Groundbreaking psychological sci-fi terror!

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2004)

Seeing this movie now in 2004, is a bit funny, first of all many of the scenes in the movie has become somewhat a cliche, and this has obviously been ia inspiration for many movies to come after.
But obviously this is one of the milestones in the cinematic history, even though it is from 1979 it is still a fantastic and stunning movie, both visually and psychological, as i wrote on topic.
There are many good points of this movie, first of all the script is absolutely great, gripping, original and controversial, full of different twists, some more obvious than others, one of the best scenes of the movie is the one where Ash turns out to be a computer, and the following interviewing scene, a scene that can definitely come up for debate of our curiosity for finding foreign and unknown organisms to explore, are we perhaps too curious and eager? Not something i'm gonna discuss with myself here, but it's an obvious opinion there, and something Ridley Scott may be very interested in exploring more, which he has done already with Blade Runner i guess.
Another strong side, and again, praise to Ridley Scott, the direction of this movie is nearly perfect, i can't find any spots to put my fingers on and criticise, all i can say is that he did a fantastic job creating a atmosphere that stuck to your back, again, some things here have been copied and thus seen before, but it is still one of the best direction i have seen ever, the work with the flickering lights, the many aspects of the image, the, at times, alternative and experimental use of the camera, there are so many good aspects of that, and this movie could have been a lot worse without Ridley in the lead.
The special effects really is the only point that annoyed me a tad, but considering the movie is 1979 and we are now in 2004, i don't think it's something i wanna get into, the monster so to speak wasn't viewed a lot of times, which added to the psychological part of the movie i think, the many silent scenes where you follow the characters is the real backbone of the movie, not the monster, which is good i think, horror movies shouldn't always be focused on what the eye can see, but maybe rather than on what the eye can not see.
9/10