The Quiet Beginning

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2006)

Review 1 of 4
Alien is one of those films that will never age. It takes the simplest story and tells it as well as it can be told. I look at this film as the first in a trilogy, many may not agree with that, but Alien is a perfect beginning. It establishes an entire world and makes it feel real. Everything feels new and interesting. The things that are not explained in this film are exactly what makes it so fascinating to watch. Where did that ship come from? It doesn't matter. Like a good novel the film allows you to fill in the pieces with your own imagination. This goes for the alien it self, since we see so little of it that it becomes all the more terrifying for it. Ridley Scott is like a painter with his images. So many frames of this picture seem like they could be made into still photographs. Alien is science fiction and yet with the way it is shot and acted the movie feels like a documentary. It's that sense of verisimilitude that has made this movie last for so long. So much is present in the subtext. I get the feeling that one of the underlying themes of the film is that technology in the future will little by little overtake the lives of human beings, but paradoxically the nostromo still needs a crew in order to operate. I believe this film is one of the few realistic depictions of what encountering a real Alien life form might actually be like, and that it may not be what we are expecting. something that has always stood out to me about the film is the level of familiarity that the characters have with their surroundings. Many science fiction films love to draw attention to their futuristic technology but the characters in Alien react to it like a construction worker would with operating a crane: it is their job. This film is so good for so many reasons. The performances are nothing short of amazing, the set design exquisite, the score by Jerry Goldsmith is subtle and evocative, but the main reason for me that alien still holds up after all these years is that it takes itself very seriously. There is no Hollywood style self referential humor that would saturate the later entries of the series. Sigourney Weaver may have gotten the academy award nomination for Aliens, but her work here is very solid. She plays a character who through much hardship finds strength within herself that never appeared to be there to begin with. If you look at the Alien series as a trilogy this is the film where Ripley discovers who she really is, or defines her character, and the only way one can do that is through the choices they make in extreme circumstances. This is a film of great tension and subtly, well worth seeing over and over again to pick up on all the layers of subtext that may have been missed the first or second viewing.