localareamom: Just watched Alien for the first time.Pretty good movie. I remember seeing it in a…
Just watched Alien for the first time.
Pretty good movie.
I remember seeing it in a crowded theater opening weekend. After the big moment in the dinner scene, when there’s that beat as the crew is looking at each other, there was a moment of shocked silence in the theater, followed by a spontaneous wave of uproarious laughter.
It was one of those moments that you can only really experience in a packed theater when something powerful none of you were expecting has happened and you all process and react to it simultaneously. It was pretty wild.
The other thing I remember being surprised and impressed by was the sense of grittiness. 2001 (the movie, I mean) had come out a decade earlier, and then Star Wars had come out in 1977, so we’d gotten used to the idea of a compelling movie set in space, but big-budget space movies had always showed spaceships and astronauts looking super clean and elegant. What Alien showed movie audiences for the first time was a spaceship that was dirty and grungy, with non-college-educated blue-collar space workers making crude jokes about how uptight management was.
None of that seems unusual now, I realize. But in 1979, in the theater with my high school buddies (including one who eventually married me and is texting on her phone about a foot away from me), it was fairly mind-blowing.
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/188941426296.
