Alien. Is it
horror, or is it science fiction. Of course it is both. The first time I saw
Alien it scared the willies out of me. Just so you know, I am not generally a
fan of scary movies. I usually don’t watch them unless they are of the campy
low budget variety that are so bad they are good. Something attracted me to go
and see that film even though I knew it would be scary. It must have been the
trailer. Although the marketing made it absolutely clear that this was going to
be scary. But something about it caught my interest. The trailer looked so good.
I went to the theater to watch it, and
it was quite a ride. The cast was excellent from Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto,
and Ian Holm, to a new actress I had never heard of before with the unlikely
name of Sigourney Weaver. I was quite taken with Weaver’s portrayal of Ellen Ripley, second in command of the Nostromo.
She sold me on the film. Under the direction of Ridley Scott all the actors had
a loose naturalistic acting style that made it seem more real. The film is
moody and atmospheric. Everything about it looked different from any Sci-fi
film I had ever seen. The future was not all gleaming white with glowing buttons
that went ‘boing’. No. This future was as dirty and sweaty and as messy as real
life. The creature that they find is terrifying and strange, and yet there are
aspects of it that seem almost familiar. The larval stage looked like a sea creature
that you might possibly find on earth. And in fact, the creature’s life cycle
was patterned after some species of wasps who lay their eggs in host prey and
the larvae eat their way out, killing the host.
All of these things helped make the
film seem more real which lead to greater emotional investment in the story and
characters. For those who say that the sequel Aliens is better than the
original, I disagree and refer you to last week’s discussion about sequels.
The Day the Earth Stood Still. On the one hand it is yet another 1950’s flying saucer
movie. Yet it is so far above all the others of that ilk that it hardly bears
comparison. The production values are first rate. The story is intelligent and they
obtained some fine actors: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe. Alien
spaceman Klaatu comes to Earth to tell us humans to stop being so stupid,
petty, hate-filled, and war like. If we don’t, they (the space-faring species
that he represents) will end us. The film was made during the cold war. Klaatu’s
message seemed right on point. Unfortunately it seems that humanity hasn’t
progressed much from the 1950’s. The cold war may be over, but the hate
mongering paranoia is still with us. Let’s just hope someone like Klaatu isn’t
out there watching us.
Blade Runner.
Another Ridley Scott entry. It had a wonderful starting point. It was based on
a novel by Philip K. Dick called Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (Philip K. Dick has been a wonderful
resource for Hollywood. At least ten movies and three television series have
been based on his stories). I read the novel years after seeing the movie. The
film and the novel are quite different. The bones of the story are there in the
film but it diverges from the novel in tone and explores new ground. We follow
a detective as he tries to track down five illegal replicants (artificial
humans). The main theme of Philip K. Dick’s story is still there in the film: at what point does artificial intelligence
deserve human rights? At what point is
it no longer artificial? Once again there is a dark and gritty feel to the
film. We can almost smell the Los Angeles of 2019. (Really? 2019? We are almost
there. Where are the flying cars? For that matter, where are the replicants?)
On the surface it is a noir detective story. But deeper questions keep coming
to the top. And there is the wonderful work By Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
The Matrix. What
a game changer. The Wachowski’s wrote and directed this and stunned everyone
with ground-breaking visuals. It asks questions about reality. Is our world
real because we perceive it? Or is reality something that we cannot see, and we
are just being manipulated. These are questions philosophers have argued about
for thousands of years. The film ties into some good old-fashioned paranoia
about who is controlling our lives. There is a character who betrays his
colleges and chooses the manufactured existence over reality. We may not like
him, we may disagree with his choice and hope that he loses, and yet we can
understand his choice. He is choosing a pleasant fantasy life over a harsh and
horrid real one.
We will finish this off next week and
summarize all.
(My novel Star Liner, is now
available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other
usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback
will be out soon).
The link to my novel Star Liner
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