Our trilogy finally comes to an end. We all new it would end with Ridley's best...Alien. What else is there to say but...In space, no one can hear you scream. In 1988, Nightmare on Elm Street got me interested in horror. But it was Alien, 5 years later, that got me hooked.
The story: A mining crew picks up a distress signal from a near uncharted planet. A few of the crew go down and check it out. They find a field of huge eggs. One opens and the infamous face-hugger attacks. From there, everything spirals out of control. The face-hugger implants an alien embryo into the hosts chest. At this point in the movie, we don't know that yet. The face-hugger is still attached to Kane's face with its fingers/legs wrapped around his head, its tail around his throat, and its vagina against his mouth. Seriously that opening of the face-hugger looks like a really messed up vagina. Anyway, it finally falls off his face and dies. He awakens dazed and with a mighty hunger. He's got to feed that baby alien you know. The next major scene is what Alien is known for. All the crew is eating their last meal before hyper-sleep and Kane gets some serious indigestion. This scene always reminds me of the parody from Spaceballs. "Water my ass, bring this guy some pepto bismal!" The Alien bursts out of his chest, escapes, and goes on a murdering rampage.
The Characters: Kane, the host. Dallas, the captain. Lambert, the annoying crybaby. Ash, the vicious android. Parker and Brett, a couple of lazy bums. And Ripley, the most ass kickingest lady in the universe. The last character, one of the best antagonists of all time, the Alien.
Really only 2 of these characters are worth talking about in depth: Riply and the Alien. In fact, those are really the only 2 characters that matter in all 4 of the Alien movies, everything else is secondary. The way Weaver plays Ripley is great, and she actually evolves the character through out the quadrilogy. But in this movie she likes to play everything by the book. The reason she survives is she uses common sense and is smarter than everyone else. It's actually very rare in horror movies. She is definitely the best heroine in any movie ever. Done.
Earlier I said the Alien is one of the best antagonists of all time. There are many reasons for this. It doesn't have any emotions, just the instinct to kill mercilessly and further it's species. It doesn't make mistakes, it doesn't discriminate. It's just an effecient killing machine. One aspesct I always thought that made it even better was its growth rate. It went from tiny, adorable alien pal, to furocious killer in a few hours. I've never understood how though. Does it eat a lot? Actually, what the hell does it eat. We never see it eat. I would guess that it could eat some of the people it kills but I'm not sure. And who doesn't love that little mouth that comes out of it's big mouth. How awesome is that!?!? The Alien design is just amazing. Of course anything HR Giger makes is pretty damn cool.
One thing I recently read was a book full of interviews with David Cronenberg. He was talking about how people compare Alien to his movie Shivers. I've never heard or even thought of that. Sure, they both feature a little monster inside people. But the Alien bursts out of its host, killing that person. The Shivers' slugs stay inside their hosts controlling them (and making them really horny). So I understand the comparison to the foreign entity inside a human, but to me they are still extremely different movies. Cronenberg was a little bit arrogant about this comparison. He accused Ridley of stealing the idea from him. It kind of pissed me off at Cronenberg, and I love Cronenberg.
But one of the very best things about the movie Alien is its mood/atmosphere. This is RS's forte. It's tense, scary, and gloomy. What's not to love right? The combination of the atmosphere, the Alien, and Sigourney make this the best Ridley Scott movie ever and one of the top 5 horror/sci-fi movies of all time.
10 out of 10! Perfect!...Almost. Turn the damn lights on in a room before you search it for aliens or monsters!
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