A welcome slice of dark sci-fi.

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2006)

For me, Ridley Scott's Alien is one of the most perfect pieces of cinema, not only with regards to its genre, or genre hybridization, in this case sci-fi and horror, but also one of the finest films ever made. Unlike the fairy tale world of Star Wars (which I like I have to say), or the philosophical and mythological world of The Matrix (which I love, it is my favourite movie series I have to say), Alien is something of a rarity, a science fiction movie set in a world that is almost realistic and authentic. Of course the movie hinges of an extra terrestrial, a space ship, a strange planet and all manners of grisly deaths, but what makes the film so good is how the film feels real because director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shussett have set their thrill packed horror spectacular in a future world that feel real. Their main characters are not soldiers or quasi-religious figures, they are merely futuristic equivalents of truck drivers, carrying their cargo not from city to city but from planet to planet. It is this kind of creation of character and mise en scene within the film that gives it its charm, in a manner of speaking.
The way in which the story develops is also superb. What starts out as a film about a potential rescue mission for the main characters then turns into one about a medical emergency surrounding one of their own, in this case Kane played by John Hurt. The film then takes its twist and development into the film everyone knows and loves via its most famous scene at approximately the half way mark (that's almost sixty minutes in to a two hour movie), another superb piece of development as it allows the audience to get to like these characters before the violence and chaos begins. Of course when the chaos and violence do begins the film becomes one of the most thrilling ever produced, with its increasingly claustrophobic settings and the systematic killing of each one of its crew until only Weaver is the only woman left standing.
What I love most about the film is that coming at the end of the seventies (in this case 1979), the film is almost symbolic of everything that the American film industry had gone through throughout that decade artistically. The film has the science fiction leanings and fascination with technology and space travel that Hollywood was going through at that time with Star Wars, Close Encounters and even James Bond with Moonraker, but it also has that dark rawness that Hollywood had scene throughout the first six to seven years of that decade and witnessed in films like The French Connection, The Godfather and that other classic staple of the horror genre, The Exorcist. Like the latter movie, this is a film that, as I have said before, exhibits its plight of the fantastic and the horror inside a world that, while not as realistic as the one presented in Friedkin's film, is not that is possibly plausible.
Mention must go to Ridley Scott for his superb direction (his first mainstream Hollywood film) as well as all the actors (special mention must go, as always, to Weaver who truly deserved to become a big star after this movie) who in doing the movie gave us one of the most startling and most interesting movie series in mainstream Hollywood.