The first in the "Alien" series, part of a 30th anniversary BD set.

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2017)

I remember where I was in 1979 when this movie came out, I was a young professional with 5 little kids from 3 to 10 years old. We didn't have a lot of time for movies and we never got around to seeing this in the theater.
Fast-forward to 2010, a re-release of this movie plus the next three in one complete set on BluRay disk, along with two extra disks of extras. A total of 6 BDs. I found that my local public library has the set and today I watched this one. I will watch the other three over the next week or so. Being on BluRay the sound and picture are first-rate, worth seeking out for fans of these movies.
The movie has a fine cast of mostly well-established actors but I will only focus on one, Sigourney Weaver in her still iconic role as Ripley. Set somewhat in the future, as the movie begins we see that a merchant spaceship is traveling back towards Earth after a mining mission, the crew of seven are in hibernation pods. The pods open, the crew awakes, and we soon find out it is premature, but for a specific reason. A signal, possibly from intelligent life, is detected from a nearby moon and the ship is preprogrammed to wake them for a possible mission, to investigate for life forms and bring specimens back to Earth to study.
They go and in the exploratory mission in fact encounter an alien life form that attaches itself to the face of one of the crew, forcing them to bring the alien back to the ship to save the man. This ultimately creates a number of really serious issues and soon survival of the crew is at stake.
This of course is a very well told story and a very well made movie, indicative of its high IMDb rating.
SPOILERS: For my own recollection. The crew members, one by one, are killed by the alien as it grows in size and reasoning. Ripley finally realizes only she can escape and must blow up the mother ship and its cargo to destroy the alien. As she sets that in motion and retreats to the smaller escape ship, once there she finds the alien has stowed away there also. She puts on the space suit and releases a toxic gas that gets the alien in position that she can open a door and have it expelled. Then she puts herself into a state of hibernation. In the next movie, "Aliens", we find out that she was in that state for 57 years before being recovered.