Aliens- Mise-en-scene (Lighting)

Lighting

From the beginning of the chapter i chose (52 minutes in), the lighting in the ship is dim, and there is steam/fog coming from some of the ships ventilators. The crew enter in a tank with two bright headlights, they park up turning the headlights off and shine a massive torch ahead, brightening up their path. The ship's lighting is more or less the same through out most of the sequence but different sources of light are shown, for example when the crew are making their way in to investigate, they carry attached torches on their shoulders. There are the odd few lights on the ships ceilings but this does not brighten up the surroundings.
There is more light where Ripley and the operating crew are, perhaps showing that there is less chance of them being in danger, we can see this because darkness is associated with monsters and fear. The crew walk into a tunnel-like area and the lighting isn't very dark, the militants can see but need their torches to see properly. By having a constant dim light throughout makes the audience feel the intensity of what is happening on screen. A bright torch is shone on a human corpse's body to emphasise her grey skin colour.
The camera point of view is used a lot, it shows what the operating team are able to see. The lighting on it is purposely dark and the quality and connection to the crew's camera is bad, this is so the operating crew find it harder to tell what is going on when an incident occurs. After the alien baby is shown and the flamethrower is used, the lighting on the screen and in the surroundings are red and orange, apart from the torches it seems like the new light source. From then onwards the adult aliens start to wake up, when showing this it is very dark so the audience struggles to make out the features. We are able to make out a head and perhaps a tail. It is difficult to see as the walls look just like the aliens' body, it is almost as though alien corpses are used as the interior design.
At this point the crew are wary of their surroundings as it shows movement on their monitors, the audience would be wary because everything on the walls looks like the parts of the alien we saw. This could mean some may even be hiding on the walls, camoflaged. That is exactly what happens and the alien attacks, and once again, the fire is the light source.