Check your brain at the door

Rating: 1/10 (4 June 2016)

SPOILER ALERT. I suppose it's asking too much to want a sci-fi movie that's halfway intelligent. "Alien" is not. If you start thinking about this movie, it falls apart. I'll try to be brief. One, if I'm not missing something, the "Company" that owns the spaceship knows about this horrible alien monster, knows it "can't be killed" (Ash, the robot, actually says this), and wants the monster brought back to Earth, "crew expendable." Question, if the monster can't be killed, but it kills each and every human it sees, how the heck are they going to get it off the spaceship when it gets back to Earth? And what will they do with it then? That's absurd. Two, how does the Company know the spaceship crew will even get the monster on board to bring it back in the first place? There's no way at all for the Company to assume this. Three, the only reason the monster got inside the spaceship was because of an incredibly stupid thing one of the crew did. If you were on an unknown alien planet and you saw some "eggs," would you try to go down and sniff at them and put your face as close to them as possible? And when one of them started to open, would you just stand there and get even closer to it? This is beyond stupid, it's insane. Four, once the monster is on the ship and hugging this guy's face, it disappears, and suddenly another monster pops out of his chest. Seriously? This rather sizable alien being with a big ugly head has been living inside a man's chest but he never felt any pain and none of his organs suffered any damage, not his lungs, not his heart, nothing? I didn't buy that for one second. Five, this creature supposedly has "molecular acid" (ha ha) flowing through its body, an acid so strong that it can eat right through steel like a knife through warm butter -- but the creature itself is immune? Right. Six, once the entire crew except for Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is dead, she decides to blow up the ship and escape in the shuttle. So she has to go through a cumbersome series of physical actions, including pulling up big tubes, just to set a destruct signal, and then it gives her ten minutes -- ten minutes, folks -- to go to the bathroom, find her cat, get to the shuttle, strip down to her micro-panties for us, ten minutes. In a sane world, on a sane ship, you'd be able to set the destruct for any time you liked, and you'd be able to get on the shuttle first and then activate the destruct signal. Finally, only a guess from the way they made it look, but evidently the ship was destroyed in a nuclear explosion, while Ripley is still close enough that she (and her cat) would be killed by the radiation. (Even in "Forbidden Planet" they knew enough to get the ship far away from the explosion.) So, for all those reasons, this is a movie that is so scientifically stupid and impossible that I couldn't believe it or enjoy it at all. Where are Joel and the bots when you need them?