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Intro:
As many of you should know by now, I live across the pond. This means a lot of
the films you Yanks see come out a lot later if at all for me. Not exactly the
greatest thing when you review the darned things. So I’m going to provide a little
service for everyone. The days leading up to a movies release you can look forward
to reviews related to that weeks big movie. This week, ALIEN: DIRECTORS CUT comes
out so this series gets the treatment.
Review:
So where to start? Well, with ALIEN: THE REGULAR EDITION. More specifically the
Digitally Remastered edition.
I don’t know what Ridley Scott has done to his movie for the re-release, so it’s
possible that this is basically a review of that. I’m sure the plot is the same.
The crew of an interstellar freighter is awoken from cryo-stasis by the ship’s
computer, Mother. They are due to wake up when they get back to Earth, but it’s
10 months away. Why have they been woken up so early? Well, Mother has received
a message.
Is this message human or is it from an alien race (why hasn’t such a thing been
encountered yet)? Well, they don’t know so they go and check it out. The ship
lands on a environmentally brutal planet and some of the crew trudge 2 kilometers
to a very alien looking ship. They go inside and loose contact with the Nostromo,
leaving everyone there wondering what is going on. Luckily we get to know. They
encounter a long dead, giant alien being with a big hole in his gut that seems
to have been exploded from the inside. There’s also a whole bunch of eggs. Kane
(John Hurt) is lowered into the area with the eggs, looks too closely at one and
gets something attached to his face.
So they take him back to the ship and try and get it off, but no luck. It likes
being there and when they try to remove it, they discover it has acidic blood.
You don’t mess with something that burns a hole in your ship when you cut it.
Besides it comes off by itself after a couple of days. The crew finds the dead
alien being and decides it’s time to leave, go back to sleep and get home. They
have one last meal and Kane’s salad disagrees with him. So much so that an alien
bursts out of him, does a song and dance number and disappears into the kitchen.
Wait that was Spaceballs...
Anyway, if you haven’t seen Alien in the last 24 years you haven’t lived, so you
should know what happens. The late seventies and early eighties were the home of
the slasher flick, and that’s basically what Alien is. Sort of like Jason in space
(before they actually made Jason in space).
Acting:
I have one problem with this movie. Alien is a great film, but there’s one character
that annoys me every time I see it. Horror movies generally have their scream queens
who do stupid things and scream when they see the villain. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright)
is Alien’s scream queen. And she seems to complain about everything! That’s all her
characters dialogue in the movie (Ex: Lambert: I can‘t see a Goddamn thing. Kane:
Quit gripping. Lambert: I like gripping). Come on, this is a space ship! How did
someone so weak get a job hauling tons of iron ore from deep space!? I think the
whole reason the crew goes in stasis for the journey is so they don’t have to listen
to her for months on end. Seeing as we have Ripley to compare her to she’s even more
ridiculous.
The rest of the crew is great though. Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is the tired captain who
seems to be stuck on a ship where he doesn’t have to do much captaining. He’s a company
man who only wants his pay check. He doesn’t care about alien life, being famous or
anything else really. He’s what Captain Kirk would probably have been like if he never
got to do anything but haul cargo, bored.
Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) come as a package. They make sure
the Nostromo works, which isn’t easy, as it’s a heap. And they get paid less than everyone
else for doing it. The main laughs come from these characters. Brett is as good a ships
engineer as you will see anywhere. He seems to be filthy right from the get go; a real
grease monkey. Parker seems to hold the ship together through sheer will power at times,
and he’s a big guy so you wouldn’t want to mess with him.
Kane (John Hurt) is the cat that curiosity killed. He’s like a little kid who knows he
shouldn’t stick a fork in the power outlet, but does it anyway because he wants to know
what would happen. I’m not sure what his role on the ship actually is, but for the movie
he’s the guy who wants to know. Most of the crew wants to ignore the signal but not Kane.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran to the 2k to the alien ship, looking behind him and
saying “Come on guys, hurry up!” John Hurt is pretty much always good and he’s great
here. You believe that he’s inside HR Geiger's messed up paintings, and he just loves it.
Ian Holm (Ash) is a truly stunning actor. Anyone who has seen From Hell knows this. And he’s
good here as the company man (ahem...yeah, “man” *rolls eyes*) that wants the Alien alive.
He’s the cold-hearted scientist, and finds the whole thing fascinating. When John Hurt is
on the table with a Face-Hugger attached to him, Ash cares more about the face hugger.
And off course, there's Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). It’s generally a girl that survives these
things, and Ripley earns it. She the commander of a ship who’s captain isn’t all that energetic,
so she has to run the thing. Ripley belongs here, unlike Lambert. She’s a guys girl and isn’t
afraid to get down and dirty. When everyone else is panicking she tells them what to do and
they jump straight to it. This was Sigourney Weaver’s first sci-fi film, and she wasn’t that
big an actress at the time. Alien made her a marketable leading lady, and it’s clear why.
Unfortunately Jones the cat doesn’t get an IMDb mention. And he’s probably dead by now anyway.
They must have had a bit of trouble with him, as anyone who knows cats knows that his reactions
in the film are way off. But Jones is the only character that the Alien looked at and didn’t try
to kill. Show’s how intelligent the Alien is.
The Alien itself looks very good here. Stan Winston didn’t work on the first picture, but it gave
him something pretty polished to work with. There was no CGI in these days so for the most part
it’s a guy in a suit. This shows a little, but there are worse looking rip-offs of this creature
out there. The little chest buster looks pretty cheesy though. Ridley did a very good job of
showing the creature in bits, rather than standing there in all its glory for the whole film.
I think that's what makes Alien stand up so well. If he’d shown the critter all out from the
start it would have looked pretty bad.
The Nostromo is obviously a model of thrown together kits, much like Star Wars’ Star Destroyers.
And Ridley Scott rips Lucas off with the establishing shot of the ship itself. The sets themselves
look very warehouse-esque. It works for the most part, but I would love to know why Brett doesn’t
freak out when he finds it raining inside. You’re in a spaceship, that much leaking water should
worry you!
And finally the Alien ship itself. This is from an unknown species; the only representative of
which that is shown is dead. Geiger's design work here is stunning and the whole thing looks
very organic. It provides a stark contrast to the Nostromo’s pipes and fluorescent lights.
And that’s one of the things that dates Alien (and frankly all sci-fi from the early computer
age). My bedroom is more hi-tech than the Nostromo. Mother, the main computer, is a big room
with lots of flashing lights that serve no obvious purpose. The crew communicate with her via
a text interface that’s like the old “your in a forest” RPGs. And she has a similar amount of
dialogue. “Hi Mother how are you?” “Do not recognize ‘How’”. According to a book I read in
college when I was researching a paper on computer graphics in movie, Alien has the first
use of CGI. You know when the ship is landing and they have that terrain map? That’s apparently
the first time computer graphics were shown on screen. I don’t think that’s accurate (the Death
Star graphics in Star Wars were a year before) but it is early stuff. It’s not something that
Alien shouts about anyway.
Conclusion:
Aliens brought a nice twist to a genre that was relatively new, but basically it’s just another
slasher flick. It’s very pretty, and the acting is relatively decent, but it follows the same
formula. Maybe I’m just jaded by two decades of rip offs. It’s a great film, an all time classic
that everyone should see, but not something I would watch 100 times.
MacGyver Rating:
4 out of 5 Planets
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