Alien

So this is still fucking perfect. I dunno, does the world need another rambling review of Alien that namechecks all its influences and basically just gushes about how perfect a fusion of all of them it is, how it's a formal masterpiece, how it was my trial-by-fire introduction to the horror genre? Well, I love this movie dearly so that's what I'm about to do, strap in. But when I talk about favorite movies I typically like to make it personal, if I can, so here's this: Alien is, unless I'm mixing up some chronology, singlehandedly the film that made me interested in films. When I was a kid, my movie watching pretty much consisted of switching off between Jaws and Jurassic Park. Maybe once in a while I'd throw, like, Men in Black or The Lost World in there, but for the most part I was the exact opposite of an "adventurous" viewer. And I certainly hated horror; I couldn't handle it. Jaws is horror, in a sense, but not the sense I'm talking about; I'm talking about horror that makes you afraid to go to bed at night. My friend's dad used to watch horror flicks out in the open in their living room, and I think that's what scared me off them for a bit. I still remember some of the stuff it was - a single frame of Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw 2, that scene in Terminator 2 where the T-1000 sticks his finger through the security guy's eye, that scene in The Mummy Returns where the mummy like, sucks the life force out of some dude (I'd put the link here but I'm lazy. YouTube "the mummy returns 5/11" if you wanna see what I'm talking about, it's the first link, the scene is at 1:35). I'm now realizing that only one of those is actually even a horror movie and even that (TCM 2) is a horror comedy. Strange! The point, anyway, is that this shit traumatized me - my love of horror is certainly not innate. But then when I was about 10 I found out about Alien, in the strangest way - a cartoon short called "Alien in 30 Seconds with Bunnies" - obviously which included the chestburster scene, to which ten year old me went hey, what the fuck's going on with that? From there I found the actual scene, and from there resolved to actually watch the film - the first time in my life, in fact, that I had "wanted to see" something that wasn't just some dumb animated movie that was probably just an excuse for me to go out and have theater popcorn anyway. This was totally out of my comfort zone - like I said, I hated horror, and this movie looked goddamn terrifying. The natural response, then, was to scan the Wikipedia synopsis for anything that could possibly be scary, find that scene, and watch it so I could preemptively sap the movie of its scares. Yes, as better a story as it may make to say I just went in blind and got my balls scared off, that's just not who I was at age 10. All this meaning that I've never actually gotten the experience, properly, of watching this for the first time fresh. Damn me! I finally tracked down the movie and watched and I survived, and through it pretty much snapped my fear of horror films - not that this isn't scary, just the opposite, it made me realize that being scared could be compelling. In fact I was so disturbed, both at the step outside my comfort zone and the actual content of the film, that I immediately popped in Jurassic Park again after it ended, as a bit of a palette cleanser. I was huge on familiarity as a kid, so that was a natural response, but the point stands: Alien broke through that wall and spoke to me, and it was the first movie to do so, and it led soon after to me wanting to watch every last goddamn thing I could get my hands on. So in a way, I guess you could say that this was the very first step on my journey through movies. That's right: I owe my interest in movies to a cartoon bunny short. And now here I am, rewatching the film for the first time in 5 or 6 odd years, only my third full viewing. Only three? For a lifelong favorite? Yes, after this broke the routine of switching back and forth between the same four movies over and over, my brain took a sharp turn the other way - to this day I'm still trying to shake my resistance to rewatching movies. It's never not a rewarding experience when I do, particularly with an old favorite like this, but when I get some time to watch one, my attitude is always "well why not watch something I've never seen before?" Even if it's been literal years. It's not good! This means I've got a lot of favorites I've only seen once. Anyway, where was I? Right. Proving the merit of rewatches, I'll say this: This viewing is, without a doubt, the most I have ever loved this movie. The first time was great, yes, but there was the wall of unfamiliarity to get over; the second time, I think I whined about the "epileptic" finale or something like that. I dunno, I was a dumb kid. Since then I've of course realized this was a masterpiece, but this was my first full viewing since then. The thing that most surprised me this time was how patient the film is, a quality I'd more or less totally forgotten: if you'd asked me before this rewatch at what minute mark in this 117-minute film you-know-what happened, I'd probably have said, I dunno, minute 35-40? But no: it's damn near a full hour before that happens, about half the movie's runtime, and it's a brilliant bit of pacing, essentially cleaving the movie into two halves; the first half a triumph of slowly mounting dread, and the second half, which is just nonstop primal tension right to the end. You could spend all day listing out everything this movie is influenced by, but as an amateur I'll limit myself to the most eyeball-gougingly obvious ones. Starting at the top, let's talk about the movie's approach to space; cold and completely unglamorous, never spoken about in any terms other than purely perfunctory. Our characters are used to it, the wonder is gone: all we get as far as fancy sci-fi language is orders barked from crew member to crew member during landings and takeoffs, and we never get the sense that this is anything more than a job to them. They're wearing casual clothes, smoking on the ship, it's all dirty and worn down. Bringing this view of space to life is a cast of deliberately undeveloped, yet distinctive characters; this is not really a film that needs profound character development, and the cast functions exactly as they should, resembling ordinary people for whom the extraordinary has been made ordinary (consider this: going by the film's timeline, none of them have been born yet). There's also Jerry Goldsmith's twinkling score, that captures the cosmic loneliness of being lost in space. 