From Whence We Came

Year: 2012

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green, Michael Fassbender 

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This damn Alien franchise just refuses to end! I know it’s still shorter than most of the marathons I do, but damn has it been an excruciating stretch between Aliens and now. This is a marathon where I really had to lean on my completist instincts as a crutch, otherwise I might have abandoned it long before a single Predator came into the picture.

It’s unbelievable that the five short years separating the Alien pseudo-prequel Prometheus from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem were enough to revive any sort of public interest in the franchise, but the return of original director Ridley Scott seemed to have been the spoonful of sugar that lured butts to the seats. I have my doubts about the man’s consistency (never forget the dude directed Exodus: Gods and Kings no more than 3 years ago), but Prometheus is at the very least enough to get me tentatively excited about the upcoming Alien: Covenant, a feat I wouldn’t have thought humanly possible.

Even I, a staunch sequel advocate, find it hard to justify keeping this franchise on life support.

Anyway, Prometheus is set in the late 21st century, following a scientific expedition to a far-off moon that may be the location of a settlement created by the Engineers, a race of giant albino aliens that created humanity. Exactly how or why humanity has come to this conclusion is beyond me, but anthropologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) are leading the expedition from the starship Prometheus, funded by a generous grant from the late business mogul Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce in utterly tacky old age make-up).

The crew includes the ship’s captain Janek (Idris Elba), the stern corporate representative Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the bumbling scientific duo Fifield (Sean Harris) and Milburn (Rafe Spall), and the humanoid synthetic David (Michael Fassbender), who – like all androids in this franchise – may not be entirely trustworthy.

His trustworthiness is inversely proportional to his beauty.

Prometheus is not a masterpiece. Heck, it might not even be a great film. But it’s so much closer to the tone and spirit of the original Alien than the half-dozen films that came before it that it’s a real breath of fresh air. Here is the sense of sweeping sci-fi grandeur that doesn’t undercut the claustrophobia of the main narrative. There are the irresistible jabs toward visceral, exploitative horror nestled in the stately cinematic atmosphere. It’s a Ridley Scott Alien picture through and through, and that is a good thing.

Frankly, Prometheus is a beautiful piece of work. The production design is a spectacular expanse of organically inhuman architecture and sweeping spacecraft curves that imply a world that’s itching to become the one we see in Alien, set centuries of technological development later. It’s a beautiful dollop of sci-fi blockbuster filmmaking.

There’s just one thing it isn't very good at: being a prequel to Alien. And I’m no whiny fanboy complaining that nobody on this crew was named Ripley. Fundamentally, Prometheus is on a completely different thematic journey than any other Alien flick, as varied as they all have been. This film, as scripted by Jon Spaihts and Lost’s Damon Lindelof (ah, there’s the rub), takes a decidedly philosophical tack, exploring the meaning of the creation of life. It chews on this theme in scene after scene, eventually spitting it out when it becomes too tough to swallow and throwing in a big ol’ monster instead.

Which, honestly, I prefer.

Prometheus just doesn’t seem to have any clue what it’s about, other than the occasional spot of sci-fi mayhem. The inception of the Xenomorph is a mere afterthought, and the creation plot line fails to gel with anything in its own movie, let alone the whole franchise. Oh, but that sci-fi mayhem is pretty incredible.

Although the film’s zombie element is one of its farthest diversions from the franchise it’s attempting to resurrect, it’s still visually and viscerally stimulating, and a late scene in a surgical pod is beyond reproach as a sublime nugget of grotesquery.

It’s a beautiful movie that allows ugliness and horror to penetrate deep into its being, and that’s exactly what an Alien movie should be, space albinos or no space albinos. It thinks it’s far more intelligent than it really is, but at the very least it’s light years better than everything we’ve had to wallow through since Aliens, 26 long years before.

TL;DR: Prometheus is an excellently crafted sci-fi thriller.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 768
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

Popcorn Kernels: Double Crossover

In which we review the cumbersomely titled Alien/Predator mash-‘em-ups in back to back mini-reviews, because Lord knows I don’t want to spend a second longer with them than I absolutely need to.

AvP: Alien vs. Predator

Year: 2004

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen, Raoul Bova 

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A group of explorers stumble into a buried pyramid in Antarctica that is also the site of an ancient battle between the predators and the Xenomorphs.

It’s such a miracle of licensing management that any crossover film ever gets made that I really want to like them. I really do. But Alien vs. Predator, no doubt sparked into life by the runaway success of Freddy vs. Jason, doesn’t even reach that film’s level of base mediocrity. To be fair, with mid-2000’s franchise horror it was either go torture or go home, so the sci-fi tinged property was already dead on the vine, but I’m not sure it’s physically possible to come up with a worse justification for the meeting of these two genre giants.

That being said, I also didn’t think this ludicrous mash-up could possibly be boring, but against all odds I continue to be wrong. Even when you add a shifting, labyrinth-esque puzzle box of a pyramid and some Thing throwback Antarctic mayhem, Alien vs. Predator can’t shake off the doldrums of tedium that wrack it to its very core.

This probably has a lot to do with what it has in common with Alien: Resurrection, namely a brobdingnagian slate of names cardboard soldiers that fail to be anchored by the presence of a stately character actor (in this case Lance Henriksen, who slums it for an appallingly large amount of time. But it also has to do with Paul W. S. Anderson’s royally clunky staging and liberal application of exhaustingly prolonged slomo. The Xenomorph effects were clearly limited, so it was difficult to frame an Alien and a Predator in the same shot without flop sweat, and the bleak grey color palette made it pretty much impossible to discern what was going on regardless.

AvP is a choppy, generic movie that just doesn’t seem to care one whit about either of its source materials. Plus, its convoluted mythology leans far too heavily on the side of the Predators that it’s impossible to view this as a clash between two equal, evil factions. Its wan action is buried under hideous clichés like the Academic Who Can read Dead Languages like the Back of a Cereal Box.

Fortunately, being a Paul W. S. Anderson movie does leave AvP with its fair share of ignoble popcorn flick charms. Every 15 minutes or so, it briefly perks up with a scene so mind-bogglingly stupid, you can’t help but admire and enjoy it. You won’t catch me complaining about the mid-glacier-climb phone call or the jump scare featuring a penguin, because they at least show a spark of life in the dead-eyed monstrosity. And [SPOILERS] I have little to no opinion on the Predator as a villain, so the controversial climax where our heroine befriends one of the hulking kill beasts brings me nothing but frothy delight. [END SPOILERS] 

AvP is nothing but a waste of time, but at least it has the decency to be a weird waste of time.

Rating: 4/10

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

Year: 2007 

Director: The Brothers Strause

Cast: Reiko Aylesworth, Steven Pasquale, Shareeka Epps 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A Predator-Alien hybrid is let loose on a small Colorado town in British Columbia.

The films where acid-blooded moon beasts and technologically advanced dreadlock monsters duke it out just should not be boring! How does this keep happening? This movie whose name I refuse to type a second time and shall now refer to as AvPR isn’t spectacularly bad in any showy, immediately recognizable way. Instead it’s insidious, sinking into your bones like a rot.

It has a lot going for it. This is the first time the Xenomorphs have made contact with anything remotely resembling the real world (as Dawson’s Creek-y as the human cast gets, it’s set in a recognizable modern American town). The franchise has returned to its R-rating, doling out gross deaths by the bucketful. And there are even a couple tidbits about civilian life in post-9/11 Patriot Act America, if you look hard enough.

But between its hopelessly tangled laundry list of characters (this is basically a Garry Marshall movie with Chestbursters) and unrelenting nastiness, AvPR is just unpleasant to spend time with. People live and it’s hard to care about their unexplored personalities. People die and it’s pointlessly brutal. A Predator and a Xenomorph have a tussle in the street while the camera swoops gracefully past a huge Papa John’s sign a couple dozen times. It’s just crude.

And the worst crime of all is that it wastes cinematographer Daniel Pearl, by far the most experienced person on set including the two directors and every member of the overpopulated cast. While Pearl attempts to create the slick, mottled look he crafted in Texas Chainsaw and Friday the 13th that was inescapable in the 2000’s, it’s clear he was given no more than two lights to work with, leading the entirely film to be clouded by a murky gray fog.

It’s a dreary, dilapidated mess that had no reason to exist in the first place, and it hardly justifies itself with its leaden action sequences, dull pacing, and complete lack of interest in anything slapped onscreen. If Alien vs. Predator was one to miss, AvPR is one to hit… with a flaming arrow that launches it into oblivion, so you never have to think about it again.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 960

Reviews In This Series

Alien (Scott, 1979)

Aliens (Cameron, 1986)

Predator (McTiernan, 1987)

Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)

Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)

Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)

AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)

Predators (Antal, 2010)

Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

The Predator (Black, 2018)

Spaced Out

Year: 1997

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon 

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An Alien sequel penned by sardonic geek icon Joss Whedon and helmed by the director of Amélie! What could possibly go wrong? Answer: not as much as Alien 3, but Alien: Resurrection (the fourth entry in a franchise that had already long overstayed its welcome and has continued to do so for two more decades) trades idiosyncratic misery for completely generic fluff. But at least it’s remotely tolerable.

I’m not sure I have a thick enough carapace to survive this marathon.

In Alien: Resurrection, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is, well, resurrected. You can’t very well have an Alien movie without her so Hollywood an experimental medical facility paid her an assload of money cloned the DNA of her centuries-old corpse, and here she is. Once again, the movie fails to give half a crap about what the culture shock of waking up 200 years in the future must be like, only this time it also fails to give half a crap about Ripley’s DNA being merged with the Xenomorph’s, converting her from an avenging angel to a maternal figure with acid blood.

You couldn’t pay me to sit down and parse out the depths to how wrong this science is.

Anyway, Ripley is back and so is the Xenomorph, because this movie ain’t gonna be about her buying a timeshare on Pluto. The greedy General Perez (Dan Hedaya) has bred a baker’s dozen of the monsters for reasons nobody really cares to explain, and when things go predictably awry, the specimens escape from the custody of one Dr. Gediman (Brad Dourif, slumming it, and yes this counts as slumming it from the star of Child’s Play 3). Thus a ragtag band of space mercenaries (?) (pirates? I don’t know, they have guns) – including the morally superior (read: irritating) Call Winona Ryder) and the macho alpha dog Johner (Ron Perlman) – must reluctantly team up with Ripley to escape the ship and destroy the Xenomorphs before they reach Earth.

What a s*h*thole.

There are a dozen and a half sins that Alien: Resurrection is guilty of committing, but the largest are the atrocities performed on Ripley’s character. Their forced explanation of her return from the dead (spoilers I guess, but who really cares at this point?) robs her of any sort of personality, making her a clone with stunted feelings. If you’re paying Sigourney Weaver a truly grotesque amount of money, why script her into an emotional iron maiden? Just have her be struck by space lightning and get on with it. This is the third sequel, nobody cares.

Of course, this is a movie that displays Ripley’s newfound alien powers by having her make sweet dunks on a basketball court, so maybe character depth is a little too much to ask.

Unfortunately, there’s nobody to step up up and fill Ripley’s shoes, as hard as they’re trying to make Winona Ryder a thing. She fails as a Ripley surrogate and as a hard-edged warrior, and the only thing her character contributes is a delightfully inexplicable scene where she attempts to drink from a mug while wearing boxing gloves. The sad thing is, every other member of this overstuffed ensemble contributes even less.

