Alien: Space version of Jaws

Rating: 7/10 (14 June 2012)

"In space, no one can hear you scream." The crew on the spaceship Nostromo has a Jaws like experiences with an alien. This makes it a real thriller movie, but this time it takes place in outer space. It showed the future of space travel to standards of people who just found out about space travel. The lead character is played by Sigourney Weaver who played in all three sequels of Alien and has also plays Dr. Grace Augustine in Avatar. These sequels are Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien. In each of these films Sigourney Weaver is the only recurring character which fights for survival and tries to keep the alien from getting back to Earth. However she didn't play in the two prequels: Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Ridley Scott has directed many other movies of which the most recent one is Prometheus.
Alien starts with a true Star Wars beginning, a big view of outer space and one small spaceship approaching. This spaceship is the Nostromo coming home from a mining expedition for the Company. The crew of the ship is in a hibernation state when the ship's main computer answer a distress signal coming from a nearby planet. The crew sets out to find the source of the signal because they are supposed to react to a possible life form and bring it home to planet Earth. After bringing in the alien and accidentally letting it escapes. This result in a fight for survival while they are being hunted down one by one. This makes it a typical thriller movie.
The setting of the movie is has been chosen really well, both the Nostromo spaceship and the alien spaceship feel like a real spaceship. However since this movie was made during a time when technology was still developing, this causes a lot of old effects in the movie. For example the instrument panel contained a lot of blinking lights and weird buttons which look really childish. This childish effect makes the technological aspects of the ship look very cheap. They even had to use children to play scene where they needed a bigger set than they could afford. These children did a great job playing the astronauts.
Throughout the movie music plays an important role to create suspense. In a thriller movie this is very important because if you play a child's song during an attack of the alien you will not be scared, but you will laugh at the alien. The music is able to create suspense or make the actors move quickly. This makes you feel like the alien is also right behind you and it makes you want to run away as quickly as possible.
A movie is not just about how the movie is edited, but mainly if the actors are able to convince the audience that their fear or joy is real. In this movie the different type of actors create a perfect mix to make everyone have one person to relate to. The character of Lambert played by Veronica Cartwright is the type of person that is scared of everything. She does this very well and her screams sound real and convincing. One of her screams is in fact real, because the director did one scene without telling the actors exactly what was going to happen. Then during the filming when the unexpected explosion of blood occurred she almost fainted because of fear, but luckily the rest of the actors stayed in their role while being scared at the same time by the blood. This created a true illusion of fear.
In this movie costume design is very important. The costume for the alien, the space suits for both the children and adults and the normal day clothes had to be made to perfectly match the scene of the movie. The alien's costume was very difficult to make because they wanted to create something that did not look like a humanoid alien. They were not very successful at this, but through using other techniques like camera work they were able to compensate for this problem. The spacesuits of both the children and the adults were other big problems because of the high temperature and the lack of oxygen in the suit. This was major concern because the people in the suits would only be able to perform for a short while in the suits without fainting. In the end the costumes look great in the movie.
In a movie where not everything is perfect camera work is very important. This is because the camera is able to make things look different than they really are. The camera work in this movie is used very effectively. This is most noticeable in the scene with the children. They used a different distance than they normally would use to create an effect where everything looked bigger than it was in reality. Also in the close encounters with the alien the camera is never pointed directly at the alien to make the humanoid features of the alien less noticeable.
Overall the movie is a good combination of different techniques. The use of special effect was outstanding when the movie was first made, but nowadays the special effects look really normal and sometimes even old. However if you look through these special effects you will see a terrifying movie which shows a possible future of space travel which we are still not capable of nowadays. The actors did a very great job in transferring their fear towards the audience.