survival kitten

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2004)

The best thing in Alien is its naturalness. The way the crew talk, its spontaneity and casualness. They can be discussing a failure in a complex technological device in the ship, but nevertheless they do it smoking cigarettes and eating sandwiches, just as if they talk about the weather. When they press buttons one feels that they did it a million times before. They even play with the sliding doors to trap each other in order to be listened to. These circumstances makes Kane's death during a moment of> relaxed camaraderie so unforgettable and shocking. One is not prepared at all. No pomp, no memorable last words, just a funny comment about the quality of the food and there it goes. Like the two mechanics, Brett and Parker. One wonders what they are doing in such a mission, with their Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps, p****d off for working extra time or complaining about their low payments, as if they were in a factory. Just imagine the same characters in a bad script, wearing glasses and overalls, cutting off from the rest in the midst of trouble, challenging the others with their technical notions. They cannot stand a comparison. The Alien characters succeed in their improbability because they are not real; they are true.
Alien is more a script achievement than a directorial one. The story is so well written and solid in its structure that it could probably been as good with any other director. One thinks that Scott is more at ease with more baroque material, like Blade Runner. So there's little of the director's world here, it's definitely writer Dan O'Bannon's territory instead, a reinvention of the American horror genre, minimalist and philosophical, a big budget with a `B' premise.
Alien is not the best film ever made. It's not even the best of the saga (I consider `Aliens' a superior film). But one must admire the film's efficiency. Efficiency given solely by the characters, not always by what they say, but by the way they look at each other. These rules of the game are established right from the beginning, and are followed religiously thorough the rest of the film. There's nothing external altering this order, just as we hardly know anything about the world outside the ship. Alien's accomplishment is more in tune with films to-come as `The Thing' or `The Abyss'. Like the Nostromo ship, O'Bannon's story set voyage beyond the frontiers of the genre. Too bad that he didn't leave the irritating cat there.