I don’t think it constitutes a spoiler if I tell you that at some point the movie involves an extraterrestrial attack of sorts.
I’m alive. Were you concerned? Probably not, considering my [small] readership base sees me on almost a daily/weekly basis and has not held back from giving me grief regarding my blog hiatus.
I am aware that it has been an inexcusably long time since my last blog post. Do I have a valid explanation? Maybe.
“[I] broke my continuity. This is permissible in life, not in writing. ”
Granted, Steinbeck was discussing his 9-month journey across the United States in a makeshift mobile home, something I can’t say I replicated exactly. But there has been change, delightful and welcomed, that lead to some literary difficulty. Hey - Steinbeck offered me this scapegoat and I’m rolling with it.
For starters, I broke up with my boyfriend who was present for the inception of this blog. Second, I amazingly avoided all 100+ degree Texas days by working remote from Minnesota for two and a half months. And lastly Trump, who I paid slight homage to earlier in this blog, is now the primary presidential nominee of a major political party.
So, yeah, interesting last couple months.
I may not have been writing but I was watching movies, starting with Alien back in April. Five months ago but, let’s be honest, might as well be a decade for what it’s worth. This blog will be test of my memory more than anything else.
By that time, I had built up a worthy enough allowance of black-and-white flixs to cash in for a movie on my list with some color. I also acknowledged that my boyfriend at the time didn’t have a high tolerance for classic movies and was probably skeptical anytime I’d text him: “Movie night?”
I settled on Alien, a 1979 science-fiction / horror movie. I knew nothing about this movie upfront except:
- I was a bit cynical because the plot seemed like an obvious rip-off of Howard Hawks' "The Thing from Another World" (1951)
I have a phobia for Alien movie
I REALLY have a phobia for Alien movies
Like if ET had murdered all those children instead of being all “cute” in a bicycle basket nothing would have surprised me less.
I still hate E.T. but tell me that this isn’t a cute Halloween costume.
Upon its release, Alien was welcomed with immediate critic and box office success. Decades later, the film retains critical acclaim particularly for its groundbreaking visual and special effects that include:
The computing system that looks compatible for Oregon Trail circa 1999.
And a circuit board wall lit up like a Christmas tree.
Keep in mind, people, this was 1979.
The entire movie takes place abroad Nostromo, a mining spacecraft where all the characters are members of the ship’s crew. The film’s cast consists of Sigourney Weaver and then a bunch of other people you wouldn’t know. No, seriously, Mack and I tough time keeping the cast members straight which made our who’s-gonna-die-and-in-what-order game pretty difficult. Benefit now from my character cheat sheet:
The movie begins with the ship’s crew members being awakened from these hibernating pods that you see in like every space movie ever. The ship’s computer, known as Mother, intercepted a mysterious transmission, assumed to be another ship’s distress signal. The crew discusses the transmission and other things over a lighthearted dinner of freeze dried space food and smokes. Wait...can you smoke in a spaceship? Apparently in the 70’s you can. Posthumously, I’ll refer to this whole scene as the Last Supper (tell me I’m clever).
The same dinner table a short 30 minutes later
Mayhem ensues only after the crew decides to explore the mystery transmission coming from an unknown planet [Mistake #1] and then chooses the clumsiest guy to venture farther into the abandoned spaceship they find [Mistake #2]. I’ll pause here to mention that I drafted my aforementioned death roll very wisely and let’s just say clumsy guy was my MVP.
The film's title pays tribute to the stow-away they pick up from the mystery planet, one highly aggressive extraterrestrial creature that stalks and kills the crew of a spaceship in an epic game of cat-and-mouse. I’ll be honest, it took me 5 months to understand the symbolism of the cat on-board and I’m not proud of that.
At a fundamental level, Alien is another movie about things that sneak out of the dark to kill you. But in another way, the film has some gritty realism in the characters and their motives that juxtapose the film’s setting in such an interesting way: no matter how advanced we become technologically, the same innate human behavior will always remain.
The feminist that I am also has to applaud the fact that an anti-Farrah Fawcett landed the lead role. Alien hands-down launched Sigourney’s career and permanently created a space for her in the hearts and high school bedroom walls of nerds everywhere.
