Overrated/Boring Film. Nice Sets & Props - 95%. Crap acting, story, dialogue - 5%. Smoking in a space ship! I don't think so.

Rating: 1/10 (10 August 2017)

I watched the 20th anniversary edition, on 7/17/15 & 8/11/17. Both times sucked.
Fancy set designs and props, that's it. Acting sucks. Most are known actors. The problem? The freaking director, Ridley Scott! Boring dialogue and characters.
Cafeteria scene - they're arguing about bonuses. 10 minutes to land the freaking ship. Do we need that? No.
Boring but functional cinematography. Audio sucked. Mix of dialogue/sound effects and music crap. Music was OK, nothing special.
Lighting is crap. After ship lands scene with Ian Holm/Ash/Robot, super white bright. Monitor shot of ship distorted and annoying.
Sigourney Weaver/Ripley confronts Ash/Robot about why he opened the door to let the contaminated astronauts into the spaceship. She's in charge when the captain is out of the ship, broke protocol. Painful stuff.
Acid on pencil scene.
Yaphet Kotto/Parker has a great idea that nobody listens to - "freeze John Hurt/Kane till we get home".
Hurt wakes up, nobody does another x-ray. Hurt chestbust in the cafeteria, disgusting, stupid. More props.
Harry Dean Stanton/Brett comes up with cow shock sticks to attack the alien. More props.
Cat in the locker scare! How did he get in there? Stanton searches for the cat (Cat Search I). Alien is now giant. How is that possible? No explanation, 1 foot to 10 feet?
Here's more stupidity: Water dripping from somewhere, maybe a cargo, who knows. Stanton washes his face like its fresh rain, it's more like a leaking pipe or sewer. Alien comes out - very cool. Props! Stanton is dead.
Here's another stupid prop/set: The Mother/Computer room. Round, lights.
No likable or detestable characters here. All ordinary boring nothing characters.
Tom Skerritt/Captain Dallas, the most boring characters here, right after Veronica Cartwright/Lambert. He is no captain Kirk. Kirk would save his ship before himself. Skerritt - "Open the door, I don't care if we infect the whole crew and ship". Skerritt is an OK actor. His character here and Skerritt's acting is crap. Skerritt is killed/or taken off screen.
Lambert at this point loses it and comes up with this films 2nd best idea, take the shuttle and get off the ship. Since the shuttle takes only 3, and there are 4 people left, the robot not discovered yet, they decide to kill the alien.
Ripley goes to the computer room/Mother and finds out that the mission is to bring the Alien specimen in at all cost, the crew is expendable. Fight ensues where Ash/Robot attacks Weaver. Parker and Lambert help Ripley and decapitate Ash. This is one of the most disgusting, milk everywhere, crap fight choreography ever. Even the props here suck! Fake head, fake robot body, fake dummy head burning. It just sucks.
Ripley is now looking for the cat (Cat Search II). Parker and Lambert Get killed. Parkers death was cool. Lambert just frozen, is killed off screen. OK.
More props. The self-destruct mechanism. Another User reviewer posed a question: Do all ship have self-destruct mechanisms? 10 minutes to detonation. She tries to get to the shuttle, alien blocking her path, she tries to deactivate the self-destruct. Oh, the suspense. She can't. Her and the cat are now onboard the shuttle and off just in time. Detonation time. We see 3 explosions. How is that possible? The death star only exploded once.
That would have been enough to end the movie. But, after Ripley put the cat to sleep, she sees the alien, somehow squeezed into under the control panels. She puts on a space-suite, decompresses the shuttle. We hear mumbling coming from Ripley as she is trying to open the door to the shuttle to dump the alien out. Mumbling! Alien is excremented out of the shuttle, then conveniently faces the rocket and is burned out into space. Before all that we get to see Ripley strip down to her ugly underwear.
This is not Sc-Fi/Horror. It is Sc-Fi, and Terror. Or just Terrible. Horror would entail supernatural like undead/Dracula.
The acting dialogue looks like they improvised and are all one takes - real crap.
You want to love this because the "Alien" looks cool and that you're a sc-fi fan and it's a "classic", fine. But, please do not insult the intelligence of the whole human race by claiming this is the greatest film ever, or the greatest sc-fi film ever. It's not. Not even close. Best part of the mess is the props and sets. The cinematography is minimum. Lighting is annoying. The acting/dialogue/characters sucks. I don't care if they're a bunch of space truckers, no "company" would allow these slobs on a spaceship. They spend about 5% of the time on story. 95% of this is props/sets. Better to watch it with the sound off and listen to Black Sabbath. Or watch something that is complete.
Best part, Matte painting, when John Hurt descends to the egg chamber was cool. props.
If you've never seen this before, maybe a C grade, 5 stars.
If you've seen it before, no more surprises, grade D, 3 stars.
I'm done with this. F, 1 star.
Check out Galaxina instead. At least that's a comedy.