Best Sci-Fi movie ever

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2005)

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best Sci-Fi movie ever. I'm just a regular movies fan, with any technical expertise what so ever, my opinion is only based in my sensibility and emotions like any other people while watching a movie, enhanced with some trivia knowledge though.
What really fascinates me in Alien, as a Sci-Fi movie, is its realism. All the visuals and contexts are truly believable, and you actually look at it as a highly probable prospective of how mankind will be in the XXII century.
We can notice some aspects of the human nature that, unfortunately, will never cease to exist, like greed, latent conflicts in high pressure situations, corporative lack of scruples, even though evil is personalized on the robot Ash.
The settings are amazing as well, beginning with the spaceship, and its sense of realism becomes from its nature, a towing vehicle from a big corporation, a commercial vessel, not a scientific expedition with the purpose of exploring new worlds. Don't get me wrong, I'm a major Kubrick fan, I have almost all his movies on DVD, but 2001 is fascinating in a NASA point of view, and come on, it's 2005 and Man hasn't even got close to Mars, even less to Jupiter. 2001 is great for its visual beauty, almost poetic with the Strauss' waltzes, and it surely revolutionized the Sci-fi vision, but is far more dated than Alien.
So, regardless some devices, like computer terminals and navigation screens, that are slightly dated, all the rest of the props and sets are very well conceived, even for today's standards. Little details contribute to this, like the woodpecker figure on the mess table.
The main conclusion is that's not necessary a CGI overload to make a good Sci-Fi movie, and Alien is the proof of it. I'm sure if Alien was to be produced nowadays, certainly it would lose a great deal of its realism, that resides mainly in it's rawness, pace, darkness, humanity, and sets conception, that present Hollywood standards, and perhaps audience's demands, would suppress.
Just another remark: isn't it surprising that many of the #250 IMDb's top movies weren't acclaimed in their release years, especially by the Academy Awards? Alien is one of them. "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Apocalypse Now" are great movies, still remembered, but "Norma Rae" or "All That Jazz" are hardly in Alien's league, as far as contributions to the cinema history are concerned.