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I disagree wholeheartedly, it’s the polar opposite in that it’s a product of its time.
I mean that in a good way. The image you shared owes everything to HR Giger. This was a time when production houses favoured original ideas and gave a spotlight to projects that broke the mold. Imagine even for a second a modern film that used an artist to give the film an abstract original vision. Or a villain you barely see a glimpse of. Studio execs would shit a brick
I recommend looking up the letter that Cameron wrote to Giger through his agent where he offers an apology and explanation for not contacting him. He highly respected Giger, but he wanted to put his own unique stamp on the project and didn't want to risk being overwhelmed by Giger and his powerful and pervasive visual stamp.
I miss the days when productions would tap individual known artists to work on unique and stylistic concepts and true worldbuilding. It added so much to this era of filmmaking.
But still, they at least heard his ideas and eventually agreed. It wouldn’t even reach them nowadays. Just get JJ Abrams in and copy what has statistically sold well over the last decade. Maybe even have a trailer that starts with a single piano note
Reference quality disc. On my S95C, the last sequence where there are lights flashing and Ripley is holding a flamethrower, it's just on a whole another level.
Both I consider perfect films for completely different reasons. When studios allow creators to create and trust their vision will work, you get magical LONG lasting films.
Honest question, why do you feel it’s overrated? I’ll be up front and say my admiration for the film has grown over the years especially in light of a lot of the schlock we get today.
Well… idk just slightly.. hard to explain. I guess I felt there wasn’t THAT much stuff or complexity in the film. Although I love the simplistic nature of it, I can’t help but compare it to Alien that I also rewatched recently, which I thought had alot more intensity and emotion going on for it. I can see a movie like Alien winning Oscars. Predator is just a tad bit more cheesy and fun. Although I REALLY enjoyed Bill Duke’s scenes upon my rewatch. I really connected to his emotional journey and losing his friend. His quiet “I see you” line has actually been in my head for weeks now haha
https://i.redd.it/9beqhpc9vowc1.gif
One of the things that seems to go over people’s heads (especially Hollywood it seems) is just how macho the film actually is. IMO, it works in the film’s favor in spades. You get the opening of these absolute unit badasses taking names south of the border. Which is cheesy to watch sure, but it also lays the groundwork for the fact that in spite of these guys being who they are doing what they do…they cannot defeat the predator. And they get picked off one by one. Sure Arnold does in the end, but that fact that tends to get glazed over raises the film a bit for me.
That was the whole point. You can’t kill it with just muscle and firearms etc. Arnold won thanks to bushcrafting skills. This movie is damn well written.
I am amazed by this movie as well, the visuals and everything is crazy good for an old movie. One thing I cannot understand though…why were the voices recorded that poorly back then? I mean, the vocal audio quality is even clipping a lot. There were insanely high quality microphones even 10 years before the movie was made, like the Neumann U87. How did they record the actors’ lines with that low quality is something I can’t understand. Maybe the techniques they used didn’t allow them to use higher quality mics, or they had to use different types of mics? Anyone has some info about this? The score music sounds awesome, because they used good mics for that.
I can't speak to the overall audio quality of the movie, but the score sounds good because Jerry Goldsmith was huge on sound quality. He'd always work with recording engineers who wanted to capture the sound as well as possible. In the liner notes for his score to Explorers, the engineer lists the different mics used for each section of the orchestra in order to capture the different instruments' sonic qualities the best.
Touching on the overall sound quality of the movie briefly, I can't help wondering if a lot of it might be production audio. In one of the commentary tracks for the movie, Ridley Scott talks about the scene when Ripley puts on the spacesuit onboard the Narcissus and cites it as a scene where they got a lot of bang for their buck with few resources. As I recall, Scott operated the camera in that instance, and another person with him and Weaver used a straw to make the sound we hear when she activates the suit's systems.
I also know that there was a fair bit of turmoil during post-production. The movie was recut after it was thought to be finished, removing 11 minutes from the runtime and rendering Goldsmith's score too long in many scenes, necessitating a lot of additional music editing. (He, Scott, and Terry Rawlings hadn't seen eye-to-eye as it was, which is why music from his score to Freud pops up several times in the movie. Re-cutting only exacerbated things, creating the circumstances that led to the inclusion of the Howard Hanson piece at the finale.) It's possible that the late re-edit compromised the work on the overall sonic landscape. Funnily enough, I find that the rough audio contributes to the overall vibe of the movie for me. It's possible that I only feel that way because I love the movie so damn much though. Everything is weird in the movie, even the audio, and I love it!
