Solid suspense film set in space

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2006)

This is one of the few sci-fi horror films from the period of the late 70s/early 80s that has really held up with time.
On a visual level, the film is highly satisfying. Green and light blue colors are saturated throughout the film, but so grayed that the movie almost appears at many points to be shot in black and white. The miniatures and matte effects used in the original film were quite good.
The movie works on pretty much every level, though you can't really say it's an incredible story either. On a sci-fi level, the best parts are the early parts where we first see the alien technology. I was disappointed actually in the print that I saw because I believe it was altered with computers, I remember seeing more matte screens that resembled the HR Geiger artwork when the film was on video. Anyway, the alien technology succeeds on a level never before achieved in terms of showing a realistic alien culture. We can almost imagine these creatures living on this ship, it seems to fit in with the alien biology so well.
When they arrive back on their own ship, the film unfortunately descends into a fairly typical horror action film. Perhaps taking a note from Hitchcock's "Psycho", Scott kills off the only reasonably well known actor in the film (at the time of its release), Tom Skerrit, fairly quickly and leaves us with the then-unknown Weaver as the hero. This makes her the first really butt-kicking female heroine of a sci-fi action film, and that alone qualifies this film as groundbreaking.
The cast in general is just amazing. Yaphet Kotto, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton -- these are quite simply some of the best character actors of their generation, all gathered for the purpose of making this more than just a typical monster movie. Other films such as "Predator" tried but failed to get a supporting cast as distinguished and talented as this one gathered for a sci-fi action film. The quality of these actors makes the film better not only in the individual scenes they are in (such as Holm's incredible turn once exposed), but also the aggregate total of the film -- because the actors are so good and the characters relatively fleshed out, we can imagine right up until the film's final moments that any one of them could be the one who ends up surviving.
Another interesting element not often commented on is the cynical attitude the astronauts have towards "the company", which employs them. From Kotto and Stanton's character's complaints about the hours, all the way up to Weaver's discovery that all of them were expendable and kept in the dark as to the true purpose of their mission (which Skerrit's character seems to also know more about than Weaver's), there is a kind of dark realism here that you won't find in the vast majority of films of this type. It dovetails with the other element I've talked about, the fact that the cast is so good that any one of them could be the "hero" -- this is a very democratic look at the future, one edged with deep cynicism but with an ultimate eye towards presenting a future of real people who are oppressed by situations far beyond their control. It is a far cry from the Utopian dreams of Heinlein and other sci-fi progenitors and represents this film's true gift to science fiction as a whole.