IndieWeb Movie Club: “Alien”

January's IndieWeb movie club is Alien (1979), and it's hosted by Al Abut — here is his introduction post for the month. I've been in the mood to see some space horror lately. I saw a promotion for Ash (2025), which looks like a solid B-movie, and that reminded me to add Sunshine (2007) and Event Horizon to my watch list. I've also been wanting to watch more movies with my husband, so Alien is perfect for all of that. This is a re-watch for both of us — we've seen it (and Aliens) before, and liked them a lot.

Sound Design

A few things stood out to me about the sound design of the film. The first happens a few times throughout. When the initial exploration party leaves the ship, the sound environments inside/outside the vessel have a stark contrast, and the cuts between them are immediate. Later, as the face hugger first attacks Kane, the camera cuts rapidly from attack, only allowing the sudden noise to sound for an instant.

A similar contrast happens when Lambert and Parker are loading coolant into an escape ship while Ripley gets the escape shuttle ready. Ripley's surroundings are well-lit and quiet, while Lambert and Parker work noisily, loading the coolant, with Lambert being audibly agitated as well. Here as well, the cuts between the sound environments are immediate and jarring.

To my ear, these contrasting sound environments emphasize the otherness of the alien, with the suddenness of the cuts exaggerating the difference between the sound environments. This also intensifies the harshness of the environment where the alien will appear, and heightens the sense of impending danger. Especially in the second example above, the time between the cuts speeds up slightly as the alien nears, and finally the loudness of Lambert and Parker's environment intrudes on Ripley's part of the ship as she receives their distress call and runs down the halls to help. In both cases, I got a sense from the cuts and their pacing of two narrative strands converging and joining.

Bartók Reference

Jerry Goldsmith's score includes a passage (from about 1:11:55 to 1:12:30 in the film, or in this clip) that reminds me very strongly of another passage from Béla Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), movement III.

I initially wondered if this was the actual Bartók piece and had to look up the soundtrack on Wikipedia to confirm that it wasn't. I also remembered that the actual Bartók piece appeared in the score for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as the boy Danny rides his tricycle through the endless halls of the hotel. While my first thought was that Goldsmith and/or director Ridley Scott were inspired by Kubrick, since The Shining came out a year later (1980), that's of course not possible.

At any rate, the sinuously winding melody in the high strings, and especially the piano octaves ascending and descending chromatically sound similar enough that I imagine Goldsmith was influenced by the earlier piece. It seems that someone else also had the same thought — I was able to find this thread on Reddit, asking if others thought the passages sounded similar.

Interestingly, this music does not appear to have been written for the film. According to this review, Scott and Rawlings borrowed significantly from Goldsmith's earlier score to Freud (1962), and this title from Freud appears to be the same music as the scene in Alien.

Final Thoughts

I appreciated that this month, there was an event where people got together on a call and discussed the movies in real time. This both got me to watch the film earlier in the month than I would have otherwise, and was a fun addition to the written discussions. I liked this film choice a lot, and I'm definitely planning to participate in future movie clubs.

Until next time!