"Alien" is born where sci-fi/horror meets superb artistic craftsmanship

Rating: 9/10 (9 June 2008)

A skeptic of "Alien" would quickly dismiss it on premise alone as unoriginal and gimmicky. Yes, it could be described in one way as "Jaws" on a spaceship, but director Ridley Scott takes a solid script from Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett and turns it into something remarkable and memorable, something more than just run-of-the-mill. What you have instead is the most popular and revered extra-terrestrial/outer-space thriller film of all time.
Premise alone is not enough to make this movie work. 7 crew members on a giant mobile space station of sorts are kept from returning home when they receive an unidentified signal that they are required to answer and land on a strange planet where they pick up some killer cargo: an unknown alien species. The rest is a fight for survival on a spaceship. It's particularly bare, but Scott does something truly special with it by starting with the basics.
From the opening minutes of the film (all silent, like much of the film), Scott patiently shows you the terrific scenic design work and paints a haunting portrayal of space akin to "2001: A Space Odyssey," which Scott himself has credited as an influence. One of the biggest flaws of all films in space that have come since is that they fail to capture the essence of space and its strength as a thematic element. Scott's focus on the context of space really allows the desperate emotions of the characters to show and creates an empathy for the situation. These people are completely alone, they are facing a dangerous unknown and morality is not a force in outer space. You don't think about those things in most other sci-fi/horror films, plain and simple.
The characters are not as strong as the directing and set design, but Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the first heroine/protagonist to emerge in the fray of a film. She is not established as the focal point until much later yet Weaver pulls you into her character quickly.
Scott also masters suspense in this film like any good horror film should. While the "Alien" franchise has since taken to all out battles and action sequences, Scott takes the budget restrictions and makes the film better because of it. Seeing lots of a giant man in a rubber alien suit or an animatronic alien robot is not going to keep your viewer's credibility. I still think Scott actually showed too much of the alien, but for the majority of the film, the alien's rare appearance makes the drawn out suspense really work. You're just waiting to catch a glimpse of this thing (a technique employed most recently in J.J Abrams "Cloverfield")
The cherry on top though is simply the thematic resonance. My expectation for a film like this to make me think at all is very, very low and "Alien" blows away that expectation. I expect to just be thrilled and scared a bit, not to weigh the pros and cons of being a species with a sense of morality. This film is terrific and I hope Scott will find his way back to science fiction before he calls it a career.