And was surprised at how bored I was! When I last say this movie in my late teens, it was terrifingly scary. Now there were still scary parts - some jump scares and the Alien is always a little scary - but there were more boring parts than can just be accounted for by growing up.
Long, slow pans of this boring-ass empty ship. Long shots where absolutely nothing happens.
The conversations between the people were not that boring but how about that end? Ripley sends the Yaphet Kotto character and Lambert to get the coolant. She goes to the escape pod. We watch their travel. We are then subjected to watching Ripley start up the escape pod and the other two get the coolant. Press buttons. Load coolant. Press buttons. Load coolant.
Then Lambert gets attacked. So Ripley gets her flamethrower and runs all the way back to the coolant area. We watch every moment of her travel.
She finds them dead or whatever, then gets the coolant. Then goes to set the countdown to detonation. Then runs all the way back to the escape pod. We watch this. She realizes the Alien is there. So she runs all the way back to the countdown and just misses shutting it down. We watch her run all the way back. Then she runs all the way back to the escape pod! Again! I swear, it’s like one of those Final Fantasy games - you can see the ending, RIGHT THERE, but you have to run along this long convoluted path to get there.
Disregarding the fact that most of the crew was dumber than a box of rocks, (violating quarantine procedures!) I do have one or two questions. I didn’t see where Ripley saw the Alien took Brett (first kill) into the airshaft, how did they know that’s what it did? He was alone when it took him. Also, they really didn’t have any weapons on board the ship? Not even one pistol?
Other than that, the PRIMARY scenes were still awesome: the chestburster scene, and Ripley ejecting it out of the airlock AND shooting it with the grappling hook when it wouldn’t let go. She is just as badass as I remember her.
The growth of the creature was painfully obvious this time, though. It goes from less than a foot high to about eight feet high, with just one molting.
To me, this movie and The Thing from the same era are good for exactly this reason. Rarish, random OMFG! scary moments between long intervals of relative boredom can be quite effective IMO.
Of course it helps if the boring stuff between the OMFG moments makes some sense and isn’t just useless drivel.
Ash violated the quarantine procedures because he had secret programming to get the Alien aboard at all costs. The crew was expendable. Dallas and Lambert wanted to break quarantine because they didn’t want Kane to die, and didn’t want to be stuck outside with him for 24 hours.
Remember, the Nostromo was basically an oil tanker, not an exploration ship like the Enterprise. So these were a bunch of union truck drivers just making a buck, not intrepid explorers. Modern oil tankers aren’t armed either.
Yes, he was. It’s actually a great cast - Tom Skerritt was the only weak point IMHO.
Oh, I know why they did it. It’s still dumb though. It’s the entire reason I stopped watching Stargate SG-1, after the episode where they let some kind of disease onto the premises and were going to blow the whole project skyhigh. IF YOU JUST HAD SOME MOTHERFUCKING QUARANTINE PROCEDURES IN PLACE…I was practically throwing things at the screen.
And to me that was one of the best parts. Ratcheting up the tension, making the viewer wait on “action” scenes. It’s, IMO, a lost art form (A recent example is Super 8, which also made the decision to go slower and was incredible for it).
This is the reason I never liked the movie. Not only was the crew composed of idiots, but, by implication, everyone in the entire society was dumber than those in Idiocracy. When you keep asking “Why the fuck are they doing that?” when there are far more sensible actions at every point, it’s impossible to be scared and you start rooting for the monster to put these morons out of their misery.
If you can, see the 1950s film It! The Terror from Beyond Space, from which most of the plot was lifted. The people in the film aren’t as dumb, and when they fight back it makes much more sense. Some bits came from [i\]Planet of Vampires* (Big alien skeleton in derelict alien space ship on foggy, windy planet) and Night of the Blood Beast (Alien implants eggs in human).
The Monster-on-the-spaceship trope and the egg-implanter trope both ultimately trace back to a couple of A.E. van Vogt short stories (Black Destroyer and Discord in Scarlet) that were later “fixed up” into the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but the plot of Alien resembles the plot of It! (written by Jerome Bixby, who shoulda sued) more than any of the van Vogt works.
It! is currently available on NetFlix streaming. I watched it (first time) last week and it was bad. I kept thinking that with an legitimate SF writer involved that eventually it would show some intelligence, but nope. (Well, maybe unshielding the reactor, but that was 90 seconds in a 90 minute movie.)
I think if you see this for the first time, it has an incredible impact (I know it did for me, when I saw it in the theaters on opening weekend, before any buzz had built). The chestbuster scene plants a seed of anxiety in the minds of the audience – holy crap, anything is possible. That thing could look like anything or be anywhere. (For instance, I think the audience at my screening was convinced that the alien was inside the cat, and that taking Jonesie aboard the shuttle was a potentially fatal mistake). That makes everything that happens afterwards fraught with incredible tension.
I did a thread here several months ago wherein I reviewed all 4 Alien films that I had just watched for the first time.
I loved Alien and thought it was a near perfect movie, even being extremely dated from my POV. I can’t imagine how much I would have loved it if I were around to have watched it and enjoyed it when it first came out. It was a clever, interesting, mysterious sci-fi “horror”. I didn’t mind that it was slow and all that. To each their own, and all that!
Thank You!!! I’m constantly amazed at the short attention spans people here seem to have. Movies that actually take the time to do some scene setting and character development are frequently derided as slow and boring. The problem is that if you just jump straight into one action sequence after another, their effect is diminished. Meaning and impact can be so much deeper with proper context.
Sadly, it does seem to be something of a lost art.
Oh, and “Alien” is a masterpiece (even if some characters make stupid decisions) and “Prometheus” is utter dreck (pretty dreck, though).
Maybe we just like different things than you, you ever thought of that? People do have different tastes! I prefer action films with quiet drama scenes interlaced throughout. That’s my primary tastes, and I only like some horror films.
I just watched Alien because it scared the crap out of me twenty years ago - to the point of having nightmares for weeks. I am definitely much less scared of movies now.
It was an OK flick-but had the usual Sci Fi contradictions:
-mankind can travel between the stars, but in a ship (the Nostromo) that resembles a 1930’s tramp steamer (leaking water, swaying chains)
-an android crew member that appears to be made of gelatine and lots of slimy stuff
-a monster that has blood (“molecular acid”) that dissolves metals
Although seeing Sigourney Weaver stripping down makes it all worthwhile.
Well there are folks that like different things, but I do think that the whole way of making movies that include a more languid pace to either set scenes, develop characters, or ratchet up tension are rare these days where they used to be more common in the past.
Even in action movies… I mean compare the first Die Hard to 2010s Action films.
For me, the “boring” bits were the best part. I like long slow takes of decrepit spaceships and mysterious ruins, with dark ambient music or industrial sounds in the background.
The monster movie I can take or leave, though I didn’t find the character’s actions to be any stupider than in most horror movies:
“Jeez, Billy, may be we shouldn’t have the party in the abandoned mental asylum rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of a thousand madmen.”
“You’re right Krystal, let’s have it in Kevin’s basement instead. What was I thinking!?”
Also the monster suffers from a Citizen Kane effect. Tremendously original at the time, so copied that now it looks like a hundred other sci-horror monsters.
