Okay But Not Great

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2014)

BLADE RUNNER is my favorite movie of all-time and just for that I think Ridley Scott is a great director. But ALIEN was really underwhelming.
First of all, it's not scary. That's my biggest problem with the movie. I read somewhere that back in 1979 people actually ran out of the theaters because they thought it was so scary. I guess it wouldn't be fair of me to judge them. I watched the movie on DVD, not in a theater. And the most shocking scenes are pretty famous and I'll admit that that takes away quite a bit of the suspense. Still, I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't scary.
Roger Ebert said in his Great Movies review of ALIEN:
"A recent version of this story would have hurtled toward the part where the alien jumps on the crew members. Today's slasher movies, in the sci-fi genre and elsewhere, are all pay-off and no buildup...It isn't the slashing that we enjoy. It's the waiting for the slashing."
I don't like movies with a lot of pay-off and very little buildup. But I also don't like movies with a lot of buildup and very little pay-off. ALIEN is a movie in the latter group, so it's kind of boring. Good movies, especially good horror and/or thriller movies, have to have about an equal amount of buildup and pay-off.
Take JURASSIC PARK, for example. You don't get to see the dinosaurs for quite a while. But when you finally see the dinosaurs, YOU SEE THE DINOSAURS. (Sorry, about the all caps. I'm just trying to emphasize what I'm typing. I'd use italics if IMDb had them.) And the first dinosaurs you see are majestic but peaceful herbivores. You don't get to see the Dilophosaurus, the Velociraptors, or the Tyrannosaurus Rex for even longer after the main characters arrive at the park. But you can see them just fine when they arrive. The T. Rex especially makes a great entrance.
The Xenomorph has a great design but it's always shown in darkness and the whole thing is never seen. It has too little screen time. And when it's shown in its entirety at the end, it's a bit disappointing. You can see it's only a guy in a suit. I kind of wish that they showed it all AND that it looked more realistic. I suppose I couldn't have had it both ways, though, considering the movie was made in the late 70s.
ALIEN also doesn't make very much sense. The facehuggers come out of eggs, right? How long can they stay in the eggs before they need to attach themselves to a host? How does the embryo control the facehugger? Is the facehugger a part of the embryo that is abandoned like a snakeskin or is it more like an egg sac? How are the eggs laid without a host in the first place? In the deleted scene, it looks like Dallas and Brett were being prepared to have eggs implanted in them so it seems like eggs can only be laid inside a host. If they are laid in a host, what happens to the facehugger? Or are only embryos inserted into the host?
Some of the special effects are pretty dated, especially the scene in which Parker decapitates Ash and it's revealed that Ash is an android. The sets are all great except for the room where Dallas and Ripley communicate with Mother, the Nostromo's computer.
I'm giving the movie 6/10 stars because there are quite a few great things in it. Like I said, the Xenomorph does have an awesome design and most of the sets are great. The matte paintings are amazing. The Nostromo is, in my opinion, the coolest movie spaceship. The Jerry Goldsmith score is pretty good. All of the actors did a pretty good job. Sigourney Weaver was great as Ripley but I think my favorite performance was Veronica Cartwright's. I think we'd all like to think that we'd handle the situation in ALIEN like Ripley does. Although you can see she's scared, she does manage to blow up the Nostromo and she defeats the Xenomorph in the end. Maybe some of us would be like Ripley. I'd honestly probably be more like Lambert, and by that I mean I'd be completely terrified. So I could identify with Lambert more than I could with Ripley.
Even though I didn't like ALIEN as much as I hoped I would, I can see why many people do like it. Many of the problems that I had with the movie are probably what many people love about it.