Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: Dan O'bannon & Ronald Shusett
A deep-space mining crew gets an distress call. While exploring the source, a member of the crew is attacked by an alien life form. The crew member is allowed back to the ship against the quarantine rules, and the rest have to deal with the lethal consequences.
When I came up with the idea for an alien themed week of movie reviews, Alien was the most obvious choice because of the name and more. It's a classic, and every other movie of this type seems to be copying this one, intentionally or not.
Once the film started, I felt like I had seen this before. There are so many space travel horror movies that follow the exact same pattern than Alien. Now I don't know if Alien is the first one of its kind, but it's definitely the best known. I actually saw Prometheus before any of the Alien films, and it's almost annoying how closely Prometheus followed the same pattern as this one. The writers of that movie should've come up with something slightly different, because if you've seen Alien, that makes Prometheus predictable - and the other way around.
But it shouldn't be surprising every science fiction horror filmmaker wants to make a film like Alien. Alien's pace is just right - it's slow, but it doesn't feel too stretched. It's making everything even more intense than it'd be with faster pace. But with faster pace it would probably be harder and more annoying trying to keep a track of this movie.
One really effective thing about this film is how gross everything looks. There's always some gross liquid coming out of somewhere. Otherwise the effects seem sometimes ridiculous, like the little baby alien running away. How can you take an intense, dramatic scene like that seriously when the effects are what they are?
I don't enjoy this movie as much as other people can. I appreciate the horror elements and the value this film has, but I hate space travel science fiction. Simple setting is better, and of course the setting of Alien is simple - it's one ship, barely one planet and so on. Still I felt like I didn't completely understand what was going on.
I appreciate this movie, and I recognise it's good, but I don't really like it, which affects the medium score I'm giving this film.
☆☆☆☆☆
5 / 10
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