Ridley Scott's Alien started life as a Roger Corman B-movie and almost was until 20th Century Fox showed interest.
Fortunately, what came about is basically a haunted house horror film, but set in space. The haunted house being the starship tug, Nostromo.
On their way home to Earth, the 7 crew members of the Nostromo are wakened early from their hypersleep to answer a distress signal from a nearby planet. A team is dispatched to find the source of the signal and it turns out to be an alien ship full of eggs. Don't go near those eggs, John Hurt! Oh...too late!
There are many things that make this film brilliant.
The acting is great. Very studied characters. Sigourney Weaver, in her first starring movie role, shows Ripley to be this woman who takes no shit and gets things done, yet still shows her fragility, All the other characters have their function to play. Tom Skeritt's Captain Dallas is the straight guy, a bit brow beaten and sick of this shit; Yaphet Kotto is the alpha male; Harry Dean Stanton is the light relief; Ian Holm is the spanner-in-the-works ice-cold psycho and Veronica Cartwright holds the audience viewpoint and reaction.
Apparently, the famous chest bursting scene was secretly done. Though the actors knew what was going on,they didn't know the scale of it and those shocked reactions are quite genuine. Poor Cartwright getting hosed down by a couple of litres of blood is particularly genuine terror!
H R Gieger's alien design is extraordinarily beautiful and terrifying. Basically the perfect killing machine. Scott's shooting of the alien is masterful, keeping everything close to the details of the thing, but never really revealing it all, thus letting the audience's imagination do the work. It also means there is no man in a rubber suit running about. This way the design is never dated and it still stands up today in it's look.
A true sci-fi classic.
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