Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

For lovers of science fiction films the period starting with the release of "Star Wars" in 1977 was a golden age. There were lots of science fiction and Sci-Fi-esque films released around this time. Every summer there were three or four movies, memorable if not great, released to the public. Ridley Scott's "Alien" was a big part of this boom. It was an antithesis to the pack leader "Star Wars." Where "Star Wars" was brightly lit, "Alien" was dim. Where SW was action packed, "Alien" was packed with long stretches of tension-building. The bad guys in Lucas's film were human (or at least human-looking) with human motives, Scott's bug-monster was nightmare-ugly and alien. "Alien" and "Star Wars" have always been two Yin/Yang sides of the same coin in my mind.

If you've never seen it: Alien is set on board a starship, USCSS Nostromo, a commercial towing vessel dragging a load of hydrocarbons to Earth. The crew is made up of seven members (eight if you count Jones, the ship's cat). The Captain, Dallas (nobody in the movie has a first name) is played by Tom Skerritt. The First Officer is Kane (John Hurt). The ship's navigator is Lambert, played by Veronica Cartright (Remember the younger sister on the "Lost in Space" TV show? Veronica's her sister). The engineering crew is Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton of "Repo Man" fame.) The cast is rounded out by Ian Holm playing the laconic Science Officer Ash and Sigourney Weaver in her first big role as the Third Officer Ripley.

The Nostromo is a robot ship for most of it's voyage. The crew sleep in cryogenic freezer units and are awakened at the end of the trip...or in emergency situations. The ship's computer, MOTHER, does just that at the beginning of the movie. The ship has encountered an anonymous radio signal coming from a lifeless wind-blasted rock and they are required by their contracts to investigate it. After setting down on the planet Dallas, Lambert and Kane set out in spacesuits on foot to find out what's going on. At length they find a very weird alien ship and enter it. After descending through a hole in the floor, Kane finds...something.

That "something" is the mainspring of the story. The monsterous alien life-from, never given any proper name, is what we came for, audience and crew. It's a promethean thing, sometimes it's an egg, at other times a demonic hand, at others a...umm... male member... but usually it's a seven foot tall, jet-black, super-strong, unstoppable killing machine and it's on a mission to pick off the crew members one-by-one.

"Alien" has been compared to the old "haunted house" genera where a group of people are trapped in an old mansion and some unspecified nasty kills them off one at a time. It's also been compared to the work of horror fiction grey eminence H.P. Lovecraft. Neither of these comparisons is unfair. The Nostromo is dark, steamy, cluttered and labyrinthine. The alien monster is ugly, deeply alien and relentless, it occurred to me after I saw "Alien" the first time that Lovecraft would have been proud of the monster. With the exception of the last twenty minutes or so of the movie the action comes in brief, intense, violent spurts. This is very much for a horror movie that a space opera in the "Star Wars" mode.

This is the sophomore effort for director Ridley Scott. He had only one previous feature effort "The Duellists" under his belt before completing "Alien". Before that he did commercials and production design work. When you go to see one Scott's films you at least know it will look good. The cast was mostly unheralded as well, the biggest name in the crew was Skerritt (Weaver wasn't a big name yet).

The script was created by Dan O'Bannon and his friend Ron Shusett. O'Bannon was previously involved, along with John Carpenter in the cult favorite "Dark Star." "Alien" shares many characteristics with this low-budget classic. Just without the giggles and with more money. The alien monster itself was designed by Swiss Goth-Surrealist artist H.R. Giger. Giger is a sick dog, supposedly he made a chair out of his girlfriend's bones after she died. He's done artwork for The Dead Kennedys and Blondie. His work is dark, brooding, organic and, shall we say disturbing...? The monster in it's various forms never fails to shock and repel when first glimpsed. Scott and company have taken the principal that the less you see of the nasty creature, the more frightening it is. With the exception of the above-mentioned "hand form" we almost never get a decent long look at it.

The effects work varies from "still-pretty-decent-after-all-these-years" to "boy-that-looks-old". The spaceship effects looked pretty good back in the day but now strike you as a bit old-fashioned in a "2001" sort of way. The computer effects on the set pieces are especially elderly. Any monster movie rises or falls on it's creature effects. Make-up vet Carlo Rimbaldi Rambaldi manufactured the head of the adult monster and much attention was lavished on the rest of it's body. The alien was played by a Kenyan design student named Bolaji Badejo (sound it out). Badejo stands 7'2" tall (that's 2.18 meters for you metric types) and he's rail-thin. He's kind of a scary looking dude without the suit. The majority of the time you get to see very little him, though. There's plenty of blood and gore and goop and slime and so on, usually in quick flashes. This is not, however, a suitable movie for young kids.

Speaking of the sets, one reason everything looks so good on the good ship Nostromo is that the whole ship was assembled on a sound stage as one unit. The film was shot inside the set rather than on it. Somebody compared the shoot to filming inside a submarine.

The cast were largely left to themselves to develop their own performances. Weaver reports that Scott's sole direction to her during the whole shoot was one "interesting..." This approach worked fairly well, if a little unevenly. Generally only Cartright's Lambert comes off as shrill and annoying the others fit into their characters fairly well, one rather gets the impression they are playing themselves.

The version of "Alien" that I watched was from the "Alien Quadrilogy" box set and came with a voluminous extras disc which I will review separately, someday. I'll briefly mention the extras loaded on the movie disc. There are two versions of the movie, the theater cut as released in 1979 and an "expanded cut" with some deleted scenes restored. Scott avers in an introduction that he didn't feel there was anything wrong with the original cut and that the re-cut was done for historical reasons. He didn't say so in so many words but I got the impression that it was a commercial decision for the DVD set release. I generally agree that the scenes could be done without. (Except the Ripley-Lambert catfight, How could you leave that out? What the hell were you thinking, Ridley?). However it is nice to see them after hearing about them all these years. If you're a fan, you understand, if not you probably don't care anyway. It probably doesn't matter too much which version you watch if you're new to the movie, I would lean, just slightly, to the theatrical version for tyros. I'm not 100% if the stand-alone, non-DVD set editions out now include these extras or not.

One gripe, the audio commentary and sub-title menus don't work on my DVD software (PowerDVD) and if I want to turn one on or off it's necessary to quit and make the changes in the DVD set-up menu and then return to where I was in the movie. el-hassle-O Grande. The commentaries will be of interest more to fans and film student-types rather than new viewers.

If you're a monster movie fan or a old-fashioned haunted house movie fancier you're more than likely to enjoy this movie than not.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older