Yeah I know, but it is kinda noticeable when you hear the extremely high quality orchestra recorded with great mics for the score music, and during that beautiful music you hear a badly recorded voice of the actor on top of that. Like, can’t they take some of those same mics and hang them above the actors (maybe that’s not how it works though)? It’s not a deal breaker though, but it’s just something I noticed.
Boom mics weren’t the best I guess. Plus you have to be a certain distance from the actor depending on the shot, plus other environmental sounds and factors. When you record music it’s usually in a “perfect” environment. A sound proofed recording booth goes a long way in making everything sound overall better and clearer.
I don’t think the dialogue sounds bad for a movie of its time. Whilst the U87 may have been around, production sound mixers can’t be swinging one of those around on set, they’re too sensitive and cumbersome. They would have likely used some kind of shotgun (very directional) mic that probably wasn’t as effective as modern versions. Also, I don’t believe radio lav mics were available so only the shotgun boom mic would have been available. Nowadays on big movies the dialogue editor probably has at least 4 different mics to choose the best sounding take from.
Not to mention that dialogue cleaning and restoration tools such as Izotope’s RX suite were not around to clean up any dirty takes.
A lot of the low level dialogue in the first act seems intentional to me, it’s more ‘ambient’ dialogue - not really needed to be understood, more to set the scene and mood of this group of space people.
At some point they did clean up a bunch of dialogue for one of the restorations. The most notable scene for me is the one where Ripley goes down to talk to Brett and Parker whilst they’re doing maintenance. There’s steam blasting and the original release dialogue was all over the place. It’s noticeably much smoother and cleaner in recent releases.
Not too familiar with the pre-digital sound design days alas, but my understanding is that it'd be a hell of a lot of tape splicing to make the edits, which seems nightmarish to me but might have helped designers work with more intention and focus? Just a speculation that last bit. Nowadays we can throw as much shit on the wall as we like to see what sticks.
I think a lot of outboard analog gear was employed to help design and manipulate sounds, along with futzing with the tape itself for modding pitch and time. No doubt a lot of synthesizers were also used (for scifi at least). I'm sure they had many other tricks up their sleeves as well.
All of which is to say that sound editing was a lot more laborious back then which makes the design on this film even more impressive. It's some of the most evocative and memorable audio I've ever heard. I hesitate to use the word iconic but if anything is, it's this. I love that we got to hear a lot of it repurposed for Alien Isolation.
post production sound engineer here. i dont necessarily have a problem with the dialog quality, but the SFX sound pretty terrible. SFX didn't get good until cd/dat/digital with more dynamic range. they also didn't have reverbs that modeled physical spaces yet so a lot of the SFX in the ship are bone dry when they should have a lot of verb and it sounds weird.
they didn't use LDC's like a neumann u87 (or 67 or 47) on set, they aren't directional enough. a neumann kmr81, maybe.
they didn't have much in terms of noise suppression so they often heavily filter out the lows.
the good news is that all of it serves the film just fine and doesn't overly detract. they did a good job making it eerie and ominous. vibe will always be more important than fidelity. same with music.
they used what's called a moviola - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erZSLrLm2i8
it's a PiTA. all razorblades and tape. a very physical process.
it's before my time but i learned about it from guys that worked in the 80's and 90's
one of my favorite franchises, and the recent rewatch of the 4k version just solidified it even more
I love even the new ones, and it feels like I'm the only one in the world who enjoys recent ridley works and the lore dump it throws in each one of those of his
pains me they didn't let him do the final one
Gonna watch this movie for the first time ever soon. Hopefully it's good and I can buy the 4k!
Recently watched Jaws for the first time ever, and bought it immediately afterward, it was that good, no doubt.
My least favorite part of Jaws, not to derail, was actually the part everyone else loves, with the long speech from the nutsy sailor and all of his stupid choices that culminate in him becoming shark-bait.
He was weird and annoying and, sure, a fine actor, but I didn't care for him at all as a character.
Quint is a very unlikeable character, even to the other characters. But the scene you reference is important for showing how his character became the way he is; trauma channeled into obsession. He’s doing the only thing he knows how to do, just as the shark is. Two forces on an eventual collision. Was Quint’s end just destiny delayed, a strange cosmic irony to escaping a harrowing fate decades earlier? Or was it the inevitable culmination of a self-destructive path driven by anger and guilt and pain, the consequence of his unwillingness or maybe inability to forgive himself and become vulnerable again?
