Is Bigger Better?
by Michael Risen

It's become a hard and fast rule of summer movie-making that bigger is better. Bigger budgets, bigger special effects, bigger stars. But while this formula usually leads to bigger revenues, when it comes to making a thrilling film, it falls flat.

Ridley Scott's Alien is terrifying, a classic sci-fi horror film. You get chills when Tom Skerrit crawls through that tunnel and the alien pops out from the tube. It's the flamethrower, the beeping of the motion detector, the screaming. It's H. R. Giger's monster — an eyeless, shiny, black biped with claws and fangs.

Most of all, it's that the alien isn't seen for the first 45 minutes of the film. Scott plays with the audiences' expectations; he allows us to assemble our own mental image of the alien from the bits we catch on screen. In fact, we only see the full form of the alien at the end of the film, when Ripley blasts it out of the airlock.

The same goes for John McTiernan's Predator. This alien is invisible as it hunts Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura through the jungle. Bits of the predator are visible throughout the film, but it's only in the final battle with Arnold that we see the predator's insect-like face when he removes his helmet, exposing a fang-filled mouth — terrifying.

This formula of concealing and revealing is a classic plot device. In Psycho, the terrifying part is when we see Norman at the end dressed up as his mother. The shower scene is horrific, but it's the revelation of "Mother's" identity that makes the film.

Which leads to Final Fantasy, one of this summer's biggest sci-fi thrillers. Big budget, big special effects, big, climactic fight scene with an enormous bad guy. But the gigantic "spirit" is not particularly terrifying; its only threatening quality is its size. It's big, amorphous, and deadly-but that's all. We've seen a similar monster in earlier parts of the film — so why is this one special?

The same goes for Ivan Reitman's Evolution. In his classic film, Ghostbusters, The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and Gozer the Gozarian are "terrifying" monsters (if in a comic sense) because of their originality and the tense build-up to their appearances. We learn their stories before we see them, and Reitman exploits our collective imagination. Both of these monsters have a developed character in the film. Evolution offers, on the other hand, an unexplained, gigantic cow pie.

Films like Final Fantasy, Alien: Resurrection, Akira, The Fifth Element and X-Files die in the end because, though they certainly have that special-effects punch, they lack the creativity to one-up the audience's imagination. What would Alien be like if, in the end, the alien just turned out to be a big, slimy, human-like bug? It would look like the end of Alien: Resurrection, when Ripley fights a half-human, half-alien blob.

The Fifth Element is certainly a stylish sci-fi film, but the big, black ball of evil at the film's climax does not match the thought that went into the rest of the film. It's a copout. The directing choice to use the 'amorphous blob' bad guy has an impact at the box office, too. Alien is a sci-fi classic. Alien: Resurrection is, well, not quite a classic.

Indeed, the final confrontation between a well-developed antagonist and the hero defines great sci-fi thrillers. The full emergence of the enemy defies our expectations for the appearance and nature of the character, which we have been allowed to build up in our minds. The director leads us on, then takes us in an entirely different, more terrifying direction. In Alien, the alien hunts the crew down. For the final fight, though, Scott hides the creature in the escape craft by having it camouflage itself by blending in the cables and tubes. The alien goes from aggressive hunter to patient trapper — a new element in the alien's character.

After a good terrifying film, I want to shake a director's hand for being creative in the development of the story — for going beyond what I thought it would be. After a bad one, all I can think of is how I wasted my $7. I feel like the director didn't work for the money.

Few movies today go for the creative jugular; they throw phantasmagoria at us from beginning to end. Sadly, in today's sci-fi environment, one of the best things to be said of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is that it doesn't end in a fight between Mark Wahlberg and a King Kong-sized General Thade.

E-mail Michael Risen at msrise at wm dot edu.