Flawed

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2008)

Alien is a good film with a number of major flaws, some of which should never have been allowed into the final released print. I saw it in the cinema on its original release, and was throughly looking forward to it being both a sci-fi and horror fan.
1. So I was bemused to spend the first 5 minutes wandering over every square inch of the Nostromo. It was almost as if I was being told "We've spent 5 million bucks on these sets, and you're going to see every square inch before we even start the film."
2. An hour of inconsequential fluff before anything happened. An hour!!
3. Face hugger - good, from the alien spaceship to its final demise in the sickbay. This was more like it.
4. Chestburster - absolutely horrific. Until that is, it looked round like a curious cartoon mole popping up out of a mole-hole, and skittered off to hide and grow. Everyone in the cinema laughed. Everyone. The entire impact of the chest bursting - thrown away. I can't believe that they wouldn't have been aware of this before putting the film into release.
5. Rewiring Ash. Sigourney Weaver is wiring up a dummy head prior to Ian Holm's head, protruding through a false floor, answering her questions. So how do they bridge the transition from false head to real head? By using a cutaway to Ripley concentrating on the task in hand. No, they don't bridge it at all - instead, there is the most jarring jump-cut in the history of cinema. Even people who aren't versed in the grammar of cinema know that something cronky has happened, even if they can't put their fingers on what it is. This is Basic Film-making, first term, first lesson. Just plain awful.
6. From here to the end, apart from the illogicalities and unanswered questions, the rest of the film is pretty good.
Is that enough to make up for those glaring glitches? Not in my book.