Director Ridley Scott's breakthough film, an immensely successful blend of horror and science fiction, is a classic in both genres and spawned a host of sequels and imitators. Starring Sigourney Weaver as warrant officer Ellen Ripley, ALIEN focuses on the crew of the space cargo ship Nostromo, which lands on a moribund planet in response to a faint SOS. Inside a crashed ship, the crew members come upon strange pods, one of which spews forth a repellently fleshy insectile creature that locks on to the face of the unlucky Kane (John Hurt). Despite Ripley's advice, science officer Ash (Ian Holm) allows Kane to return to the ship, where the creature finally releases its grip. Soon, however, in one of the film's most infamous scenes, one of its offspring explodes horribly from Kane's stomach and scurries away. Dallas (Tom Skerritt), the vessel's captain, leads the others in a search for the rapidly growing, acid-dripping alien before it can cut them down--one by one. A triumph of art direction, set design, and special effects, ALIEN gains much of its impact from the contrast between the bleak, antiseptic beauty of the space vessel's interior and the primordial horror of the alien, a brilliantly original fusion of insect, man, and machine designed by Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger. The top-notch cast also includes Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, and Harry Dean Stanton.
This revolutionary “haunted house in space” thrill-ride is the classic business, stunning you with shock after shock, even when the fascinating creature is exposed in all its hideous glory. The top-notch acting (super-astronaut Sigourney Weaver) and imaginative bio-mechanical production design (with the alien created by Swiss artist HR Giger) succeed in flattering a script culled from many cult sci-fi movies, including It! The Terror from beyond Space and Planet of the Vampires. There's also director Ridley Scott's eye for detail and brilliant way of alternating false scares with genuine jolts, which help to create a seamless blend of gothic horror and harrowing science fiction. The director's cut, released in 2003, boasts a remastered sound mix and sequences cut from the original — until now only available on the Alien DVD — including a much-discussed cocoon scene.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Ridley Scott took the standard ingredients of a horror movie set in an old dark house, shifted them to a new gleaming spaceship and created a deliberately scarifying and highly commercial shocker: On its own terms, a classic of suspense Ð and art directio
Variety
"...An old-fashioned scary movie set in a highly realistic sci-fi future, made all the more believable by the expert technical craftsmanship....[Weaver] carries it off well..."
Radio Times
Halliwell's Film Guide
