Mise En Scene

 

The movie that I will be covering for Mise En Scene is the hit horror/Sci-fi film Alien from the year 1979. This film takes place on a commercial space ship that have intercepted a distress signal from another ship, but after finding out why the ship was abandoned in the first place the crew have to find a way to survive a extremely dangerous alien organisms. 

The movie's setting mostly takes place in a spaceship and its multiple rooms that are contained inside. In the beginning of the movie the ship has bright white lights and colors to symbolize that despite being in space the crew is at peace. Even when the audience is introduced to the main cast of characters, bright colors are still being used like the color of their shirts ranging from white, light blue, and green once again to symbolize that they have pure intentions of doing their assigned job right as soon as they wake up.

 The man protagonist of the film named Ellen Ripley, mostly wears the color white throughout the film because the idea of the movie was that this sweet and intelligent woman has to let go of her regular personality in order to defeat the alien threat that soon kills members of the crew. 

 

Soon as the crew discovers the alien organism all the bright colors disappear and everything has a relation to the color black which adds fear and horror into the atmosphere when the audience is watching this film. Even the main antagonist of the movie which is the alien treat is the color black, this is done so that the audience knows that the main intention that this alien has is to hunt and kill anything that moves. The alien also can strike fear into the hearts of the audience due to its dark colors and its overall design once the alien is fully revealed. The scenes that the alien (or the xenomorph) appears in also add a little emotion to the antagonist because the darkness of the scenes adds a little height to the monster and also adds a feeling that the monster has high senses because the audience can see from its design that it has no eyes.

Mise En scene has helped define the genre mostly due to the color contrast from the beginning to the end of the movie. The change from a nice bright and cheerful to the horror and fearful filled environment when the space crew discovers the alien threat they have to face. Its the main reason why I love this movie so much, from the designs of the alien monster and the environment, to the smooth way the mood of the film changed without flaw. The movie alien is a great example of the utilization of Mise En scene, and the future movies of the alien films still use the same format of Mise En Scene to bring in the horror factor of the genre.