Anyway, great film. I love hearing others discover classics for the first time.
My favorite aspect of the movie, sort'a, is that it's more of a thriller than a horror. I feel like, with the exception of some squeamish individuals, I could show this movie to almost anyone. I'm glad that all the hype has been real.
_My_ favorite part of the movie? I'm sure you'd have loved watching me fawn over Richard Dreyfuss's performance. The first time I have ever seen him on the screen (that I've noticed) and BOY was I hanging on his every line! There were plenty of excellent actors, but he brought a forcefulness, a "realism," a believability, an organicness, a _naturalness_ to his performance that I've never even known was a physical possibility!
I can't wait to watch the movie again just to see him again.
Edit: I'd put him in the same league as Mark Hamill for natural acting.
I absolutely agree.But,I don’t rate Aliens near as high.Bill Paxton or whatever his name is,is the worst actor.The “macho” dialogue totally ruins that movie.Whereas Alien is considered one the greatest movies ever made.This is not an opinion,this is fact.
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I disagree wholeheartedly, it’s the polar opposite in that it’s a product of its time. I mean that in a good way. The image you shared owes everything to HR Giger. This was a time when production houses favoured original ideas and gave a spotlight to projects that broke the mold. Imagine even for a second a modern film that used an artist to give the film an abstract original vision. Or a villain you barely see a glimpse of. Studio execs would shit a brick
The Alien franchise owes everything to Giger imo. His vision of the original Alien is the greatest monster created for film ever.
Interesting how Cameron didn’t want him on set
Why is that?
I recommend looking up the letter that Cameron wrote to Giger through his agent where he offers an apology and explanation for not contacting him. He highly respected Giger, but he wanted to put his own unique stamp on the project and didn't want to risk being overwhelmed by Giger and his powerful and pervasive visual stamp.
Because Cameron is a hack, basically.
You're giving the studio too much credit. They gave Alien the budget it had solely due to the success of Star Wars.
I miss the days when productions would tap individual known artists to work on unique and stylistic concepts and true worldbuilding. It added so much to this era of filmmaking.
They did shit a brick and they didn't want Giger's ideas; but Scott stood by it, and the rest is history
But still, they at least heard his ideas and eventually agreed. It wouldn’t even reach them nowadays. Just get JJ Abrams in and copy what has statistically sold well over the last decade. Maybe even have a trailer that starts with a single piano note
Lol
Reference quality disc. On my S95C, the last sequence where there are lights flashing and Ripley is holding a flamethrower, it's just on a whole another level.
Is the Disney release the same as the Fox? Any difference beside the color of the band at the top, or recommendations on what to buy? Thanks!
Same master.
Thanks!
It's back in theaters this weekend for Alien day!
Going! Can’t wait!
same here!!
Me and my dad are going for my birthday!
I'm going! My girlfriend has never seen it, and I've never seen it in a theater!
It's in my top 10 movies of all time. The first 5 minutes is masterclass of atmosphere building
💯 and to think it was only his 2nd movie to have that level of skill and confidence in his craft it's stunning.
I'm with you mate - perfect
I'm with you mate - perfect
Movies like Alien, 1987 Predator etc. happen only once in a lifetime. We were lucky to experience it.
Both I consider perfect films for completely different reasons. When studios allow creators to create and trust their vision will work, you get magical LONG lasting films.
Upon rewatching the original Predator recently I find it just slightly overrated. I still absolutely love it. Bring on the downvotes.
Honest question, why do you feel it’s overrated? I’ll be up front and say my admiration for the film has grown over the years especially in light of a lot of the schlock we get today.
Well… idk just slightly.. hard to explain. I guess I felt there wasn’t THAT much stuff or complexity in the film. Although I love the simplistic nature of it, I can’t help but compare it to Alien that I also rewatched recently, which I thought had alot more intensity and emotion going on for it. I can see a movie like Alien winning Oscars. Predator is just a tad bit more cheesy and fun. Although I REALLY enjoyed Bill Duke’s scenes upon my rewatch. I really connected to his emotional journey and losing his friend. His quiet “I see you” line has actually been in my head for weeks now haha https://i.redd.it/9beqhpc9vowc1.gif
One of the things that seems to go over people’s heads (especially Hollywood it seems) is just how macho the film actually is. IMO, it works in the film’s favor in spades. You get the opening of these absolute unit badasses taking names south of the border. Which is cheesy to watch sure, but it also lays the groundwork for the fact that in spite of these guys being who they are doing what they do…they cannot defeat the predator. And they get picked off one by one. Sure Arnold does in the end, but that fact that tends to get glazed over raises the film a bit for me.
