Let's Venture into Darkness: Alien

Through the two movies that we have watched from director Ridley Scott, I sense a fondness for the foreign. Just as Blade Runner presented an unknowable future on earth, so Alien shows this same future universe in the midst of outer space, a place renowned precisely because there is an unlimited amount of unknown.  From its very onset, Alien takes on an aura of darkness, and very little light or clarity is clearly discernible. The opening scene shows a cluttered and dirty space ship, in which there are many randomly tossed objects throughout. This “retro-industrial” spaceship is a scattered set with many blind corners – in which an attention to detail was given not to make the spaceship perfect, but to make it imperfect and disordered. Not to mention that the title of the movie, and what the movie itself revolves around, is “Alien,” which is a word that can be defined as foreign, unfamiliar, and strange.

The question that then rises in the movie is what do we do with the unknown? Do we go on a trek to discover and study it? Do we fear it? What if it is perfect? What if it is absolutely horrendous? Surely, jumping headfirst into the unknown can bring on emotions of anticipation, anxiety, and even curiosity. When the spaceship lands on the foreign planet, the one word that comes to mind to describe it is darkness. This unfamiliar planet is cold, dark, and filled with a white layer of smog, making it difficult to make out any clear images, because if we could see any light or objects, that would probably ruin the mood of fear and uncertainty presented as a recurring theme in the movie.

The tendencies of fear and the unknown are that the more that we think about them, the more likely it is that their presence will grow in our lives. The progress of science has been a never-ending desire of discovering the mysterious – it is about organizing the disordered and cluttered.  Alien presents to us a growing obsession with this “perfect” creature that is to be taken back to earth to be studied. As we follow the alien throughout the film, we easily realize that its image begins to literally grow larger, and the crewmembers become increasingly obsessed with finding it. Perhaps the alien grows larger as a representation of its presence becoming more important in each character’s life – they are fearful, or revenge-seeking, or just merely curious – and they allow this unfamiliar alien to overcome them – literally and figuratively… but mostly literally.

Surely, the unknown is something that is fearful. The alien essentially kills all of the crewmembers, sparing one survivor. While watching the movie, I felt anticipation the entire time, considering the next victim in this utterly chaotic plot. This film combined those feelings of fear and anticipation that accompany what is unknown – doing so by making us feel these feelings directly. It reminded me of the drive of human nature to make sense of the vast world around us, a quest that is sometimes accompanied by dire and dangerous consequences. 

Defying Mortality: Sunshine

This morning I woke up, and there it was, seeping through the blinds of my window and making its way into the living room of my apartment – this incomparably bright light was an indication that my day had begun. The source of this light, the sun, has an ironically familiar and mundane presence in my life – I have gotten used to it. However, if our diamond of a sun were to vanish, this occurrence would seem to be a statement from a supernatural source that perhaps existing life is no longer supposed to be so. The movie, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle boldly placed viewers directly in the midst of this hypothetical position. The film presents, to our ever-so surprise and absolutely bewildered astonishment, a notion that humans would not be able to humbly accept such a situation as the end of our existence. Who would have thought? We will grasp onto every last second, week, month, or year of life we can lay our hands on – and the absence of the ultimate energy source driving all life forms cannot get in our way. In a sense, this persistence is venerable; however, this manner of potentially twisting nature presents a few feelings of worry, disaster, and even horror at the possibilities.

The two-thirds disaster portion of the film was almost inevitable – in a mission such as the one presented in the movie, I would be a bit shocked if there weren’t some extremely complicated hurdles to jump. The dilemmas in the beginning of this film progress from bad to worse, and the uncertainty behind the action is in full-throttle. The past reality of the failure of Icarus I looms in the air, and it is only the motivation of the crew members that keeps me holding onto the chance of success in the movie. Each member of the cast, besides perhaps Harvey, reminded me how strongly the world did not want to accept the defeat of mankind. After each character died, I was disturbed but somewhat reassured because of the persistence of the crewmembers to continue on – and I found this character demeanor to be a significant element in the overall effect created by the movie.

A very powerful point in the movie occurred during the conversation between Cassie and Capa directly in front of the payload, when Cassie articulates a key question: “Does it scare you?” From this point on while watching the film, I held onto this question – these words. It wasn’t a notion of whether or not Capa had faith that the hurdles could be overcome. The question asked was whether Capa was scared, whether the audience was terrified by the mission presented in the film, whether there was horror in the possibility that man has the capability of creating a new star from a dying one to create “the big bang on a small scale” – because Cassie was. I believed that this aspect of fear was presented well in the movie after Pinbacker so slyly entered Incarus II – consequently, the film was all horror. Whether we wanted to experience it or not, the film forced us to associate the mission with horror – through the chases after the crewmembers, the bloodshed at every corner, and the death of every last member, we felt the load of the cost that came with twisting nature and attempting to escape mortality, and it wasn’t at all pretty.

There were countless aspects of the movie that contributed to the psychological and emotional states of the viewers as it was experienced. From controlling the use of certain colors to presenting microsecond flashes of the faces of old crewmembers, our audiovisual senses were intentionally manipulated to allow us to feel certain emotions and associate them with the plot and themes of the storyline. Personally, I felt that these elements were significant and worked throughout the movie to allow me to consciously and subconsciously  experience the movie for all the issues it presented about humanity, science, uncertainty, light, darkness, and life in general.