journal features

movie review - Alien

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Calgary, 2002.05.20

This is the third time I've seen this one, and I've noticed something. As with The Fly, I can see this one every five years or so and not remember a damn thing about it. Which is good, because it's certainly worth seeing repeatedly.

The movie is about the crew of a small space vessel that's en route to the Solar system from deep space towing a large ore refinery. On the way, the ship intercepts a signal of unknown origin while the crew sleeps. The Company that owns everything redirects the ship to investigate, and the crew is woken to do the dirty work. And what dirty work it is, indeed.

Strongly recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton