the fact that I managed to finish this film – unlike my mother – and didn’t have nightmares afterward (I rarely do, at least about fictional monsters), I have to say this movie was well done and I enjoyed it.

Part of that stems from my love of 1970s era cinema. Alien is a film like so many others of that same era. Visually, it very much resembles John Carpenter’s The Thing or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Clockwork Orange and – later on – The Shining. It’s darkness to the point of surrealism.

Another reason I like this movie is because I love H. R. Geiger’s artwork. His hand is clearly visible in this film and not just in the set design and the alien itself. Just as Wikipedia says of Geiger’s work – “His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as "biomechanical" – there appear to be “cold, interconnected” relationships between most of the characters in the film. These are individuals who are just doing their job, and there aren’t a lot of strong loyalties among the ship’s crew members. That sense of isolation even in the midst of the group is another reason I believe this film works well. Even in near claustrophobic conditions, each man is essentially an island.

There’s little question who the true villains in this film are. I agree with some of my classmate’s assertions that the alien is an innocent if murderous bystander, and that the “real” monster is The Company, who have created the android Ash and put him on board the Nostromo to serve their horrifying, potentially catastrophic purposes.

In a nutshell, I’m glad I had a chance to revisit this film and to examine it more closely. While I think it stands the test of time, I think I at least may be too desensitized by having seen films that were so much more gruesome and over the top, including the subsequent films in the Alien franchise.