Alien

Just recently my close friend and brother-in-law and I have been in a semi-heated debate/discussion surrounding the ‘Alien’ films. He watched the first and thought that it was slow and that it could have been accomplished in 80 minutes instead of 2 hours. I, could NOT be in more disagreement with how he felt. To refresh myself on the film, I just watched it yesterday, so here is my take on it. Quick premise – on a spaceship in the future that is used to mine ore and bring it back to earth, a crew encounters a stranded ship in space. On board that ship one of the crew members is attacked and a foreign entity is latched on to his face. Long story short, an alien sprouts from his chest and runs rampant around the ship killing humans, but sparing cats.

Alien Trailer

In my humble opinion, the best part of this film is the pacing and buildup. Ridley Scott, one of the best directors of sci-fi in the world;( BLADE RUNNER, THELMA AND LOUSIE, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME, etc) sets this film up perfectly. There actually isn’t a true scare until close to an hour in this film. The first minor scare actually comes from one of the actors accidentally knocking over a garbage can – and true story, that was a true accident, but Ridley kept it in after the fact because it alerted the audience to the tonal change that was coming about in the film.

Sigourney Weaver is a gem in this film. She plays the role of background crew member that is shoved into the limelight perfectly. And I’m sure everyone enjoys the final scenes where she “relaxes in the spacepod.” During the first act and half of the second act we are submerged into this new world. This allows us to relate more and become more enthralled in it – at least it did for me anyways. It made the payoffs in final half of the film much better for me. Some of my favorite scenes are: 1. The alien coming out of the chest. 2. The scene where the engineer is looking for the cat and the alien gets him from behind. The way it was crafted with the close-ups on the cat was extraordinary. 3. The final scene where the alien is hidden in the front of the computer deck and startles Ripley. It still gets me every time. They waited till the perfect second then pulled the trigger.

Overall, this is probably one of my favorite deep-space thrillers that will still remain to be relevant for a long time. I know, I know, JASON X is pretty close to this film, but I’ll stick with ALIEN. I’m going to watch the sequel soon “ALIENS”, because my brother-in-law did like that film more. He said there was more action and better pay-offs… Hmmmm… I remember not liking it so much. We’ll see. James Cameron is a good director too, but… Well you’ll see.


Rating: 8.75/10
RT: 97%