A Masterpiece of Suspense

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2007)

Ridley Scott opens Alien in a completely foreign atmosphere, with detailed images and objects that we've never seen and detailed sound effects that we've never heard. The camera moves around slowly and quietly, exploring this place, and it makes us want to be there. This is how he elusively draws us in and begins building suspense right under our noses. The commercial spaceship, the distance it is away from earth that's impossible in this age and surely for another several decades, the planet the characters land on, and practically every means of doing ordinary things are all, well, alien to us, and we cannot help but feel bewildered and tense. The scenes of suspense are some of the most powerful I have ever seen. You cannot watch certain scenes in this film without being caused to jump. Ridley Scott is such a cognizant and clear-minded director that he has built the entire film around the seemingly incidental effects it has on us.
The story is original, and somehow very naturally disturbing. Everyone is away from home, everyone has a lifestyle that doesn't even exist in the present-day reality, the science-fiction creations are all twisted imaginings. The plot hardly takes any turns. It's actually rather simple, and yet every scene is unpredictable, the writing is truly scary, and literally everything is done right, right down to the handling of the character of Jonesy, the cat.
The creature itself is a disturbing, vivid creation. I mean, have you ever thought about how odd this thing is? It looks almost like a Frankenstein's monster of machinery and mechanical parts. When it is first seen, we hardly even realize that we've seen it. That is how scary this movie is.