My pick for this month’s Indieweb Movie Club is Alien, the original 1979 film directed by Ridley Scott. The movie follows a commercial starship crew who investigate a derelict space vessel and are hunted by a deadly extraterrestrial creature.
If you watch the movie and blog about it, drop me an email or send me webmention so I can update this post with a roundup!
Announcing a new event series
Calling all cinephiles!
Join us over Zoom this Sunday, January 11th at 10am Pacific! No RSVP needed and you don’t need to have watched the movie either.
I’ll be hosting a fun call. We’ll be joined by Matt Lee to discuss his December pick Ghost World, I’ll share why I picked Alien, and we’ll just generally have fun talking about all things movies.
Visit the Indieweb event page for more info. The Zoom link will appear 15 minutes before the start time.
Why I picked it
Ok, this is where I go long and you might have to indulge me a bit. Without getting into spoilers or plot specifics, let me nerd out about why I love this movie so much.
Alien is different than other movies we’ve chosen so far. Although it’s a classic in the science fiction genre and has a huge cultural impact, it’s also a horror flick and I wouldn’t blame anyone for shying away. I’m not normally a fan of scary movies myself!
I hope people give it a chance for one simple reason: frankly, they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
Modern movies rush everything. Too much inane exposition and fast editing to get to the punchline, which is further watered down by a boring HDR-style painterly look. I’m particularly annoyed when movies do what’s called “Mickey Mousing it” and play a constant barrage of cheesy non-diegetic music to fill the gaps.
They don’t take their time to build. No long sections without dialogue. No overlapping lines of naturalistic improvised chatter. No silence or time to soak in the views of fantastical environments.
There’s a few exceptions. The recent Dune movies have a sense of scale, and the introduction of Daisy Ridley’s character Rey in The Force Awakens reminded me of the opening 45 minutes of WALL-E, both of which skipped dialogue while building a backstory. But for the most part movies have succumbed to the Marvel effect and turned into childish cartoons.
Alien is a counterpoint to all of that and a masterpiece on every level. It holds up so well and is one of the movies I come back to again and again to enjoy timeless techniques. It starts with Kubrick-style slow opening shots through an empty spaceship like it’s a haunted house, builds with Hitchcock-like pacing to introduce characters and raise the stakes, and then ends as a modern day rollercoaster, carried all the way through with talented actors showing a real team chemistry.
A movie made by movie lovers, for movie lovers.
Honestly, I think it’s at least as good as Blade Runner, from a cinephile point of view. And I love Blade Runner so much that I took an entire class on it in college.
Even the tiniest details in Alien were obsessively thought through, like the system of semiotic symbols invented for the UI by graphic designer Ron Cobb.
On top of all that, the cinematography is what really sticks with me. It’s one of the best examples of a filmmaking technique called “dirtying the frame.” Foreground elements that are out of focus, set design that’s cluttered with touches of real personality, so-called “atmospherics” like smoky haze, steam and rain… it all grounds the unreal situation and setting with a gritty realism that I love. You can see the influence in modern films like The Batman and Children of Men.
If you’re into the cinematography of movies or even just photography in general, you might enjoy this interview with the late Derek Vanlint on how he achieved the movie’s signature look as the director of photography.
Let’s talk about it
Honestly I could keep going forever about how great it is, but I’ll leave some gas in the tank for the zoom this Sunday. Again, no RSVP needed. Hope you can make it!