"Aliens" : Some nice effects, but actually kind've a crap film.

Tracer and latebloomer OTM about the acting. Was it on ILX or somewhere else that someone made the case for the cast based on their age as well? Like, first of all it just feels realer in the sense of looking like a workplace where these people really do this for a living and have been doing it for ages. And it also means that they're more experienced actors with better chops and all that stuff.

yeah the casting and age of the actors and the "workplace realism" of alien seems to be the remnants of 70s genre filmmaking in alien. a few years later it probably would have been full of beautiful quippy young people on loan from john hughes movies.

ya if they made it today they'd all be 22

haven't seen prometheus, but the alien series as a whole hasn't cast a lot of beautiful quippy young people (maybe winona?)

"Will you LISTEN TO ME, PARKER? SHUT UP!"

^^^^

"As long as that means killing it."
"OBVIOUSLY it means killing it."

latebloomer so otm - that's the thing that grabbed me so much about Alien from the first time I saw it. The future is dirty and greasy and broken-down, and the people working on the ship are all irritable mechanics beaten down by the man. It's like belowdecks on a battle cruiser after years at sea. It feels like a real place, in a real time. And for a change, it's not a nice place.

That milieu against the whole rapey sex/reproduction angle makes me wonder why I didn't actually give it a few points on the horror poll. Not that it needed any.

i thought harry dean stanton's hawaiian shirts were pretty festive. the future can't be that bad -- they have hawaiian shirts! presumably hawaii still exists!

Ridley Scott mentioned once that seeing the scuffed-up production design of a lot of Star Wars gave him the internal go-ahead to commit to the vibe of "space truckers". Where you didn't have military or sciencey types in clean, sleek starships, you had working stiffs shuffling about in long-haul freighters

Blue-collar / working-class Sci-fi flicks: List them here

oh here's a neat bit, focusing on the costume design:

http://hellotailor.blogspot.com/2012/03/movie-costumes-i-have-loved-alien-part.html

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DvzIdKKMHwk/T1Kl3FkB0UI/AAAAAAAABIA/ow5wuyVdgjI/s1600/alienbrett.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XXlLOIYx5S0/T1Jpu0Y5rNI/AAAAAAAABGo/056ski5rXJ0/s1600/aliencrew.jpg

I like how there are now multiple places online where you can get Nostomo or Weyland-Yutani crew patches. I kind of want a W-Y logo decal to put on my hardhat, see if anybody notices it amongst the other ones.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-baKobTewysY/T1J3seBPZnI/AAAAAAAABG4/npr5yvsH0aM/s1600/alienlambert.jpg

boots!

Also, between this and the 70s Body Snatchers, Veronica Cartwright could play the terrified screaming blonde with the best of them.

all youse guys otm about the performance quality in & workplace realism of alien, something that's largely absent in aliens, replaced by enjoyable but rather cartoonish miltary action characterizations. from the blade runner vs. alien thread, some three years back:

the corporate stuff in alien is great!! i'd never seen the future look so... privatized

― s1ocki, Tuesday, December 30, 2008 7:36 PM (3 years ago)

Slocki OTM. Or so working-class. Alien nails this feeling of lived (and labored) in-ness like no other science fiction movie I've ever seen. You get a sense that you're not seeing the totality of the characters' lives, but just this one, small corner. In part it's the quality of the actors, in part it's the Altman-like approach to dialogue: fragmented, naturalistic, delivered with no regard to cameras or microphones. Especially true during the build-up to the chest-burster gag (perhaps, less so elsewhere in the film). Anyway, it fascinated me as a kid, and it still seems unique and compelling.

― served by boot-face (contenderizer), Tuesday, December 30, 2008 10:31 PM (3 years ago)

next on "discussion generator," contenderizer vs slocki in who can have the last word about how they appreciated the art design, altman-esque dialogue, and which sfx are a bit wack in ridley scott's 1979 space-horra opus Alien

― El Tomboto, Friday, January 2, 2009 12:39 PM (3 years ago)

So many cargo pants. The movie took place in an Old Navy c. 1998.