2001 is obviously where you'd point to find a movie that made space travel unglamorous and commonplace within its world, but the ships and sets still look glossy and clean there; Star Wars is the one that came along and made everything look grimy and lived-in. Alien combines the two, and once they've landed on the alien planet, it goes full At the Mountains of Madness, with horror imagery of terrible grandeur and a sense of ancient cosmic history. Once we get to that non-stop second half, we get scenes of raw, primal horror reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre five years earlier.  But, really, all of this is anchoring one craft-based element that, to me, without which this wouldn't be the classic it is: the design. Ridley Scott has an awfully weird career; after The Duellists, which I haven't seen, he made two absolute fucking masterpieces, and then since then, he has made absolutely nothing that I would describe as any better than "decent" (I haven't seen Thelma & Louise or the Kingdom of Heaven director's cut, it should be noted). So what the hell happened there? Not to discount his contribution to both films, but what's the most obvious similarity between Alien and Blade Runner? Yep: both are absolutely peerless works of design. Ridley brought it all together, sure, but the fact is Alien would fundamentally not be the same film if it weren't for the sets and the titular monster. I mean, where the fuck do we even start? It's almost intimidating how many individual elements of Alien are design masterstrokes; I'll admit upfront that I'm not going to do them justice. I talk of influence, but there's absolutely nothing in the 90 years of cinema preceding the film that looks anygoddamnthing like these sets. The production design and art direction work is, perhaps, what really brings home the perfect genre fusion; sure, it's a horror film that takes place in space, but the way it looks sci-fi while also having a heavy sense of terror in those same images is really what sells the fusion; it is, from the way it moves to its design, a mixture of two incredibly effective executions of mostly disparate genres, completely inextricable from one another as presented. I mentioned Lovecraft before, and I'll tell ya the scenes on LV-426 might be the best cinematic adaptation of Lovecraft I've seen - it is horror on an ancient, cosmic scale, and that, my friends, for all that Alien took influences from so many different places, is something that truly hadn't been done on a movie screen. Which, fucking finally, brings us to H.R. Giger's design of the alien itself, which I'll go right ahead and call the greatest movie monster design in all of cinematic history right off the bat. No need to beat around the bush about it, yeah? It's become such an ubiquitous part of pop culture that it's almost hard to look at it with fresh eyes and realize just how fucking primally terrifying this thing is - the elongated, oddly shiny dome of a head, the weird elements on the body resembling mechanical wiring far too uncomfortably for something on a living creature, the lack of eyes, those fucking teeth, the multiple mouths. It is a creature straight from Hell, straight from a primordial nightmare, and I cannot imagine what the hell was going on in Giger's brain that he thought of it, but I'm glad he did. I haven't even touched upon the sexual elements of the imagery here, which is essentially the main driving force behind a lot of it - such a bizarrely horrifying element of all of it, a film about rape just as much as any film that's actually about rape, only this time it's mostly against men. There are tits on the bottom of the ship and in the doorways; the alien's head is a giant dick, everything's dripping wet and moist. Every last element of the design here is sexual, and that increases the visceral quality of the horror tenfold. It certainly doesn't stop at the design; the characters are all impossibly horny, but I wouldn't dream of calling the movie horny. It is sexual in a disgusting and animalistic way, creating an almost surreal horror out of it, recognizing a taboo in the audience and exploiting that. Look at Ash's reveal as, uh, what he is - what does all that white fluid remind you of? The magazine scene? Speaking of Ash - Ian Holm here gives one of, to me, the absolute creepiest performances of all time, in the whole movie really but particularly in the scene where his true nature is revealed, with fluttering eyelids and inhuman jitteriness finally encroaching upon his cold efficiency. It gives me the fucking willies - the whole movie does, as it's a combination of two of my absolute favorite modes of horror; mysterious, terrible, ancient grandeur - the horror of an imagined past, you might call it - and primal monster horror. Two very different modes, to be sure, and on top of that it's also sci-fi - but it's as perfect a genre fusion as there ever has been, and as perfect a film. A perfect organism, if you will.