Alien

Note: This review basically spoils the film.

I confess I only recently saw "Alien" for the first time.  This is because I am a complete wimp when it comes to horror movies.

The good news about "Alien" was that it wasn't very scary.  The bad news about "Alien" was that it wasn't very scary.

First off, credit where it's due: director Ridley Scott does a nice job of setting the mood.  At the movie's outset, the camera slowly pans through our heroes' ship, the Nostromo, while they sleep.  We also get plenty of shots of the Nostromo drifting along, emphasizing the cold silence of space.  This is a film that shows uncommon patience.

But patience only works if there's a payoff, and that's rather lacking here.  Much to my surprise, for a movie that features a killing machine with razor sharp teeth and a terrifyingly huge head, most of the scares in the film are more gross-out shots than actual shocks.  Some of the blame probably goes to the clearly limited effects budget for the film.  But that's no excuse: as the "Paranormal Activity" films have shown, you can get plenty of scares just by playing on the audience's imagination.

Plot-wise, the movie lost me when it was revealed that Ash, the officer who orders that the alien be brought back to Earth regardless of the loss of the crew's lives, is actually an android created by the company that employs the heroes.  The reveal happens after we see him sweating a white goo.  The crew are able to take him apart, but before he shuts off he tells them that they "have [his] sympathies."

Where to start?  If the company wants to bring back an alien and can create an android that does everything a human can, why not just send four or five of those out into space?  Why would they build a robot that sweats white goo?  Seems like a major design flaw.  And since when do machines have "sympathies"?

Admittedly, part of the problem with "Alien" is context.  The tricks of horror movies have become so familiar in the past thirty years that this one's seem tame.  In addition, the film's most famous scene--in which the alien bursts out of John Hurt's stomach--was parodied so effectively in "Spaceballs" that it's lost most of its power.  Finally, the fact that Sigourney Weaver starred in three sequels to this film makes her final scene with the alien (which she partly does in her undies, for a little gratuitous T&A) pretty anticlimactic.

But a great movie should hold up regardless of when you see it.  "Jaws," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Shining"; all still have the power to shock more than three decades later.  "Alien" is just disgusting.