Alien Review

1. Alien
(1979)

2. Alien is a 1979 science-fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott. Alien was a very successful movie and has led to a
spawn of media franchise such as toys, video games, comic books and novels. Three further films were made due to how
successful the first one was and achieved a good reaction from the audience. It took four months to film from July 5th to
October 28th 1978.
Goldsmith wanted to create a sense of romanticism and lyrical mystery in the film's opening scenes, which would build
throughout the film to suspense and fear. This technique is used a lot in horror films. The spaceships and planets for the
film were shot using models and miniatures which created the illusions of real ships.
In my opinion Alien had little elements of horror, there was night time settings which was probably the only conventions
of horror used, there was little to no blood in Alien which is not normal for a horror but a science-fiction horror it would be
expected. Isolated settings was used which created the narrative, they were in a spaceship in an environment where they
were probably not used to and this led them to discover the aliens. The aliens were ‘the other’ and the humans feared
them, the aliens would be considered the villains as they wanted to kill all the people on the spaceship.
The final girl theory could be applied here as Ripley is the final girl and survives the aliens by not being killed by them.
Several aliens were used as villains in this film which subverts from some horror films as there’s typical one main killer.
The film in my opinion wasn’t scary, the music added more of a fear factor but overall I didn’t get scared at all and I feel it
could have been a lot better.