After watching Markiplier's fantastic Youtube playthrough of the new Alien video game Alien: Isolation, and a number of other horror game playthroughs, I now absolutely have to watch the first Alien movie again (only seen it once before). I've been getting creeped out and put through the suspense ringer for the past several days, so I'm perfectly primed for this -- which I generally am not, as even the scariest horror movies do nothing to me these days.
I'm almost a half hour in, and I just have to gush a bit about the sci-fi tech. They do some of the cheesy, B-rate, blinking-lights-on-the-ship's-consoles-for-no-apparent-purpose kinda thing that just looks goofy, but for the most part everything looks gritty, rudimentary, and just plain ****ty at times in a way that makes everything seem functional rather than impressive for the sake of being impressive (The Empire Strikes Back clearly embraced this aesthetic with both arms wide open).
It's pretty much impossible to make future tech in 1979 that still looks futuristic in 2015, but it actually works for Alien, since '70's/80's tech, made grimy and futuristic, is actually hella moody and creepy. I am far more terrified of pre-DOS operating systems than I am of the current Windows OS (and that's saying something). As cool as the tech in 2001: A Space Odyssey was, the fact that everything was supposed to look uber-futuristic makes a lot of the tech design look dated today, but the nature of Alien makes that not such a problem.
And don't get me started on the alien ship that I haven't gotten to yet, which is still the coolest alien ship in all of sci-fi.
__________________
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
|
|