Day 76: Alien (1979)

Movie #45 – Alien (1979) - 117 min, cert 15.

A deep space mining crew are brought out of hibernation early on their way home when their ship picks up a strange signal. They are duty bound by their contract to investigate such things, so they reluctantly do so. They follow the signal to a desolate, uninhabited planet where they find a crashed spaceship of unknown origin. A small landing party go inside and Kane (John Hurt) finds a large number of giant eggs laid out on one of the decks. While he’s examining it, a squid-like creature leaps out and attaches itself to his face. They bring him back on board and take him to sick bay where they discover that the creature has concentrated acid for blood, preventing them from cutting it off. Some time later, the creature falls off of its own accord, and Kane is apparently fine. But when they all sit down for a meal later on, Kane collapses and a vicious creature with sharp teeth bursts out of him and scuttles away. The crew try to hunt the alien down, but it picks the crew off one by one, while growing at a tremendous rate. Eventually, only Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is left to deal with it on her own.

This is a suspense movie, with quite a few horror elements thrown in. It is not what you’d call an action movie, unlike the various sequels that came along later. The pace of the film is quite slow, particularly to start with. It picks up some after the iconic ‘chest-bursting’ scene, but even then it’s more about creeping through dimly lit corridors expecting the alien to jump out from every shadow than blasting it with ray guns. At the end of the day, these crew members are not young, trigger-happy soldiers. They are older, mainly in their thirties, forties and fifties. Plus they are miners, engineers and scientists. They have not been employed for their combat skills.

This movie still has the power to shock, and keep you in suspense until the very end. The first of the sequels is probably a better than this (or maybe just more to my taste), but this is still good.

Score – 8/10

Next up is Amelie, the second foreign language film in the list after City of God. I don’t know much about it, but it doesn’t sound like my sort of film.