Classic Horror

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2006)

Commercial star ship Nostromo, returning from a routine mission, are detoured when an alien SOS is intercepted. Awakened from hypersleep, the crew are obligated to land on the alien world where the call for help has originated, but the ship is slightly damaged during the landing process and three of the crew set out to explore the hostile new world. They come upon a derelict spacecraft, the skeletonized remains of an alien creature with an odd wound in its chest and a cache of strange egg-like objects. Crew member Kane is brought back from the exploration unconscious and with a bizarre, crab-like creature attached to his face. He is still alive, and indeed, the creature on his face seems to be keeping him alive for reasons unknown. The Nostromo is repaired and the crew leave the desolate planet behind. The crab creature soon leaves its perch on Kane's face and dies, and Kane emerges from his coma, apparently in good health. But the purpose of the alien soon becomes terribly clear; Kane has been impregnated with an alien embryo which births itself from his chest in a shower of blood and gore, killing Kane and escaping into the ships air ducts before anyone can react. The crew set out to destroy the creature, not realizing immediately that its accelerated growth has transformed it into a huge and vicious predator whose only desire is to kill them all.
Very loosely based upon the 1958 horror film "IT! The Terror From Beyond Space" Alien is a masterpiece of Gothic horror, a haunted house movie on a spaceship. Flawlessly directed by Ridley Scott, Alien, whose plot is actually fairly simplistic and nothing new, is so filled with dread, so claustrophobically genuine, that it seems like nothing ever seen before. Ghostly steam, clinking chains, long dark corridors where anything can be hiding, the suspense is unbelievably suffocating. We never really get to see what the alien actually looks like until films end, and so the quick flashes of tail, head and mouth are so brief and so confusing that it only adds to the horror. Plus, Alien does what no ghost story can do - there is no way out of this "haunted house." There is no escape from the horror within.
The performances are all outstanding. The alien is not the only menace to the all-too human crew; there are also soulless corporations and short circuiting androids to be dealt with on top of everything else. Faced with these dilemmas, every single crew member of the Nostromo are absolutely believable. They're tired, stressed out, rude and bitchy and they spend a good lot of time griping and snapping at each other, but they drop what they're doing and stand together, protecting one another without hesitation when they must. The gore is minimal; the death of Kane is the bloodiest, nastiest moment in the whole film and because Kane, played by John Hurt, seems to be the nicest of the crew members, it just makes his painful death scene all the more horrible.
Alien is a grim, visceral, satisfying horror film and remains the unsurpassed best film in the series. Alien is an established classic and should not be missed.