Still Scary After All These Years. Eat Your Heart Out, Stanley Kubrick.

Rating: 10/10 (1 July 2013)

I wanted SO badly to give ALIEN a perfect 10-star rating. Science Fiction and Horror are difficult genres in which to work, whether you are a novelist or a filmmaker, and it is a genuinely rare gem of a film that actually straddles both genres, succeeding as both sci-fi and horror in a single one-two punch.
ALIEN does all this; in fact it is one of the most terrifying outer-space movies ever made. So why did I lop off two stars? Because of the soundtrack. I never saw the movie in a theatre, so I don't know if it had this problem in a large space, but on television you can't hear half the dialogue. Now this is not a problem unique to this single film, but I've never seen a film so hobbled by it. I don't know how much of the blame to lay at the feet of the Dolby crew who recorded the sound, but director Ridley Scott did not help matters; he lets his actors whisper so softly in so many scenes that after thirty-five years there are still some lines that I can't make out. And if they aren't whispering, they're mumbling (Tom Skerritt in particular is the worst offender in this regard), which if you replay the scene often enough you might finally figure out what he says but there's no guarantee. At any rate it makes watching this film a little like doing homework. A pity, because if only they could fix the sound issue, this would be a great film.
Deep space. The industrial starship Nostromo (its exact function is a tad bit murky; I've seen it described as everything from a towing vessel to an interstellar garbage barge) picks up a signal from a nearby planet. Thinking it an SOS, they go to investigate and discover a desolate planet that appears to have been abandoned, so they go on their way. But that signal was not an SOS; it was a warning to stay away, and we soon discover that the Nostromo has picked up a very unwelcome stowaway.
The alien in this film is a cinematic icon: it has been copied at least in part countless times, possibly the most obviously in INDEPENDENCE DAY. And the film is one of the last in the genre before CGI special effects changed the industry. CGI has made things almost too easy; so easy, in fact, that directors misuse it and the results scream "FAKE!!!" louder than anything from the old Fifties B-pictures. The title ALIEN may well be the most accurate title in the history of Hollywood.
Sigourney Weaver heads a brilliant cast that works hard and the film is wonderfully effective despite the soundtrack issues. I keep hoping that one day they can remaster the thing so that watching this film won't take so much work.