This is no fault of the casting director. Ron Perlman and Brad Dourif are fabulous character actors filling the exact spaces they need to, but the script scrounges around to find anything for them to do, let alone the 35 faceless goons that are flanking them.

And love Joss Whedon though I do, this script just isn’t working. The way he tells it, his humorous dialogue was steamrolled by an overserious tone, but 1) did anybody really want Ripley trading Avengers-style quips with Hellboy? And 2) that still doesn’t excuse the ten-car pileup of syntax that attempts to pass itself off as wit.

It’s just not fun. The plot is a shambles and the action is poundingly repetitive (if I never see a squad of gun-toting astronauts tip-toeing down a metal passageway again I’ll be a happy man). It’s straight boring is what it is.

Something a film about a man-eating alien with acid blood should never be.

However, as much of a slog as it was to sit through, it has two strengths that buoy it at least above the dismal Alien 3. First, it’s surprisingly gory, resurrecting the grindhouse flair that made the original film so viscerally compelling. Second, the world-building of the franchise hits its peak here. The Alien movies have never particularly cared about exploring the technological developments that litter the world of the future, but Resurrection is full of fun little flourishes (like freeze-dried whiskey or a security door that identities people by their breath) that indicate subtle ways life has changed over the centuries.

Even if the characters are made of tissue paper, at least that paper is filled with blood and exists in a world I can find a foothold in. There’s still no justifiable reason for this film to exist, but I daresay I’ve seen far worse.

TL;DR: Alien: Resurrection is a mildly diverting but still dull and muddled sequel.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 874
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

I Find You Unpleasant To Be Around

Year: 1992

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Alien 3 is a disastrously compromised motion picture that its director disowned and is largely reviled by all but a select few outliers who hail it as a nihilistic masterpiece. As usual, the controversy around the movie forces people to take strong stances for or against it, ignoring the fact that it’s a completely middling film when all is said and done.

People never learn. They really ought to read my blog more.

In Alien 3, Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-lands on a prison planet, not realizing that an alien Facehugger is along for the ride. Her fellow survivors from Aliens – Michael Biehn and the little girl formerly known as Newt – have perished during the crash. She conscripts the prison’s medical officer Clemens (Charles Dance) to help her perform an autopsy on newt while she chokes down sobs and the camera repeatedly zooms past the girl’s dead eyes like a hungry fly. Then they toss her friends’ bodies into a flaming pit, superimposed over Ripley’s devastated eyes, while in the other room a Xenomorph bursts out of a puppy dog, painfully killing it.

They’re really making a meal out of this.

So yeah, Ripley must team up with the 25 interchangeably British prisoners to fight off the alien once more. They fight a lot about how exactly to accomplish this while the alien mows down the expendable meat who inexplicably decide to wander off alone.

It’s basically a slasher movie, with slightly less phallic symbolism.

Alien 3 has a truly spectacular opening logo. The 20th Century Fox fanfare trumpets from the screen, shifting almost imperceptibly into a blaring minor key musical sting that hits you like a ton of bricks. And that’s pretty much the last nice thing I have to say about the movie.

Alien 3 really revels in being a miserable slog, which is totally fine for a movie to do, even if I’m not a huge fan of that style. But a movie this nibbled-at by production quibbles in no way has the strength of character and tone to sustain such a dismal atmosphere. It’s too unsure of itself, rapidly flitting from idea to idea, to the point that its bleakness is inconsistent. So whenever something truly dire happens, it feels wholly unjustified, and whenever something remotely happy occurs (as rare as that is), it feels manic and forced.

And then there’s the fact that it’s all just wicked emotional manipulation, grabbing you by the hair and rubbing your face in its every bleating misery.

LOOK AT THIS DEAD GIRL! GUESS HOW DEAD SHE IS! VERY!

