Male-female relations hampered by a Darwinist catastrophe

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2002)

In the future, all "haunted house" movies ought to take place on intergalactic spaceships. Well, not really, but you have to admit the concept works - at least when the movie you're talking about is Alien. (Or maybe the most recent Friday the 13th flick, but I digress.)
Long story short, the crew towing a mining freighter (the Nostromo) back home is awakened from hibernation to investigate a distress signal sent from a nearby planet. Upon landing, the ship that presumably sent the signal is found to be lifeless and covered with an odd substance. Kane, the crew member volunteering to check out the lower hull of the dead ship, finds what appear to be eggs and is attacked by an odd alien being. Upon returning him to the ship for medical treatment - that is, getting the alien off his face - the crew wonders what fate might be in store for Kane and themselves. Luckily, the facehugger eventually detaches itself and dies, leaving Kane to wake up and rejoin his mates. And it's at just about that point that all hell breaks loose on the Nostromo...
Without giving too much more away, I should make one thing clear. Alien is not a kind, gentle movie about friendly creatures. The alien in Alien pretty much wants to kill you and everything you love. It appears to have minimal compassion for any living thing, least of all humans - which are, probably correctly, viewed as a threat.
And the alien isn't even the most important part of the movie. What is more intriguing is director Ridley Scott's conception of future gender relations. Aboard the Nostromo, "male" is the dominant theme for both sexes - after all, the uniform (shirt, pants, optional jacket or hat) is pretty much the same either way. Females, for the most part, are forced to think and act in the same way as males - Ripley's tough demeanor, especially in the first half of the film, is the best example of this ideal. Lambert represents a more traditional female ethos, but her fate shows that such a forgiving attitude will not be advantageous in the future.
And in that vein, there's one more interesting way to look at the film. The ship - nicknamed "Mother" by her crew - effectively serves as a technological counter to the entirely natural alien incubator on the "dead" ship. Both are adept at keeping their living cargo safe, and both are surprisingly mechanical in the way they do so. Obviously, this is to be expected from Mother (who is a digital entity, after all) but is interesting coming from a natural life form. But when one thinks about it, an evolution into which a creature exists only to feed and reproduce is maybe inevitable in the end.
Now, to rate the film. Alien is technically beautiful, both from a directorial-cinematic point of view and in a design sense. To be specific, great acting and camerawork allied to truly lifelike sets make you feel as if you're a crew member. Not to mention scaring the living daylights out of you at times. It's a true classic, both for the way in which it tackles the subject of interstellar life forms and for the fact that it's simply a brilliant piece of filmmaking.
Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars (thus, a 7-star IMDb rating)