Snail paced and failing to achieve true suspense

Rating: 1/10 (28 May 2012)

I like to think that the slowness of the film allows for a good look at the set designs which are excellent. The entire success of this movie, where it's laurels rest, is upon those sets. Besides from that it is nothing more than another sci fi movie. I am stating this as my impression after watching it at least twenty times at home, if I had seen this movie in the theater at it's seventy-nine premier I would give it a different review.
Despite the realness of the alien world I am unable to suspend my disbelief and earnestly follow the action... I mean everything looks good but there is something awry with the story in which I find ridiculousness and redundancy. In the directors commentary Ridley Scott says something interesting about the cryogenic freezers that open up at the beginning of the film, he says that if you think too hard about it then it does not make sense. I say that if you think at all such a thing will be a hindrance to reason. And since the bulk of the movie is just pushed along by a continuance of sci-fi clichés such as those cryogenic "freezer-inos" it leaves me wondering what does this movie mean to do? I mean every movie has a purpose, film is not a reflection of life but an attempt to create a new vision for audiences that will change the course of the world. And in Alien the goal is emasculation. As a genetically born male I find a problem with the feminist orientation of the thing.
The film culminates with a strong female character ejecting a phallically headed creature off into the oblivion of space. The entire film equates male sexuality to a monstrosity. There is an apparent gender opposition even in the antagonism of "mother" the computer. Humans are trapped between a primal and bodily nature in the alien and on the other-side face the apathetic machinery of progress in the form of mother and the company. Now why are the destructive forces of progress written as female while the space of regression is shown as male? Even the android Ash is feminized by being an android which is an assuredly impotent thing, indeed he must consume a drink that looks like semen discharge because he cannot produce his own.
But I am not writing with the intention of deflecting love from the finer sex. I just think that there are human natures that never change and that portraying a woman in a man's role is not going to improve the world. Maybe men make more money than women in general and that is unfair but what is all the money in the world to a woman if she does not have a man to protect her.
Going off of that and returning to Alien I say that it is not a film that gives respect to women. I think that Sigourney Weaver appears in it scantly clad and bra-less. Enough said.
Leaving the arena of philosophy there are other details I have left unscathed that need to be addressed when discussing Alien. Firstly the opening shot that pans the spaceship is directly stolen from Star Wars. Next when Cain is attacked by the parasite it melts through his thick visor wall but leaves his face uninjured. When the monster kills Dallas it just is crouching there with it's arms outstretched, in fact never in the movie did I see the monster in the fluid motions of an attack. And finally, although I'm sure I could find more errors, there is the issue of the self-destructing spaceship. Why am I supposed to believe that a spaceship would just conveniently have a self-destruct mechanism, of all the vehicles man has forged thus far from the space shuttle to aircraft carriers how many of them do you know to have mechanisms designed to readily blow them to kingdom come.