As if that wasn’t enough, it’s a technical misfire on every level. I’m not going to point fingers at any particular person behind this very tampered-with production, but Alien 3 is just a mess. Scenes bubble up from the plot’s molten primordial ooze with no context whatsoever, the geography of the prison appears to be some sort of M. C Escher thought experiment, and the editing is – in a word – perplexing.

There are some excellent deep focus shots of lurking aliens, but this cosmic ineptitude (and the fact that every single character – including Ripley – looks exactly alike), Aliens is muddled and incomprehensible. Even worse, it’s boring. The action of the third act is defused by the editing making it entirely unclear what is happening and where or why, so all we have to cling to is an endless carousel of scenes of Ripley being angsty at Charles S. Dutton.

Oh, and there’s some abysmal CGI at certain points, but this was 1992. Hollywood was going through some forgivable growing pains.

In motion, it looks more like that dancing cartoon frog than an alien beast.

OK, it’s time to resheath the claws. As insufferable as Alien 3 tends to be, it’s far from the worst thing to happen to the franchise. While there are only one or two things that qualify as categorically “good,” it’s at least operating at a basic level of cinematic decency. It galloped by at a steady enough clip, and Sigourney Weaver is always a delight, even when her character’s actions are entirely inscrutable. If you love to watch Xenomorphs repeatedly drop down onto people from the ceiling, then boy do I have the film for you.

TL;DR: Alien 3 is a miserable, overwrought slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 748

Reviews In This Series

Alien (Scott, 1979)

Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

Bug Hunt

Year: 1986

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn

Run Time: 2 hours 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This October, I watched Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien for the very first time, which sparked the gestation of this marathon I’m about to embark upon. But, like most people born after 1983, the first film in the franchise I ever watched was James Cameron’s seven-years-later sequel Aliens. So we’re kicking off this exploration of a franchise that’s mostly new to me with a revisitation. I’d say  resurrection, but we’ll have to wait until 1997 for that. I haven’t caught this flick in over a decade, so I was definitely excited to give it another look.

You could say I was slavering at the jaws.

In Aliens, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only survivor of the Xenomorph attack on the starship Nostromo, has been drifting through space in cryosleep for 57 years. When she is found and awakened, she learns that the Weyland-Utani corporation has built a colony on LV-426, the very planet where her crew discovered the deadly creature. She is strong-armed by corporate stooge Burke (Paul Reiser) into joining a crew of marines bound for the planet after the company loses contact with the colony.

When they get there, they of course discover that the colony is decimated and turned into a hive for the hideous aliens. Flanked by the handsome and capable Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), the cowardly braggart Private Hudson (Bill Paxton, may he rest in peace), the half-trusted android Bishop (Lance Henriksen), and the fiery badass Private Vasquez (Jennette Goldstein in brownface, oh me oh my), Ripley must fight off the aliens, escape the planet, and protect the colony’s only survivor: a little girl named Newt (Carrie Henn).

Get away from her! Please?

Aliens (especially in its overlong director’s cut) is actually structured a little bit like James Cameron’s later epic Titanic. The first half focuses on character drama that’s a wee bit too thin to sustain itself, before crumbling entirely in the face of a showstopping, groundbreaking special effects spectacle. There’s a very clear division in the middle too, as the Xenomorphs don’t appear onscreen until at least the hour mark (I clocked the director’s cut at 1 hour, 13 minutes). The first half is far from bad: it features a Sigourney Weaver with seven more years of experience under her belt (it shows) and a crew of mostly likeable, if interchangeable marines. Plus, it stays true to the trauma Ripley would be feeling as a survivor while it sets up a spooky little locked-room mystery in the empty colony.

But there’s no way any of that could compare to the triumphant return of the shiny black, relentlessly phallic H. R. Giger monstrosities. Although the first two or three scenes with the Xenomorphs (a shootout, a car chase, and an offscreen siege) do highlight the limitations of the special effects by showing only one or two aliens at a time in quick flashes and nudging them out of frame every chance they get, every sequence improves on the next until it becomes a pulse-pounding hailstorm of fire, bullets, and shards of black carapace.

