Alien
Directed By: Ridley Scott
Written By: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shussett
Produced By: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Henry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Koto
Plot: When a Deep Space mining ship receives a signal from an unknown planet, they are completely unaware of the danger they have let themselves in for.
Originally, Alien was poorly recieved by critics, and religous zealots viewed this piece of horrific art, as work of the Devil. It isn't too hard to understand the reasoning behind this, as the Alien (or Xenomorph) slaughters the crew in an all manner of nasty ways. But, Ridley Scott has used a brilliant technique of not actually showing us the brutal deaths, but leaves it to our imagination. This makes the whole experience ten times scarier, some have even called it the "proto-type" for the slasher film genre.
The film has become infamous because of it's "chest burster" scene, which is both shocking, and quite disturbing, and is one of the greatest deaths in Cinema. The film is almost revenge on the string of 1970's films which had female characters sexually exploited by male monsters. The face-huggers method of implanting the eggs have been compared to male rape, this time by a terrifying monster with an almost "phallus"-like head.
The film is completely terrifying, and claustrophobic. The set is very dark and moody, with shadows covering everything, leaving many places for the horrifying monster to emerge. There are several moments throughout the feature where I truly felt terrified and almost helpless. In the 1970's, it was very rare to have a female antagonist (hero of the film) and Sigourney Weaver does a brilliant job of being the first female badass in film.
Eammon Jacobs
