CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
I was looking at Disney+ recently and it had an image saying Alien: Romulus was coming soon. I decided I'd watch all the Alien movies leading up to that as they're all on Disney and it would be something to do. It's not exactly that I haven't watched them before: I think I watched the first one on tv many years ago and have seen parts of others (and definitely watched Prometheus when it came out), but I definitely haven't watched them properly. They were not a formative part of my chidlhood movie watching experience like they seem to have been for everyone else. So maybe I could watch them with fresh eyes and notice things and then I'd be able to watch Romulus in context, since I wanted to watch that anyway.
Plot twist: I watched the first one tonight and will post about it now!
Alien (1979) - The thing is though, I don't have anything to say that hasn't been said in the last 45 years. It's obviously a great movie. It's obviously best to have watched it BEFORE watching all the things it influenced later, to put it in its proper context. When looking at the design of the interior of the spaceship, I thought about how good it looked and how it's not that different from how a lot of science fiction stuff looks now. Of course the reason for that is because so much that came later was copying or inspired by the look of this movie. It gives it a kind of timeless feeling, like the original Star Wars, because it was inventing the look of this kind of science fiction on screen. Maybe the ony thing that's aged are the computer displays and the blinking lights. And the haircuts. But it doesn't really feel like an "old movie", other than in ways in which it's superior to a lot of today's movies.
OF COURSE everyone other than me has spent the last 45 years talking about how well it works that we hardly see the xenomorph, how much scarier it is, how the limiations of the time it was made only enhance the experience. It helps also that the alien looks so good when we actually see it. We can believe in it.
Again, it's hard to imagine what it would have been like to watch this in 1979. To totally freak out and possibly literally shit yourself when Baby Alien bursts out of John Hurt's chest. The part I found creepiest though was when Ash started freaking out, spinning around shooting cum everywhere, and had his head knocked off. I would not have been able to handle seeing that as a child. And Ian Holm is just magnificiently unsettling when he's revived as only a head (people have probably noted this before, yes!)
What impressed me most was the economy in the storytelling. There's absolutely nothing in there that doesn't need to be. No loose ends, no wasted time, no needless backstory. (I wonder if it came out today if the Youtube cunts would declare "WHERE ARE THE CHARACTER ARCS? STORY-TELLING FAILURE!" But who cares about this imagined cunts.) All of the characters feel like real people just shoved into this situation, with no over-acting or silly quips or overwrought sentimentality.
And there's a cat!
So yes that is the best possible start to the franchise you can expect from a movie made in 1979 and I'm sure they'll get increasingly better from here!
Plot twist: I watched the first one tonight and will post about it now!
Alien (1979) - The thing is though, I don't have anything to say that hasn't been said in the last 45 years. It's obviously a great movie. It's obviously best to have watched it BEFORE watching all the things it influenced later, to put it in its proper context. When looking at the design of the interior of the spaceship, I thought about how good it looked and how it's not that different from how a lot of science fiction stuff looks now. Of course the reason for that is because so much that came later was copying or inspired by the look of this movie. It gives it a kind of timeless feeling, like the original Star Wars, because it was inventing the look of this kind of science fiction on screen. Maybe the ony thing that's aged are the computer displays and the blinking lights. And the haircuts. But it doesn't really feel like an "old movie", other than in ways in which it's superior to a lot of today's movies.
OF COURSE everyone other than me has spent the last 45 years talking about how well it works that we hardly see the xenomorph, how much scarier it is, how the limiations of the time it was made only enhance the experience. It helps also that the alien looks so good when we actually see it. We can believe in it.
Again, it's hard to imagine what it would have been like to watch this in 1979. To totally freak out and possibly literally shit yourself when Baby Alien bursts out of John Hurt's chest. The part I found creepiest though was when Ash started freaking out, spinning around shooting cum everywhere, and had his head knocked off. I would not have been able to handle seeing that as a child. And Ian Holm is just magnificiently unsettling when he's revived as only a head (people have probably noted this before, yes!)
What impressed me most was the economy in the storytelling. There's absolutely nothing in there that doesn't need to be. No loose ends, no wasted time, no needless backstory. (I wonder if it came out today if the Youtube cunts would declare "WHERE ARE THE CHARACTER ARCS? STORY-TELLING FAILURE!" But who cares about this imagined cunts.) All of the characters feel like real people just shoved into this situation, with no over-acting or silly quips or overwrought sentimentality.
And there's a cat!
So yes that is the best possible start to the franchise you can expect from a movie made in 1979 and I'm sure they'll get increasingly better from here!
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) They had a guest book in the lobby and you could write down requests. More than once they did a "Summer Movie Summer" and they showed "Alien" one summer. It's pretty safe to say almost everyone in the theater had seen the movie before, but everyone jumped and gasped at the scene where Dallas meets his end in the ducts. Then there was some laughter because we all felt a little silly that we all got scared by a scene we knew was about to happen, but damn, on a big screen in a dark room full of people it held up after almost 20 years.
