Give Scott a camera and here's what you get...

Rating: Null/10 (3 May 2003)

Ridley Scott typically lets his visual style impede in the way of telling a story (Gladiator and Blackhawk Down in particular), but sometimes he is blessed by a tiny budget in which case he must improvise as necessary.
Enter ALIEN, by all means a breakthrough movie for everyone involved and a landmark in the science fiction field. Between this and Terminator, the genre is spared of the annihilation it would've suffered had George Lucas had his way (thankfully Lucas wisened up with Empire, only to fall on his face with Jedi).
The visuals are awesome, possibly the best outside of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Sci-Fi realm. Of course, pure sci-fi is rarer to find than uranium in your backyard and ALIEN is yet another example of enslaving the genre to another inferior one. In this case: horror.
The cast is negligible at best, pathetic at worst. There is no real character depth, not even for Ripley (James Cameron would get her role kicking into hyperdrive thankfully) and the plot still has its lapses in logic. My real sympathy goes to Ian Holm, but not his character, since he seems to be the only one who can act beyond screaming like Veronica Cartwright's character and spouting "Right" as Harry Dean Stanton does. Ian also gets the best lines =)
Actually, that can be said for the ALIEN series in a whole. The bigger the sequel number, the more plot holes there are. Someone want to explain how the eggs got onboard the Sulaco in "3", or cloning Ripley after 200 years in "Resurrection". Exactly, point proved.
The visual and special effects are a grab bag. They are better than Moonraker, I will admit that, but some scenes are rather lackluster in the flash content. In many cases, the Adult ALIEN looks like a guy in a suit (they perfected the design for ALIENS in my opinion) and some of the space scenes, particularly at the end, are obviously phony.
The tension is much the same as in ALIENS, we get halfway into the film before things really get rolling. Fortunately, Mr. Fincher got us going at the outset of "3", but then wrecked it by having too many pauses.
All in all, ALIEN is an incredible experience that isn't quite as exciting or enjoyable as ALIENS, but still deserves much respect for the ground it covered. 4 out of 5.