So, how are Star Wars and Alien different? To answer this question I watched around 10 minutes of the beginning of both films and made notes on the six areas of genre.
Here are my notes for both films and then I will compare them:
Alien
Style
Star Wars
These two films have many similarities; these are because of the narrative theme boundaries. Every genre has different narrative themes, but can be cross-referenced with one another because the boundaries tie together. Certain things are the same in two themes but mean different things.
In ‘Alien’ the spaceship comes into view of the audience and fills the screen to show the size of it compared to space, the size of it makes the audience feel small. The same thing happens in Star Wars, which shows the conventions that Lucas gave this theme were very successful and the audience liked them.
The white lighting and angular shape of the interior of the ships show the modern style that needs to be portrayed for the audience to understand the genre because they represent future.
The titles of the films give the obvious suggestion that the films are sci-fi films because ‘Alien’ and ‘Star Wars’ are all words that people associate with space and these outline the storyline.
The sounds that you here are very modern and hi-tech sounds which show that these two ships have a lot of technology that they need to fly through space. The computers on the ship in ‘Alien’ control the ship while the crew are sleeping; this shows that it is very technological to direct such a big ship.
The red and blue lights that you see all represent more technology, they all look like buttons, there is a lot of them that shows that controlling these ships is a very complicated thing to do, you need to be very smart and know how to use such advanced computers.
These films were produced in the 1970’s and there wasn’t many computers, and if there was any they would fill a whole room, the technology and special effects used in these two films really where advanced compared to technology at the time, Lucas gave Sci-Fi a new way to show things that weren’t realistically there and this amazed audiences because they wondered how it was done.
The characters in the two films are very different but there are some similarities. The crew on the ‘Alien’ ship are all humans and are normally in casual clothing with badges on their arm to show they are in uniform to show that they are working together and are all the same.
In ‘Star Wars’ there are some human being characters, but most of the characters are robots or humans in costume being represented as robotic beings. There are the same character types in each film.
The two films are both Space Fantasies, but different types, ‘Star Wars’ is a battle and ‘Alien’ is an Alien Invasion. The opening of ‘Star Wars’ opens like a fairy tale telling us the story first of all so the audience already know some of the story so the film doesn’t have to go back in time. In the opening of ‘Alien’ you see five rectangle shape silver lights in front of a planet, coming up one by one giving the impression there is a spaceship in space. More rectangles are added slowly to make the word Alien.
