Alien is a solid movie. Technically, visually, dialogue…ly, it is a fine example of quality film-making. From that perspective, Alien has aged remarkably well for a sci-fi movie from 1979. The framing and the score and the tension in the cinematography are all just excellent. (Although modern audiences might get antsy at the pacing, which is much slower than most recent films have accustomed us to.) Despite being great examples of what I like to call “ugly-tech”–meaning: the future as imagined by the past–the sets in Alien look absolutely fantastic when set against space movies from a similar time period. The dialogue is natural, the characters are lovable, and real–well, almost all of them are real. Wink.
There’s bad news though: if you take a different perspective and look at Alien as specifically a horror movie, it doesn’t hold up quite as well. The xenomorph’s head and mouth look great, appropriately terrifying and drooly, but it loses a lot whenever you see it in a full body shot because the suit doesn’t do a great job of concealing the recognizably human figure inside. Those moments kind of break the tension for me. Instead of thinking: “The xenomorph is the perfect predatory specimen, always striking from the shadows and pouncing on unsuspecting prey.” I can’t help but think: “That’s some guy in a suit with a ridiculous mask-helmet-thing.” It’s too bad they didn’t stick to leaving the alien almost entirely out of the shot for the whole movie. The headcrab, on the other hand, is still as viscerally unsettling as it was the first time I saw it how-ever-many years ago.
That said, it is still a fantastic science fiction movie, and one you should definitely have in your collection if you consider yourself a fan of sci-fi movies. Alien also manages to establish a lot of really important information that, of course, leads to three more fantastic movies. Then, also, a couple crossover movies that we won’t speak of. (Okay, maybe briefly. AvP was atrocious, don’t even bother with it. AvP2 was basically crossover-fight porn, the thinnest possible plot stringing together set-piece fights. So, like most porn, it’s a guilty pleasure.)
Alien was also interesting to watch in light of my recent Prometheus viewing. Don’t get me started on all the things I disliked about that movie, but I found it very interesting that both an Engineer corpse and an Engineer ship make an appearance in Alien. It had been so long since I’d seen Alien when I watched Prometheus that I didn’t even recognize the ship as the same type the crew finds the xenomorph eggs on in Alien. There are some interesting potential implications there for the Alien universe and timeline, but my knowledge of the subject is not nearly encyclopedic enough to comment further.
I would definitely recommend re-watching Alien if you haven’t seen it in a while. If nothing else, it will whet your appetite for the gratuitous and glorious action-fest that is Aliens (1986).