Pretty good. Does not fully capitalise on some of its own best ideas.

Rating: 7/10 (8 July 2013)

The invective against this flawed but quite original sci-fi movie is so over the top Id rather review that than the film.
Most of the 1 star reviews refer to 'plotholes' (when they mean mystery) without understanding the meaning of the term. They all complain that there are 'unanswered questions' and that the motivations of the characters seem to be 'random' or insufficiently unexplained.
Lets examine Alien from that point of view.
Who sent the distress signal? Why is there no explanation of the giant alien strapped to a huge chair/weapon? Why mess with a bunch of alien eggs - that "appeaar to react to breaking the light" Why would Dallas volunteer to go into a maze of tunnels alone against a vicious alien creature? Why would Kane not be kept in quarantine even after the facehugger died and came off? How could the alien possibly know about the self destruct - does it speak English? Why would Ripley bother about the cat ? Couldn't the crew have just locked the all the doors in the main living area and waited it out? Why would a space mining vessel costing billions by staffed by fools like Brett and Parker? IF Ash received "crew expendable" orders how come Weyland Yutani knew nothing about it in Aliens?
The answer to all these questions is, it because it FITS the story. Todays google generation seems to want their movies to come prepackaged with all the answers. They hate mystery and mistakenly call it 'plotholes'. For instance "why does the medpod only work on males"?. I can guess its because it is intended for Weyland, but that's a mystery, not a mistake. Why dos the captain appear to know more about Alien WMD than he is letting on? Because he's a former military man with a gut feeling for this sort of thing? He wouldn't even have to be since its clear as a a bell that when you fill a delivery mechanism with jars of death it's a "weapon of mass destruction" (I didn't like the concurrency of the phrase but that wont matter 30 years from now).
When someone told me "hurray, Scott is directing" I was nonplussed. "But Scott directed classics like Bladerunner and Gladiator" - yeah well he directed White Squall and Black Rain too. Not to mention "legend". Besides Bladerunner is only well regarded because of Syd Mead's work, realising William Gibson's vision. And Gladiator is Scotts derivative go at swords and sandals after Mad Mel Gibson revived the genre with the ballsy "Braveheart" - a film twice as violent and yet twice as nuanced.
Yet Scott has no peer when it comes to the language of Cinema. This film is his best work to date on that score. You may find it clunky, you may find it hollow - but you will find its images haunting your mind for some time to come.