Whose idea was it to bring a cat in the first place?

Rating: 10/10 (31 July 2004)

I'm a little confused as to why there was a cat on board in the first place. Needless to say, given that there was an entire crew on board the Nostromo, a merchant vessel carrying, if I remember correctly, something like 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore, there was hardly a lack of companionship. At any rate, I can easily brush aside my curiosity about the effort that went into designing the life support system that would have been needed to keep the cat alive along with the rest of the humans as they traveled for months on end in deep sleep. It doesn't matter, because the cat was involved in most of the scariest scenes.
That being said, I think that one of the things that really makes Alien great is that it explains all the twists and turns of its plot in great detail, which is almost unheard of in science fiction and horror films. No one displays ludicrous behavior to allow for the construction of bloody, gory death scenes, the alien, masterfully designed, isn't rushing across the screen in every scene to allow for maximum payoff of the costume design, we don't even see it until well past the halfway point in the movie. Like Jaws, Alien takes its time to allow the characters to gradually grasp the enormity of their situation.
The Nostromo is a merchant ship, which allows for a non-military crew to be faced with a mortal enemy that they do not understand. The ship intercepts a strange transmission that must be from an intelligent source since it repeats itself every twelve seconds, and so it wakes up the crew to investigate. The subtlety of the way the conflict is introduced is very important. The transmission didn't just appear, the ship awoke the crew months ahead of schedule, because it was programmed to do so should anything like that happen. And to the chagrin of a couple of the money financial-minded crew members, it is also in their contracts to investigate any such occurrence. The movie is covering its tracks very thoroughly and to great effect.
When they reach the planet from which the transmission originated, they find the spectacular discovery of what appears to be a crashed alien spaceship, complete with a dead alien pilot still in his chair. A brief look at the body suggests that the pilot may have exploded from the inside, creating curiosity about his death that the movie never satisfies but doesn't need to. One of the crew members discovers what look like dozens of leathery eggs, gets attacked, and is brought back on board the ship. Significantly, protocol is broken to get him and the alien life form back on board for medical attention.
When they discover that the alien has blood that melts through the hull of the ship like thermite, a new and particularly difficult challenge arises. How do they kill a deadly enemy without making it bleed? And to make matters worse, the very ship is programmed to work against them. They are in the most hostile environment imaginable, worse than anywhere on earth. They are being stalked by an unknown creature that they can't injure for fear of damaging the hull of the spaceship, and the ship itself has placed the survival of the alien life form above their own survival. They have to trick the alien into submission without letting the ship know what's going on. Even HAL wasn't THIS creepy.
Released at a time when science fiction was probably at the most popular that it had ever been (and possibly ever will be) thanks to the recent release of Star Wars and the soon to follow first sequel, Alien came along and capitalized in an area of science fiction that people evidently were very eager for, the darker, more sinister and dangerous side. The side of science fiction with the bloody deaths rather than light sabers and heroes. In fact, by looking at the way people probably saw Alien in 1979 and the way they see it now, you can learn a lot about how science fiction and horror have evolved over the years. Back then, this was horror/science fiction. Today, it's science fiction/horror. But while it was more horrible in 1979 than it is today, it is significant that, while other films that have come along over the years have overshadowed Alien as far as the intensity of the horror, the movie has lost none of its powerful effect. Rather than reinventing the science fiction genre by adding horror to it, it is now maintaining the life of the science fiction genre by reminding us of how good it can be when it's done right.