Ridiculous rubber puppet monster terrorizes space morons...

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2002)

(SPOILERS***SPOILERS***) Former television hack Ridley Scott has a habit of wasting good actors in bad movies. "G.I. Jane" had the always awesome Demi Moore; the tedious "Blade Runner" abused the otherwise fine talents of Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah; and his best (and only watchable) movie "Legend" still didn't manage to do justice to the thespianic skills of Tom "Top Gun (totally excellent, do NOT miss "Top Gun")" Cruise.
But before all that, there was "Alien". I don't even know where to begin. The usually fine Yaphet Kotto, star of 1976 classic "Monkey Hustle" gets about 10 lines in this movie but Ian Holmes, minor player in such snoozefests as Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and gross-out artsy sex comedy "Naked Lunch" gets to play (SPOILER>>>) an insane robot! I think Yaphet Kotto would have made a much better homicidal automaton, but hey, they didn't ask me to direct (I was only 12 years old.) And Sigourney Weaver, who was good enough to win a Supporting Actress Oscar in the cult classic "Working Girl" has little to do in this borestravaganza other than cowering at the sight of a cheaply made plastic alien monster puppet.
This movie combines two of the worst movies ever made, "Jaws" and "2001: a Space Odyssey" into a mix that is somehow worse than both of those movies put together. A laughable rubber monster ("Jaws"), on a spaceship run by an evil computer ("2001"). Many of the scenes in "Alien" seemed to be filmed with a camera that was handheld by an epileptic kid with attention deficit disorder. I know the tripod was invented before 1979, so I 'm not sure why the director does this. Maybe he was trying to be "artistic." Also, much of the action involving the Alien takes place in near-darkness using quick cut editing and strobe lights. If the special effects people had made a monster that was really scary, they would have used decent lighting and kept the monster on screen for a few minutes so you could look at it. But then again, if they had any imagination, they might have used a color other than "brownish-grey" for the set design. I mean, come on, a spaceship should be made out of gleaming metal and plexiglass. The Nostromo interior looks like the boiler room in an underfunded inner-city junior high school. And the exterior looks like a Battlestar Galactica model put together by that epileptic cameraman.
Dull "action", lousy set design and comedic special effects all add up to two stars out of 10 for "Alien."