Double-Joint

Behind the times as usual, I just watched Alien. I hadn't realized that this movie was quite that  old (1979, jeez), but surprisingly it didn't show its age too terribly.

As would be expected for such a well-known movie, the majority of the shock value relating to alien itself had been worn completely away by its status as a cultural icon. Of course the alien comes out of the dude's chest; that's what aliens do. And of course the baby has to become huge really quick, because I've never seen a medium-sized version. That said, I was reasonably satisfied with my viewing experience, and was quite impressed with some parts of the film.

The best part of the movie for me was all of the set design. I can only imagine what it would be like to work on the crew building all of the ship's control panels, lighting, etc. External shots of the ship are all of nice miniatures, as they ought be. Even with the interior of the alien ship they investigate, I didn't once feel that they could have done a better job if they had present-day CG effects and whatnot. Extraneous LEDs and DOS-style computer displays in some ways look tacky, but then again, part of the fun of this type of movie is seeing the way the future was envisioned in the past.

The plot is as solid as one should expect. There are a number of "Why the fuck would you do that in that situation?" moments (about half of which involve Jones, the resident cat), but you should expect to feel that way at least a handful of times during any horror film. I'm just glad Jones made it at the end given all the trouble people went through dealing with him.

The main technological wtf was the 'Mother' system. Nobody seemed to really understand how it worked. Repeatedly, the ranking character at a given point in the movie would consult this computer room system called Mother (the room is a sphere coated on the inside with blinking lights) and ask it questions such as "Request evaluation of current procedures to terminate alien?" or something similar. The response to which would always be "Unable to compute; insufficient data." I guess people didn't know much about computers back then, but usually if you use a system regularly (as the crew seemingly did) you usually have a clear idea of the scope of problems solvable by the system. Kind of like doing a web search for "Where did I leave my glasses?" It wasn't something that actually bothered me, I just found it amusing.

I was expecting there to be some sort of mech-suit involved in the final scene, but that seems to be from the second film, Ariens. I suppose I should watch that one as well, otherwise the only two movies I will have seen will be the first and the fourth, and I don't think the average of those two quite represents the overall calibur of the start of the series (at least I hope not). Besides, I need to figure out why Ripley becomes half-alien or whatever the hell was going on in Ressurection.

-Steinkamp