Fill in the blanks

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2018)

Ridley Scott's 'Alien' is still his most impressive movie, it was only his second film, that every effect is physical (the opening credits is a camera panning over a painting!), and that the budget was so low the "spacecraft" is an odd mish mash of various components that Spaceballs would spoof with their giant "Spaceball One" ship.
More than any other directors I know except maybe Zack Snyder, Ridley Scott has the ability to create a unique look and has the mastery of craft to coordinate every element (acting, score, movement) to reinforce that look.
That he chose Giger to base the look on was brilliant. Evil without the constraints of morality conveyed by an organic lifeform constantly dripping goo.
The alien ship, though only briefly shown, is a sequence that will live way past the time that the monsters of the series are forgotten; that blending of beast, environment and narrative is unique in all filmdom. Really amazing that the sequels didn't go back to that ship until Prometheus, and it looked like half the audience complained about that anyway. Ridley was forced to add the classic Xenomorph in a tacked on ending sequence because the test audience demanded "The Beast".
The movie seems to have a lot in common with "Planet of the Vampires" although the writers deny it.
The real reason I like this movie so much was because you had to fill in the gaps with your own imagination. What I filled in was that the juggernaut was an entirely bio-mechanical creation, intentionally crashed on that alien planet. The company then sent the miners, unaware, to retrieve the specimen and bring it back to earth without anyone knowing the better.
The movie doesn't work without Ian Holmes. Ridley needed an actor of his caliber to play that character because the audience has to find out the same time the other characters do about his truth.