DISPLAYS
Orbital Approach
As the crew of the Nostromo begin their approach to LV426 there are various displays on the flight deck showing the ships decent. Boy there is a lot going on here! The most intricate one being the approach vector represented by expanding concentric rectangles. At first this seems like a simple repeating pattern, but then the ship rotates and the rectangles turn and begin to give a 3d effect which is very impressive visually for 1979. The planetoid itself is depicted as a wireframe globe with a topographic map encompassing its surface.
There is great attention to detail here as most people who try to recreate this particular animation immediately make their globe rotate. This is not what the image does. In fact, we can see that the globe is getting larger from our POV as the ships position changes within its orbit and the “camera” is moving past it. No matter how many times I see this, it always looks believable, and the viewer always knows what is going on in the scene.
The eagle-eyed among you may notice a black line starting to rolldown the screen, was it intentional? I’m not sure, occasionally certain scenes show interference lines across the monitors to indicate malfunctioning equipment or issues with signal. In this case it may just be to do with the refresh rate and the frame rate of the camera.
Auto Distruct
The infamous auto destruct screen that kicks in at the end of the movie, when Ripley sets the ship to blow up. This screen is also used in the scene where Kane’s body is blown out the airlock, and seems to be counting down from five minutes for some reason.
On the main flight deck the hexagon outer shape is orange and a series of red crosses reduce in size and dissolve in the centre of the screen. Upon closer inspection we can see as the next new smaller cross appears an after image of the previous one remains briefly. This continues until we reach one large glow bloom over a simple bright yellow “X” shape in the centre and then dissipates and the cycle begins again.
For some reason there are two smaller monitors to the left of this display, showing the same animation except the graphics are entirely blue. Further left is a small duplicate of the main screen this is exactly how the deck looks during Kane’s “burial at sea” scene also.
