Scene Description Spotlight: “Alien”
Since we featured Wall-E last week, and co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton acknowledged his inspiration for the ‘haiku style’ approach he took to scene description from reading the script to Alien, I figured we should take a look at what Walter Hill and David Giler did with their final draft.
As noted previously, Will and Giler did not receive writing credit on Alien; Dan O’Bannon did (with story by credit to O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett).
Here is the final action sequence of the movie: Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), along with the cat Jones, has left the Nostromo — and supposedly the Alien — for the ‘safety’ of a lifeboat shuttle. The action starts just as Ripley has watched the Nostromo explode — “the boiling fireball fades into nothingness”:
Easy to see the appeal of this stylistic approach. But I can’t make this point strongly enough (as I did with our Wall-E article last week): This style absolutely has to match the genre and feel of the story or it can come off as a horrible mismatch. For instance, the haiku style would not work with a Victorian era period piece; but maybe so for a film noir movie.
What did you notice about this approach to scene description? What caught your eye?
For more Scene Description Spotlight articles, go here.