Alien - my favourite scene

With little to do last night aside from sit in the house and finish writing my contribution to the BAFRA annual exam, I decided to watch Alien again.  I've stated many times on this blog that Alien is my favourite film.  So this time I want to discuss out my favourite scenes from the movie.  Though the film's most iconic and memorable moment is the notorious chest-buster scene (I expect this video link will fail to work at some point - the Ridley Scott copyright police are fairly hot on this), my favourite part of the film is the opening sequence in which we are introduced to the ship and the horror of what might unfold is foreshadowed.

The film opens with a shot that pans across space and an unknown planet.  After the film's title disappears from the screen we see the now infamous ship - the Nostromo - drifting through the endless cold indifference of interstellar space.  If anything were to go wrong out here, there's no one to help.  We cut inside the ship, observe its empty, cramped spaces and are invited into the main cockpit where we see a fragment of an unknown transmission being received by the ship's computer.  As the transmission ends we cut quickly to black.  When the picture comes back in we are in a darkened corridor with the lights just turning on.  Almost as if it had been waiting there for months for just this moment, the camera pauses for a second before slowly edging towards the door ahead of it where the crew are awaking from their slumber.

This is the visual language of cinema at work and operating at its finest.  The scene tells us about the premise of the film, sets up the aesthetic, hints at the horrors to come and generates a foreboding atmosphere of the terror of isolation in space - all from a few shots before we see a single person or hear a single line.  The idea that the camera has been waiting for the crew to awake if the bit that sends the biggest tingle down my spine.  It's as if the ship's computer has been waiting for this moment, stealthily hiding in the pitch black corridor for endless time until it's able to wake its crew and send them to their doom with a disconnected indifference that's only possible for a machine - or perhaps a corporation - to express.

I don't know why I'm watching Alien again now that my Lovefilm subscription is providing me with an endless films supply of films.  Maybe because it's bloody brilliant.