Best of the 1970 Science Fiction/Horror Movies

Rating: 9/10 (16 December 2006)

In these days where screenplay readers want movies in only one genre, this movie is an exception. A combination of science fiction and horror make forces to create what I believe is the best of the Hollywood movies in the 1970s since Close Encounters and even Star Wars Episode IV.
It is basically a movie about the Nostromo, a spaceship which had been said to contain a lot of treasure inside---and a small band of space treasurers risking life and limb to find the treasure before the alien monsters ruin their plans.
The part of the scene I liked in Alien was the conclusion, although I liked the middle of the movie where the crew members were fatally eaten alive on the Nostromo by the alien creatures.
It was so sad to witness Ripley figuring out that when all of his crew dies by the awful creatures, she decides on one of his crew member's advice to destroy the ship and go into an escape ship.
So, as I witnessed all of the attention on Nostromo's Emergency Destruction System that she activates, I think of that machine as the new monster with no alien monster inside. The system was designed to blow the Nostromo up in 10 minutes--with an option to override the system so that the ship would not self-destruct...but that option had to be used within 5 minutes! But the big problem was that since Ripley was overly obsessed with the monsters that killed all of her crew, she goes upstairs to the hallway to make sure that all of the monsters did not come out. All of this it haunts her so much that when she realizes that the 5 minutes were closing up and she goes downstairs to the self-destruction machine to try to get the override option to work---she procrastinated and the override option soon became "no option" as the 5 minutes elapsed quickly for her.
Now, with Ripley having absolutely no choice but to get to the escape ship before the whole Nostromo blows by itself in 5 minutes, she has to go to the ship very slowly through the hallway maze of smoke and flashing lights, because I speculated that any sudden movement of Ripley meant that the monster would strike her from anywhere and kill her. She does go to the escape ship in time at about T minus 1 minute.
She drives the escape ship just far away from the Nostromo, just in time before the Nostromo explodes several times into oblivion. And I thought that would be it for the movie. But this was what I call a "false finale", because later on, one more alien monster surprises her in the escape ship; but Ripley finds a way to stop it---putting on her space suit, and letting one of the doors of the ship open so that the strong vacuum of space would suck that monster up as it is forced back fatally into the darkness of space. And she does that, and it is all over for the film....
Ripley is saddened that she had lost a lot of money for this mission as well as losing all of her crew and the Nostromo.