In space, no one can hear you yawn.

Rating: Null/10 (26 April 2003)

In space, no one can hear you yawn.
The first Ridley Scott film I saw was The Duelists. LOVED it! So I had high hopes for Alien. I saw it when it came out in 1979. Admittedly, the film had a disadvantage before the credits rolled: I saw it in Hollywood and the line for the film was far scarier than the film could possibly be.
As I sat watching it, it seemed familiar, like a film that really freaked me out as a boy: It! The Terror from Beyond Space. ITTFBS had a monster that just couldn't be killed and it was on a ship in space so there was NO escaping it (none of these fruity escape pods in 50s sci-fi). I haven't seen ITTFBS since, but it ranked right up there with Mars Attacks bubble gum cards for giving me the creeps.
So Alien was a remake. There's no crime against that, unless it ends up being the film Alien turned out to be: not very scary, pretty funny (for the wrong reasons) in spots, and politically correct (the enemy isn't so much the Alien as BIG BUSINESS that wants the Alien brought back no matter what the cost). I haven't seen the complete film again for several years, but as it was on today and I found so many parts so ludicrous, I had to vent.
First, a plus: the sequence leading up to the face hugger eggs was, if sluggish, rather intriguing (why do space-age cameras of the future take such bad pictures?) and the sets were great! But we are introduced early on to the film's unending and uninteresting mumbled dialog. I guess this was supposed to make the film seem more `real.' They were improvising some of this, but it might as well have been `caterpillar watermelon' crowd-scene improvising. This got old fast.
The stomach bursting was a shock! But that quickly faded as the Alienette looks like little more than a nasty finger puppet and literally zips off screen WB-cartoon style. It gets worse. After a fight to the death involving a rolled-up issue of Evil Android Monthly, Ash's head comes off. A few minutes of poking a prosthetic mock-up of Ash's head which looks NOTHING like the actual Ash, there is a clumsy cut to actor Holm's head poking through a hole in a table. Meant to be gory and gruseome, this is all just inept. And the gurgle/burble white ooze everywhere made me chuckle -- it looked like someone was having a Dairy Queen nightmare.
Before Ash, the only enunciator in the bunch, is sent to that big milk carton in the sky, he tells us the Alien can't be killed and that the crew is expendable. Daft! How can one transport something that can't be killed which, if it decides it wants to kill you (and everybody else, which seems to be its "thing"), can't be transported? Well, that's just the way those big, evil corporations work, I guess. I'll bet the same people behind Wendy's and Swatch are planning something just like this right now! In space, nothing makes much sense!
And speaking of that tag line, I had hoped that this would be a scary, `real' tech movie, following in the footsteps of 2001. No. Sadly, in space, everyone can hear you scream, and mumble, and just make a TON of noise (especially Lambert and Parker throwing those cylinders around; they were probably killed because the Alien couldn't sleep!). And when did steam become a high-tech necessity. Is it DRY in space and they need a nuclear humidifier on every deck; a leaky one, at that?
The last ten minutes are fairly tense: will Ripley slip into something even more comfortable than skin-tight t-shirt and panties before confronting the Alien which is no longer fast and dangerous in the confines of the escape pod, but stumbles around in the ubiquitous steam until it can be ejected like a drunk who's stayed past closing time?
There. I feel better now.