And they saved the best for last. The alien queen, with her translucent crystal fangs, gargantuan bulging egg sac, and stories-high crown of spindly ridges, is a masterpiece of terrifying excess, a worthy foe for the hard-nosed survivor Ripley has become. She’s also an excellent foil for the film’s themes of femininity on attack, two sides of the same coin of motherhood.

Hail to the queen, long may she reign.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point out that Aliens takes the grindhouse horror villainy of its predecessor and transplants it into an action flick milieu. It’s a military siege movie more than anything: James Cameron’s Saving Private Ryan. Whether or not this makes it better or worse than the original varies depending on how much mileage the war genre has with you. For me, it’s about zilch, but I find Alien to be superior in many other ways, especially how it succeeds in creating and sustaining a mood. Aliens doesn’t have a mood. It’s blustery and loud and awesome, but there’s not quite as much going on beneath the surface.

That’s not to say it’s an unintelligent film. Cameron’s script just puts it all out there and throws subtlety to the wind, which isn’t a wrong way to go about things. It’s just a bit less sophisticated. Which is awesome.

OK, I obviously have conflicting feelings about this, but there’s one thing there is absolutely no argument against: Private Vasquez is a problem. It’s hard to take war scenes seriously when prancing through the middle of them is a white lady who has been dunked in bronzer and is grumbling things about “pendejos.” Jennette Goldstein gives a good performance, but there’s just no excuse for not hiring a Latina actress here. The fakest effect in Aliens should not be one of the human characters, and the racial baggage this forces onto the movie weighs it down like an anchor.

So… Aliens! I guess I don’t want to exit on a down note. It’s a gun sci-fi shoot-em-up romp with excellent production design and explosive effects. Everything here James Cameron has done better in other movies, but as its own entity, it’s not exactly a chore to sit through. It’s one of those films that justifies the practice of making sequels, and I can say as many negative things about it that I want because it will all just bounce off its sturdy ion hull. Aliens is a great movie. Mostly. But it is, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, nor would I want to.

TL;DR: Aliens is a little shaggy and problematic, but nothing can touch its sci-fi action glory.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 978
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

Arrow in the Head: Ripley's Believe It Or Not

Year: 1979

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt 

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: I can see why they hired James Cameron to do the sequel to this film. Alien is a massive, unprecedented special effects spectacular that tests the limits of the gooey monstrosities you can show onscreen. And aside from an obvious cut replacing a dummy head with Ian Holm’s and a late wide shot that exposes too much of the Xenomorph’s “dude in a suit”-liness, the effects hold their glorious icky power to this day. H. R. Giger’s orifice-tacular design is gross enough on its own, but it’s realized with tremendous skill. 

Like I said, design is what really counts in this movie. Although the basic interiors have lost their charm after years and years of rip-offs and copies, there are subtle elements that still stand out, my favorite being the hatches that swirl shut like a camera lens.

I suppose I should mention the cast, although the human element barely registers in this cold and (literally) alien film. They have solid chemistry and their banter is amusing, although they’re only given a handful of character traits between them. Sigourney Weaver isn’t, like, mind-blowingly good, but she retains her femininity while still presenting a tough, professional attitude, a balance that earns her all the credit she gets for being an iconic strong female character.

I really don’t have that much more to say about Alien, because at its core it’s devilishly simple. I respect what it does and how it works, but as the years pass I’m less and less sure that it’s Ridley Scott’s doing why it works so well. All I can say is, when compared to its proto-predecessor, the likewise Dan O’Bannon scripted Dark Star, Alien is a massive quantum leap forward for 70’s sci-fi.

TL;DR: Alien is a base and dirty grindhouse horror flick with the impeccable design of an A-list sci-fi picture.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1051
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)