Great sci-fi horror

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2018)

Alien is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time and it also happens to be a horror, making it all the more tense and exciting to watch. Its strength is its patience combined with top-notch visuals and music and an original plot.
The look of the movie is incredible from start to finish. The Nostromo spaceship, the interiors, the Alien itself. Much of it was designed by H.R. Giger, a German with a unique and fascinating style. He also worked on Jodorowsky's Dune (which never got made) and you can see similarities in the design. They seem to combine the organic with the artificial and often border on the sexual. The inside of an alien spaceship is full of imaginative and strange details like nothing you've seen before. It's a shame Prometheus was such a terrible attempt at expanding on the story behind it...
The score by the prolific Jerry Goldsmith is one of his best. There are faint echoes of more innocent sounding woodwinds with swelling, ominous strings in the background. It's mysterious but captures mankind's natural sense of wonder - it's not completely evil. As one character says at one point, they practically admire the alien, despite its capacity for destruction. We can't help but feel similarly. There's a juxtaposition of beauty and death. In Interstellar as well, the characters go on journeys at the edge of what's possible, seeing incredible things but also facing the serious risk of death. Our universe (and the beings in it) can be a harsh but beautiful mistress.
Like all the great horror movies, the monster or threat is only gradually revealed. We're in the dark along with the characters. The details surrounding the alien, how it reproduces, what defence mechanisms it has, what on Earth it even is are very cool. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is a strong female character who is forced into a survival situation. She's one of the few to use common sense throughout the whole movie. She's cautious where others aren't. She know why certain rules are in place and gets frustrated that others would prefer to take risks. As it turns out, she was right the whole time.
There are slow shots moving down corridors, letting us take in the designs of the walls, sometimes with emergency rotating lights and gas clouding things a bit. The movie takes its time setting things up and creating a mood. When things do happen, they have more impact because of the calm moments in between. But I enjoy the quiet moments just as much. There's always plenty to take in and ponder.
There are many twists and turns in the plot. This keeps things tense - we don't know what might come out of nowhere, who can be trusted, where are you safe. There are some frustrating horror cliché moments where it seems like problems could have been prevented if the people were less stupid at key moments. But we also get to experience some imaginative situations which aren't yet possible with current technology but might well become realities in the near future.
I have to admit, I don't find the alien itself scary. But I like its presence and the overall mood of the movie - it's a very well made horror. It's more about suspense than jump scares. It builds up the anticipation and a sense of inescapability. The tone is a bit depressing in some ways. These humans are in the middle of nowhere. But we do get the impression they're heading back to Earth and usually spend their journeys in some kind of cryo-sleep. This movie's an exception to their routine. But a film like Jaws is much easier to relate to while still putting the humans in a setting (the sea) where they're out of their comfort zone.
Aliens is a great sequel but the rest are more average. Alien goes down as the best of its genre, a horror sci-fi that takes its time, confident in its story and visuals and creates one of the most memorable movie monsters of all time with characters we care about.