Review of Alien³ (1992) by Henrysmovieguide C — 26 Nov 2017

Alien (1979) Movie Review.

If you really think about it, the original Alien movie is about as complex of a storyline as Halloween or Vacation. All it is is a big scary alien on a spaceship killing people. And it's done so well that I might even like it more than its fantastic sequel, Aliens. So in case you haven't seen Alien, here is the basic synopsis. In deep space, the ship Nostromo gets a distress call from an unknown planet. They get to the planet and find hundreds of alien eggs. Kane (John Hurt), one of the ship's mechanics, is attacked by the creature that hatches from one of the eggs. The crew figures out that the distress call they received was actually a warning. They flee the planet and start to investigate the extraterrestrial life form attached to Kane's head, called a facehugger. Eventually the crew freezes the facehugger off of Kane and everything returns to normal. But at breakfast that day, Kane dies in what is possibly one of the most memorable death scenes in any movie ever when another alien, called the chestburster, aptly bursts out of his chest. The chestburster scurries off into the depths of the ship, and the crew is left with no choice but to track it down. Soon enough they realize that the alien has evolved and is picking them off one by one. Needless to say, Alien is truly amazing. The special and practical effects are both spectacular, especially for the time. I also must add that the costume work on both the crew members' uniforms and the xenomorph (the titular alien) in particular are excellent. I'm trying not to run out of synonyms to great: I've already used fantastic, excellent, spectacular, and amazing. Next up is incredible I think. Ridley Scott's direction of the movie is incredible. The lighting and suspense add to the overall horror vibe of Alien, which is something Aliens lacks. I mean, Aliens is good and all, but to be honest, it's really not that scary. Alien is scary. The xenomorph is terrifying, far more menacing than the Yautja of the Predator series. And the constant sequences of suspense and then jump scares are great because they never let you breath. Even the first half of the movie, which has close to zero scares, is chilling because you just know that awful things are going to happen to these people. If you watch other confined horror movies like the other Alien movies, Predator, or The Thing, then you know that the fact that it is set in a claustrophobic place makes it scarier. Sure, you feel it in those movies. But while I was watching Alien, I REALLY felt the whole "closed in" thing. There's really nowhere to hide. In Predator, the jungle is a pretty big place, so I guess you can kind of move around. In The Thing, you can always just go outside, but you'd probably freeze to death. In Aliens, there's the ship, and the planet, and all of those places. But in Alien, it's just the ship and that's it. There's no escape (don't even bring up the escape pod because I don't really want to rewrite all of those sentences). I thought that almost all of the actors in this movie did a great job. Especially Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm as Ripley and Ash. For some reason I felt like Ash wasn't a good name for Ian Holm's character. Ash is a name for a generic teenage boy or a grumpy dog or some mythical action hero. Not a snobby English android. Ash just doesn't seem like an Ash. At first, you can't really tell who the main character is. So great.