Alien

1750 Words4 Pages

The movie Alien was released in 1979 and was directed by widely known director Ridley Scott. The movie also had a very experienced cast, headlined by Sigourney Weaver (as Ripley) and Tom Skerritt (as Dallas). This particular movie is a Science-Fiction/Thriller movie and has since made four sequels, which has helped push the Alien franchise forward. Ridley Scott’s well-honed talents of editing and setting the atmosphere definitely set the tone for this definite scary, thrill-ride type of movie. For this assignment, I will be critiquing/analyzing the film through its storytelling, plot structure, editing style, audio/visual elements, camera elements (and techniques) and its characters. If you have never seen the movie Alien, then hopefully after …show more content…

The use of camera angles, cuts and transitions really made Alien, as a whole, very successful. The fact that the entire movie was based out of a spaceship, allowed the director to pick and choose how he wanted exact scenes setup. The overall tone of the movie was dark and spooky, the characters continuously found themselves in portions of the ship that were dark and all but the character (played by Sigourney Weaver) made it out alive. The majority of shots are shot with low-key lighting so that the suspense and terror of the creature are emphasized. The feeling of the unknown is perpetuated with the low-key lighting by the dark shadows and of how those shadows play across the characters and the landscape of the setting in the ship. The low-key lighting punctuated with bright strobes of light help to escalate the terror and urgency experienced by the crew. The benefit of the most used style of lighting in the movie, low-key, was its ability to create the eerie and somber mood of being in space. It was then extended to creating the suspense and terror of the unknown and then eventually of the alien. The low-key lighting of the film contributed to the overall theme of the movie by accentuating the loneliness of space; while at the same time expressing the fear of the unknown by cloaking much of the surrounding environment in low light and …show more content…

Alien was your definite fiction style movie and really had no political or social agenda. The only thing this movie really inspired, was the fact that audiences enjoyed futuristic, thrill ride types of movies. Society definitely played a role in the creation of this film. Originally, Alien was not slated to be approved for production, however with the release and huge success of Star Wars in 1977, movie companies took notice and began visiting similar genre scripts. For me, Alien is definitely one of those movies that I can watch again and again regardless of its age. Alien not only was enjoyable, but the film left me wanting more… I have always been ready to watch any of the sequels and look forward to the revival with Alien: Paradise Lost sometime next

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