ALIEN
Very likely, the best horror flick ever
I first saw Alien on prime-time TV in grade eight (1987, I believe). Actually, I saw it on French TV as a kid, but was about halfway through the grade eight viewing before I realized it was the same movie. When it was over, I was completely floored. My admiration of movies took on a whole new character that day; for about a year, I wore out the tape (that Beta tape) rewinding and watching numerous shots, exchanges, and moments again and again, often in slow motion.
I was a damn near obsessive fan up until I got out of high school in 1991. I found typing class to tiresome in having to repeatedly type random characters that I'd end up typing out lengthy exchanges in the film, committed to memory. My friends found my Alien monomania quite irritating, not that I cared in the least, because they were stoned all the time anyway. I had pictures cut from magazines and posters pasted up all around inside my locker (my locker partner just kinda disappeared after about a month). God help me, I even had three (three!) Alien T-shirts, although I learned rather quickly not to wear them in public. (lemme get this straight - it's okay to wear an INXS shirt, but not an Alien shirt?)
It wasn't just the effectiveness of the movie that so stirred me - it was the love of movies that it cemented in me. This changed the way I looked at movies; ALL movies. (the Star Wars movies would've done that for me earlier had I ever considered that they were, ultimately, just movies and not actually peeks into some alternate reality) This is what movies do at their best - they create a reality within themselves that viewers couldn't extract themselves from even if they wanted to. Whether or not it's "realistic" is beside the point - the movie convinces YOU if its reality.
The plot's simple enough; taking a cue from Dark Star and It! The Terror From Beyond Space, there's a nasty creature running around the starship Nostromo, and its skeleton crew of seven has to deal with it. (well, six. When it's born - oh, for chrissakes, it's not like you don't know what happened when it was born) Hell, it's basically just a slasher movie with a monster instead of a slasher. If we are to look at things in terms of plot or character, Alien comes out as nothing really special, with the exception of the revelation about 2/3 of the way through that one of the crew members isn't what he appears to be. But what kind of damn fool looks at a movie like Alien in terms of plot and character?
The movie's strength lies in both the harrowing terror that it can instill, and in the inescapable reality of what's shown onscreen. Responsible for this are director Ridley Scott and gremlin-like Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, who designed both the creature (all forms of it) and a whole lot of what they find on the planet where they pick it up. Together, they create this completely enveloping and convincing situation, the equal of which I don't think I've ever seen in any other horror movie. Jerry Goldsmith's incredibly frightening score tightens even more screws; even listening to it without the movie itself is scary as hell.
Sure, the characters are thin, but the actors all make a convincing lot of it, and they come across beautifully as an ensemble. Their concerns are their own, and entirely appropriate for each character; nobody might stand out as an individual, but as a group, all we see is a starship crew, and not a collection of actors. Alien is also notable for presenting the viewer with the then-novel notion of showing a starship crew as a bunch of working stiffs, and not a Star Trek-style science-military elite or a Star Wars-style technocratic operations machine.
Most famously excellent about this film, however, is the creature itself.
We of course don't get to see all that much of the movie in the film - the scariest monster movies never really show you that much. But what a unique menace this is, and so very distinctly male. What is the Alien, after all, but a nightmare version of a rapist? It impregnates you, sows its seed inside you whether you want it to or not, it has this long, phallic head with an intrusive, jawed tongue that penetrates you. Even though all the characters in the original script were written androgynously, to be played by either a male or a female, I don't think it's any coincidence that the only two women on the ship are the last two left alive after a while. Certainly the climax on the Narcissus shuttle strongly suggests this, as Ripley strips down to just what I liked to see her in while the creature waits and watches in hiding (so much as a creature without any apparent eyes can watch). There are even hints that the creature may have literally raped one crew member.
There have been movie monsters which have promised a fate worse than death, but rarely one quite like this (at least, not before 1979). Death is one thing; spawning a horror that will just bring more of it (and itself) is something else. Worse yet, one that wants to be born by punching right through your ribcage. We've seen this imitated about a zillion times since, never even remotely as skillfully as it was done here, not even in the film's admittedly mostly excellent sequels. It's been a sort of minor Hollywood urban legend that the cast had no idea what was going to happen during this scene - I find this quite unlikely, considering that we are shown footage in the Alien Legacy video of just how it was set up, and I very much doubt that the cast couldn't see this fake torso for John Hurt, or the guy with his arm in a sock puppet about to burst out through it. I think this is just an embellishment of how little the cast really knew about just how gruesome it was going to be.
I seem to remember widespread speculation on the nature of the creature before Aliens came out in 1986; people even took the notion of its changing form far enough to suggest that in order to weasel its way onto the shuttle, the alien shape-shifted into the cat! This is actually not entirely unlikely if we discount the sequels - the cat is not seen again after Ripley brings it in, and there is that very frightening shot (I say that as if this movie's not loaded to the gunnels with 'em) of the alien slavering over the abandoned cat in its box. What's that about?
And finally, one question, the closest thing to a problem I can really see in the film. The final line of Parker (Yaphet Kotto) sounds something like "Get it in the road!", but I've never been able to make out what he says, not after all these years, all these viewings. What the HELL does he say?
There was one scene omitted from the film which a lot of fans have historically clamored for; after watching it, I have to agree with Scott that it would seriously have thrown off the pacing of Ripley's flight to the Narcissus. It's the scene where Ripley comes across the cocooned bodies of Dallas (Tom Skerritt, the top-billed star, delightfully knocked off halfway through) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Dallas begs her to kill him, and she fries him after much sobbing. It's a great-looking scene, creepy as hell, and it works on its own, but it would not only have thrown off the pacing, but it may well have seriously altered Aliens history by suggesting a different life-cycle for the beast. Not only that, but Skerritt's voice is REALLY high in this scene and he just sounds silly.
The movie doesn't need to be tampered with. I've never seen a perfect movie, but Alien is just about as close as I can imagine.