The Dailies 2/5/09: Chock Full O' Aliens Edition!

Howdy, everyone, and welcome back to The Dailies, where I take a look at two movies I’ve recently viewed. Enough talk, let’s do this thang!

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Principle Actors: Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr

It’s pretty well-established what you’re going to get when you watch a Steven Spielberg picture. You’re going to get a well-made, intriguing enough film often featuring dazzling special effects and even more dazzling characters. The film may not have the most tightly knit story or realistic plotline, but we’re willing to forgive these lapses because, “Holy shit! Indiana Jones just decapitated that Nazi with an airplane propeller!”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind has perhaps a better storyline than any of Spielberg’s other 70s and 80s blockbusters. Electric utility lineman Roy Neary (Dreyfuss) is driving around at night in the middle of nowhere in Indiana trying to find his way to an electric power plant that has been thrown off-kilter (by recent UFO activity). While hopelessly lost and surveying a map, an alien craft hovers over Dreyfuss’ truck, shining a bright beam on him and causing the truck to shut off and various papers and unfastened materials to fly around. Dreyfuss is darkly sunburned, but his mind is also burned with the indelible image of the alien spaceship.

Dreyfuss’ obsession with the spacecraft and his adventures in trying to figure out where it came from and how he can see it again provide the best moments of the film. In one scene, he and the others who witnessed the craft attend a government press conference. Their attempts at gathering more information about the aliens are thwarted by one of their own, a country bumpkin who makes a variety of insane assertions. In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, Dreyfuss creates a sculpture of a mountain with his mashed potatoes at the dinner table, and then sobs when he sees his family looking at him in horror. There are many well done scenes like this one.

Dreyfuss is quirky enough in the role, but the success of the Spielberg formula has always depended on characters. Indiana Jones. Crazy sea captain Robert Shaw and local police chief Roy Scheider in Jaws. E.T., for Christ’s sake! Dreyfuss doesn’t provide that iconic connection of character to film that these aforementioned films create. He does his job admirably, but he’s not larger than life. And in Spielberg’s films, the bigger and brighter the special effects, the bigger the character needed to be able to make us care about them. Without that piece of the puzzle, the film rings a little hollow.

Those special effects are breathtaking, to be sure. In their time, I imagine they were state of the art, and they still looked very good on the Blu-Ray transfer I watched. The special effects in Spielberg’s pictures from the 70s and 80s have a nostalgic feel to them. They’re a little dated looking, but they’re timeless nonetheless, and still very effective. The climactic scene of the film, featuring the alien mothership performing a “duet” with the humans (of that famous five note sequence) is as great a scene as any I’ve seen recently.

A lingering question had me a little unnerved after I watched this. Dreyfuss willfully abandons his family to pursue his dream of boarding the alien ship, and we get nary a mention of this during the climactic scenes (Dreyfuss drives his wife and kids away with his constant craziness, and they’re never heard from again). We know Dreyfuss is obsessed with the aliens, but this obsession is never quite fleshed out enough for us to believe that he has lost all feeling for his family. It was a little odd that it wasn’t addressed.

B

Oscar nominations:

Won – Cinematography & Sound Effects
Nominated – Supporting Actress (Dillon), Art Direction-Set Decoration, Director, Effects-Visual Effects, Film Editing, Music-Original Score, Sound

Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Principle Actors: Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt

Alien is a movie that really knows how to scare the crap out of you. It isn’t horribly gory, and it lacks the staples of modern horror flicks. You’re not going to see scantily clad C-cup teens being hacked to pieces by machete wielding maniacs. Alien is too smart for that. It scares us not by throwing everything in our face, but by keeping us waiting.

Ridley Scott really knows how to direct a suspenseful film. Every aspect of Alien is designed to provide a surreal spookiness. The ship, the Nostromo, is dimly lit, with often the only illumination being provided by the control panels and their futuristic buttons and switches. Tensions between crew members are almost constantly uneasy, and grow worse as the alien begins killing them one by one. Even the title of the film, Alien, gives you cause to wonder; what is the alien? Where is it? We can’t follow the camera round a corner or go into a dark room without grimacing at the thought of the alien leaping from the shadows.

Scott throws us a bone, however, and a couple of scenes pay off the tense waiting in a big way. Both scenes entertain and scare us at the expense of poor John Hurt. In the first, the crew has landed on a nearby “planetoid” to investigate a strange signal the ship’s computers have picked up. In their exploration, they encounter an abandoned spaceship. Hurt’s character ventures into the bowels of the spaceship, where he discovers a vast expanse of round, “leathery” objects that he assumes to be eggs. Peering into one of these eggs turns out to be a big mistake when a life-form hurls itself out of its shell and into Hurt’s face.

In the second scene, the most famous scene in the film, the alien has removed itself from Hurt’s face after a few days. Hurt tries to recover by eating with the crew, but suddenly goes into violent convulsions. His chest explodes, blood splatters on the crew, and a baby alien tears itself out of his stomach and speeds away. Despite the countless amounts of parodies of this scene (from Spaceballs to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me), it’s still incredibly potent and frightening.

In his Great Movie review of Alien, Roger Ebert makes a great point. I’m paraphrasing here, but he writes that part of what makes the alien so frightening and what makes the movie work so well is because we never know what it really is. At first, the alien has tentacles and is rather small and affixed to Hurt’s face. Later, we see the baby alien, a tiny monster with gnashing sharp teeth. In each scene where we encounter the alien, it looks different; it has developed. That makes the alien an even greater villain (for both the crew in the film and for us, the audience), and gives us another wrinkle to watch for.

Alien has its drawbacks, unfortunately. Some of the characters are pretty one-dimensional, including the character Lambert (played by Veronica Cartwright). Lambert constantly whimpers and cries, which wouldn’t be as big an annoyance if she wasn’t one of the last people remaining at the end of the film. Another, more infuriating problem, was the insistence of the characters to constantly put themselves in compromising situations. Crew captain Dallas (Skerritt) enters the air ducts in an incredibly stupid attempt to flush the alien out. Other crew members blindly enter rooms with no cover or protection and don’t shoot the alien when they have a chance to. At one point, I was yelling at the TV out of frustration for Parker (played by Yaphet Kotto) to shoot the alien. I don’t know whether this is a sign of a truly engrossing movie or a few truly poor scenes.

Those qualms aside, Alien is a top-notch horror film. It gives you something you don’t see much nowadays; a genuinely scary film competently directed and expertly acted.

B

Oscar nominations:

Won: Best Effects-Visual Effects
Nominated: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration


This will be followed shortly by another entry featuring The Wrestler and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

John Lacey