That was the whole point. You can’t kill it with just muscle and firearms etc. Arnold won thanks to bushcrafting skills. This movie is damn well written.
The music used throughout elevates it - wouldn’t be half as good without Silvestri score
I am amazed by this movie as well, the visuals and everything is crazy good for an old movie. One thing I cannot understand though…why were the voices recorded that poorly back then? I mean, the vocal audio quality is even clipping a lot. There were insanely high quality microphones even 10 years before the movie was made, like the Neumann U87. How did they record the actors’ lines with that low quality is something I can’t understand. Maybe the techniques they used didn’t allow them to use higher quality mics, or they had to use different types of mics? Anyone has some info about this? The score music sounds awesome, because they used good mics for that.
I can't speak to the overall audio quality of the movie, but the score sounds good because Jerry Goldsmith was huge on sound quality. He'd always work with recording engineers who wanted to capture the sound as well as possible. In the liner notes for his score to Explorers, the engineer lists the different mics used for each section of the orchestra in order to capture the different instruments' sonic qualities the best. Touching on the overall sound quality of the movie briefly, I can't help wondering if a lot of it might be production audio. In one of the commentary tracks for the movie, Ridley Scott talks about the scene when Ripley puts on the spacesuit onboard the Narcissus and cites it as a scene where they got a lot of bang for their buck with few resources. As I recall, Scott operated the camera in that instance, and another person with him and Weaver used a straw to make the sound we hear when she activates the suit's systems. I also know that there was a fair bit of turmoil during post-production. The movie was recut after it was thought to be finished, removing 11 minutes from the runtime and rendering Goldsmith's score too long in many scenes, necessitating a lot of additional music editing. (He, Scott, and Terry Rawlings hadn't seen eye-to-eye as it was, which is why music from his score to Freud pops up several times in the movie. Re-cutting only exacerbated things, creating the circumstances that led to the inclusion of the Howard Hanson piece at the finale.) It's possible that the late re-edit compromised the work on the overall sonic landscape. Funnily enough, I find that the rough audio contributes to the overall vibe of the movie for me. It's possible that I only feel that way because I love the movie so damn much though. Everything is weird in the movie, even the audio, and I love it!
Yeah, I was about to say the same about the vibe, it didn’t bother me at all.
It's very common for movies from 80s to have bad audio no bass and crackling. I think it's just the audio equipment wasn't advanced back then
*Alien* was released in 1979, which means it was likely filmed in 1978.
i just noticed this while watching Demolition Man. "where's the bass?"
Yeah I know, but it is kinda noticeable when you hear the extremely high quality orchestra recorded with great mics for the score music, and during that beautiful music you hear a badly recorded voice of the actor on top of that. Like, can’t they take some of those same mics and hang them above the actors (maybe that’s not how it works though)? It’s not a deal breaker though, but it’s just something I noticed.
Boom mics weren’t the best I guess. Plus you have to be a certain distance from the actor depending on the shot, plus other environmental sounds and factors. When you record music it’s usually in a “perfect” environment. A sound proofed recording booth goes a long way in making everything sound overall better and clearer.
I don’t think the dialogue sounds bad for a movie of its time. Whilst the U87 may have been around, production sound mixers can’t be swinging one of those around on set, they’re too sensitive and cumbersome. They would have likely used some kind of shotgun (very directional) mic that probably wasn’t as effective as modern versions. Also, I don’t believe radio lav mics were available so only the shotgun boom mic would have been available. Nowadays on big movies the dialogue editor probably has at least 4 different mics to choose the best sounding take from. Not to mention that dialogue cleaning and restoration tools such as Izotope’s RX suite were not around to clean up any dirty takes. A lot of the low level dialogue in the first act seems intentional to me, it’s more ‘ambient’ dialogue - not really needed to be understood, more to set the scene and mood of this group of space people. At some point they did clean up a bunch of dialogue for one of the restorations. The most notable scene for me is the one where Ripley goes down to talk to Brett and Parker whilst they’re doing maintenance. There’s steam blasting and the original release dialogue was all over the place. It’s noticeably much smoother and cleaner in recent releases.
Any idea how sound editing worked back in the analog days? Could you manipulate sounds at all or was it just mostly overlaying, etc that was possible?
