The Beast Rises

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2009)

Alien is the best "monster movie" of all time. It has all the best aspects of a science fiction movie, a horror movie, and an action movie, all wrapped up in one terrifying, heart-pounding slime-fest. All the infamous Godzilla movies were men in suits, and they looked fake as hell. A mere twenty years later, an up-and-coming American director does the same thing will uncomparable results. I am not bashing Japanese filmmakers in any way, but seriously, watch a Godzilla film and then watch Alien, and tell me you can't tell which is better.
Sigourney Weaver is incredible in this movie. She is perfect as the bad-ass space heroin amongst a team of corrupt or otherwise incompetent crew-members. She got an Academy-Award nomination for the same role in the sequel, and even though I didn't notice any difference from the first movie, I still think she did a great job.
Ridley Scott kept a perfect balance of suspense, action, and horror in this film. Each kill took place in a dark corner of the ship and showed just enough of beast to keep the audience scared. A flash of the head here, a glimpse of the tail here, and then the unsuspected victim is lifted off the floor and into the rafters where he is silently dismembered and devoured.
The Alien itself, though you don't ever get a real good look at it until the end, was expertly designed by H. R. Giger. What's better than an acid-bleeding, two-mouthed humanoid lizard monster that can crawl through air ducts and across ceilings as quietly as a mouse. Nothing is the answer. The Alien was played by an African tribesman named Bolaji Bodejo, (those guys are deadly without alien makeup,) who was hired to display the creature's movements.
Alien started the science fiction/horror genre and remains the best of that genre to this day. Its induces in people a nostalgia for the earlier great sci-fi movies like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for earlier horror films like The Exorcist and Night of the Living Dead. But Alien remains one of the most influential movies from the 70s and possible of all time.