Firstly - the Nostromo wasn’t that big, the ore refinery was a separate vessel and none of the action happens there.
Secondly:
I don’t know what this is (other than unintentionally funny. The continual moaning!), but “claustrophobic” it isn’t.
So THIS is claustrophobic?
…and a lot of the time they WERE wandering around through the Ore Processing part (that’s where the Alien grabs Harry Dean Stanton’s character)
Too late to edit:
So why did you link to a blog post that shows that has things like:
“There’s a whole roster of similarities between what I wrote and [ Alien ],” he continued. “They’re both about a small group of people trapped aboard a spacecraft with an inimical creature out to get them and which, in fact, knocks them off one by one. No problem there; that’s a pretty general plot outline. […]And at the end of both stories, they’re dispatched by suffocation”
My emphasis - way to undercut your own stance there, again. Although, Bixby makes the same mistake you did as to how the xenomorph in Alien is dispatched.
I’m going to step in and defend the characters in Alien as I think they’re one of the reasons the movie is so well thought of. The fact that most of the cast wasn’t made up of young people (I think Cartwright and Weaver were the youngest at 29-30) helped lend the movie a bit of credibility, they were all good actors, and the dialogue was pretty good. Brett and Parker bitching about their shares, Ripley chewing Ash out for overriding her orders and breaking quarantine, and Parker jokingly saying to Kane “the food’s not that bad” before realizing there’s a serious problem all really contributed to the setting and mood.
Brett is grabbed in the landing leg chamber. Which is part of Nostromo-proper.
And the claustrophobia isn’t in the bare set designs, it’s in how its filmed - but ask an actual claustrophobe how they’d feel about those pods, anyway.
Not everything on the site contradicts my argument. I cited it for the other reasons
Really lit up is how it was filmed. While the scene you linked to is noticeably dark and the room far more cramped.
Really? The Landing Leg compartment is filled with hanging and rattling chains and huge open areas?
Why is a thorough knowledge of SF movie history required to properly judge whether Alien is a good movie? It scared the piss out of me and my brothers when we saw it in the theater when it first came out. I later picked up the graphic novel (drawn by Walt Simonson) which included scenes that weren’t in the movie, and it filled in some continuity gaps.
For example, there was a scene where the women discussed Ash and his indifference to women. There was also a scene where Ripley told Dallas she didn’t trust Ash. He replied “He was a last minute replacement. So were you.” So the crew did have reservations about Ash, but still never suspected what he really was.
In addition, I was exposed to the nightmarish artistic genius that is HR Giger. It exposed me to another dimension of visual design and I like to believe I benefited from the movie experience. I fully understand no movie is universally liked, and those reasons can be truly profound. I don’t think it’s case of “misunderstanding” in the case of Alien. If it can provoke this level of deep think, the art did its job, whether it intended to or not.
It’s also conspicuously filled with the actual, you know, landing legs.
But my, how “really lit up” it all is.
I pulled out my contemporary issues. By Sept 1979 issue, no actual article mentions any comparison to It!, at all. But there is one letter to the editor:
He goes on, however, to note “Nonetheless, Alien is a superior SF thriller and I am looking forward to seeing it again.”
In addition, no action takes place in the refinery. The Nostromo is just the tug. The linked floor plan only covers one deck of the Nostromo. There were three.
But really, I think we need to talk about the bonus situation.
From the perspective of the viewer, Alien is notable for its brilliant production design, strong female lead, complete lack of a romantic subplot and the superlative performance of Bolaji Badejo. The first part of the story has an efficient set-up (not sure what the issue with it is), great atmosphere on the planet and icky alien action. John Hurt getting too close to the egg is arguably stupid, but a common enough trope in sci-fi.
Following the chest-buster scene and the puppet alien’s taunting squeal (my favorite line of dialogue in the film), the movie devolves into a slasher film in space whose primary aesthetic is killing off its cast in ways maximizing tension and culminating in shock. As in all slasher films, this makes for a repetitive and predictable structure necessitating characters to act against logic so they can be killed.
Alien was released between Halloween and Friday the 13th, the two films that launched a wave of slasher movies in the U.S. and which trace their lineage primarily to the heinous legacy of Psycho (1960). Such movies – I call them “Cinema of the Victim” - tend to be remembered for the sensational nature of a few scenes while their general dreariness gets neglected. For many viewers, they ultimately add up to less than the sum of their parts.
This utterly bewildered me and then I had the sudden insight that you must not be talking about the Stephen King novel.
ETA: Alien is one of the best movies ever made and you can trust me on this. I’m always right about this sort of thing.
So… should we just go ahead and change the title to
Pop Culture Alien Stuff Everyone Seems to Misunderstand
Thread over. Thread over, man!
They cut the power to the thread!
I keep checking the thread on the off chance that someone has something to say about something other than Alien. I may give up soon, though.
What elevates Alien above the disposable pulp fiction it’s being spuriously compared to is precisely the fact that it does not exist solely to pile plot events upon themselves in as much intricacy and quantity as possible, which its detractors are so indoctrinated into believing is the sole conceivable purpose of fiction that they don’t even realize they are operating under it as a premise, or that another view is possible.
Creating an atmosphere, evoking an emotional response in an audience, and enacting an elaborate metaphor for sexual violence are perfectly valid goals of moviemaking, and keeping the plot small enough to avoid getting in the way is exactly what’s called for here.
Also, if the fact that the characters are acting like idiots is perfectly explained and acknowledged within the story, then it’s not an “idiot plot.” Arguing that “the characters panicked when faced with an unknown killing machine, therefore the movie is bad because I can link to a TV Tropes page” is really a kissing cousin to the wave of last year’s “The Shining ignores Jack’s abuse” critiques from low-functioning journalists. The movie doesn’t “rely on” the characters being idiots for no reason to proceed; the movie is about the characters being idiots for reasons that are entirely justified within the film itself.
I don’t know if it’s everyone, but I’ve heard quite a few people opine that it doesn’t make sense that none of the characters in The Blair Witch Project had a cell phone. While the movie was released in 1999, the conceit was that this was found footage from a project that was filmed in 1994 and I think a lot of people forget this. But even if it was set in 1999, only about 30% of the US population had cell phones at the time. I was in my early 20s at the time and I don’t think anyone in my circle of friends owned one. Cell plans back then were terrible with most users only have a few hours of air time each month and were charged an arm and a leg if they went over their time. And I think these were graduate students in the movie. Graduate students aren’t typically flush with cash.
I suppose this misunderstanding is because of how quickly cell phones became ubiquitous. I’m a late adopter and when I got my first cell phone in 2005 I was one of the last people I knew to get one.
Not to mention the patchy network coverage. Even if they’d had a cell phone, how well would it have worked in the middle of a forest?