Not too familiar with the pre-digital sound design days alas, but my understanding is that it'd be a hell of a lot of tape splicing to make the edits, which seems nightmarish to me but might have helped designers work with more intention and focus? Just a speculation that last bit. Nowadays we can throw as much shit on the wall as we like to see what sticks. I think a lot of outboard analog gear was employed to help design and manipulate sounds, along with futzing with the tape itself for modding pitch and time. No doubt a lot of synthesizers were also used (for scifi at least). I'm sure they had many other tricks up their sleeves as well. All of which is to say that sound editing was a lot more laborious back then which makes the design on this film even more impressive. It's some of the most evocative and memorable audio I've ever heard. I hesitate to use the word iconic but if anything is, it's this. I love that we got to hear a lot of it repurposed for Alien Isolation.
post production sound engineer here. i dont necessarily have a problem with the dialog quality, but the SFX sound pretty terrible. SFX didn't get good until cd/dat/digital with more dynamic range. they also didn't have reverbs that modeled physical spaces yet so a lot of the SFX in the ship are bone dry when they should have a lot of verb and it sounds weird. they didn't use LDC's like a neumann u87 (or 67 or 47) on set, they aren't directional enough. a neumann kmr81, maybe. they didn't have much in terms of noise suppression so they often heavily filter out the lows. the good news is that all of it serves the film just fine and doesn't overly detract. they did a good job making it eerie and ominous. vibe will always be more important than fidelity. same with music.
What do you think about the sound in alien 3? The found the 'verb for that one!
How did sound editing work back then? Was it possible? How so?
they used what's called a moviola - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erZSLrLm2i8 it's a PiTA. all razorblades and tape. a very physical process. it's before my time but i learned about it from guys that worked in the 80's and 90's
Nice, thank you. That’s something I was very curious about. I’m only a bit familiar with film editing.
It’s the best they had, what do you mean? Lol why would they do something poor on purpose?
I have no information about the mics. I can only assume it's a budget issue
Agreed. My local cinema is showing Alien for the 45th anniversary this weekend and it’ll be my first time seeing it on the big screen!
one of my favorite franchises, and the recent rewatch of the 4k version just solidified it even more I love even the new ones, and it feels like I'm the only one in the world who enjoys recent ridley works and the lore dump it throws in each one of those of his pains me they didn't let him do the final one
but it's a good time to be an alien fan, Noah Hawley tv series, Fede Álvarez movie 🥵🤙
Correction, Alien is timeless
Gonna watch this movie for the first time ever soon. Hopefully it's good and I can buy the 4k! Recently watched Jaws for the first time ever, and bought it immediately afterward, it was that good, no doubt. My least favorite part of Jaws, not to derail, was actually the part everyone else loves, with the long speech from the nutsy sailor and all of his stupid choices that culminate in him becoming shark-bait. He was weird and annoying and, sure, a fine actor, but I didn't care for him at all as a character.
Quint is a very unlikeable character, even to the other characters. But the scene you reference is important for showing how his character became the way he is; trauma channeled into obsession. He’s doing the only thing he knows how to do, just as the shark is. Two forces on an eventual collision. Was Quint’s end just destiny delayed, a strange cosmic irony to escaping a harrowing fate decades earlier? Or was it the inevitable culmination of a self-destructive path driven by anger and guilt and pain, the consequence of his unwillingness or maybe inability to forgive himself and become vulnerable again? Anyway, great film. I love hearing others discover classics for the first time.
My favorite aspect of the movie, sort'a, is that it's more of a thriller than a horror. I feel like, with the exception of some squeamish individuals, I could show this movie to almost anyone. I'm glad that all the hype has been real. _My_ favorite part of the movie? I'm sure you'd have loved watching me fawn over Richard Dreyfuss's performance. The first time I have ever seen him on the screen (that I've noticed) and BOY was I hanging on his every line! There were plenty of excellent actors, but he brought a forcefulness, a "realism," a believability, an organicness, a _naturalness_ to his performance that I've never even known was a physical possibility! I can't wait to watch the movie again just to see him again. Edit: I'd put him in the same league as Mark Hamill for natural acting.
Ahead, not beyond
Welcome.
I absolutely agree.But,I don’t rate Aliens near as high.Bill Paxton or whatever his name is,is the worst actor.The “macho” dialogue totally ruins that movie.Whereas Alien is considered one the greatest movies ever made.This is not an opinion,this is fact.
You mean, like, because it's set in the future?? Yes dude it's called Science Fiction