It's a film out of time; the pants and the high-tops vie for true temporal localization.

Growing up in the 80s, it was always weird to go back and see Tom Skerritt's various pre-moustache experiments in facial hair throughout the years.

The first time I saw MASH and saw Skerritt w/o facial hair I was like WHAAAAAAAA?

It's funny, even in MASH Skerritt never seemed like a "young" dude -- he was always a dude who'd SEEN stuff, ornery and kinda out there. Love him

He was 37 by then.

I think he was 21 when he was born

We need a poll of his changing style

He is Benjamin Button IIRC

He's so fkn funny in Steel Magnolias (I know this not the thread for that)

So many cargo pants in Steel Magnolias.

coulda done with a few more chestbursters imo

I think that one had at least two too many.

are we talking about Dolly Parton y/n

Olympia Dukakis

ok i've started the special edition of aliens (life intervened) and am struck by details that seem lifted right out of "gateway" by frederik pohl.. the family doing "exploring" and getting excited that they've struck it rich by discovering an unknown alien artifact; our hero getting a flunkie job at the spaceport in the cargo bay; the "company" which controls everything; kids running around

it's all scene-setting for the militarized reboot of the main action obv but still

Hm that is a v interesting point of influence, and one that might enhance my liking for Aliens...

ok i've started the special edition of aliens (life intervened) and am struck by details that seem lifted right out of "gateway" by frederik pohl.. the family doing "exploring" and getting excited that they've struck it rich by discovering an unknown alien artifact; our hero getting a flunkie job at the spaceport in the cargo bay; the "company" which controls everything; kids running around

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, May 25, 2012 3:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

super true... which reminds me to reread those books, i really like the just scraping by vibe of them, felt new for scifi

added to (very long) reading list, thanks!

its pure scifi so if thats not your thing it might not be yhour thing.

i can dig it

in case you were wondering i mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-OYKd8SVrI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6oSCng12xQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXxs4vE4-oA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyX_xwh2yPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMJwtMvesWA

working class scifi is kind of a boring norm by now i think

not if you're watching ALIEN

I strongly disagree; 30+ years later and it still ain't.

no-one's done it better. Battlestar came close but Alien still does the best job of making every aspect of the 'working-class-ness" of the ship tangible and real.

what else counts

i'm not saying "working class scifi" from the 70s/80s isn't great, but at this point "lived in" "gritty" sci-fi environments are sorta ... yawn

for example give me the shiny banal apple store dystopia of minority report or gattaca over the burning trashcans and smudged faces of children of men anyday

sure, but i think it's a mistake to equate burning trashcans and smudged faces with working class sci-fi. star wars, for instance, inspired alien and clearly presents an clunky, industrial, lived-in future - but i'd hardly call its overall sensibility, story and setting "working class". of the major characters, luke is the only one who clearly comes from a working-class background (probably han too, but it's hard to say) and we see only a little of that before he's whisked off across the galaxy to battle dark lords and rescue princesses. other than the disposable stormtroopers, we rarely see anybody actually working for a living in the original trilogy.

repo men is pretty working-class (and distinctly class-conscious), but it's also a train wreck.

I would say Dark Star is good working class sci-fi. Plus it's great.

I should specify that I'm talking about space opera, or thereabouts, I guess. The deliberate juxtaposition of the highest and most optimistic dreams of post-war spaceflight contrasted with the far more-realistic earthbound workaday concerns of actual people doing actual unglamorous schlub work in those environments of hardshelled tubs floating about in low-grav.

In film, this never would have been possible to portray were it not for the changes in the Hollywood studio system of the late 60s/early 70s.

This kinda stuff has been in fiction since before the war, but I don't think it ever elevated to multimillion dollar 35mm until like 35-40 years ago. Flicks like 2001 made spaceflight far more realistic, stuff like Silent Running and Dark Star brought it to the enlisted level, if you will.

yeah and red dwarf and mst3k too but now that everything in sci fi is super gritty and unglamorous i wouldn't mind seeing a new look