Short Film Review: Alien

Man, where is the bathroom in this place? Hmm… I’ll just use one of those pod-looking things over there. Hey Ripley, can you send down some Charmin?

**** Ripley’s Words of Wisdom****

Ripley: Wait a minute, if we let it in the ship, we’ll all be infected. You know the quarantine procedure- 24 hours for decontamination.

Dallas: He could die in 24 hours. Open the hatch.

Ripley: Listen to me. If we break quarantine, we could all die.

Lambert: Will you open the God*#%ned hatch! We have to get him on the ship.

Ripley: NO.

In 1979, Ridley Scott brought horror into the science fiction world with Alien. The film started a trend that still appears as a storyline in today’s films. That storyline is: It’s fun to watch aliens terrorize people on a damaged spaceship.

Why is the ship always damaged? Every killer alien running-amok movie includes an asteroid impact, crash landing, exploding planet, or Oh heck, the space geese just flew into the air vents in its screenplay.

In Alien, the crew, who failed their planet landing exams, execute a clumsy landing that breaches the ship’s hull. They don’t precisely crash the ship, but they land it hard like they’re a couple of driver’s ed rejects.

Just once, Hollywood writers, I want to see a violent alien ravaging humans on a perfect, healthy ship.

The engines will not fail, the oxygen levels will always remain normal, the crew will not contract a foodborne illness from the blue food, and everyone on the ship will sing Jim Croce songs until a murderous E.T. rips them apart.

Is that too much to ask?

All petty bickering aside, Alien is a great film and one of the best in the horror/science fiction category. Sometimes, the movie feels like an old monster flick, but Boris Karloff never had an alien parasite smash through his chest.

Alien involves a group of miners heading back to earth. The ship automatically changes course when it intercepts a distress signal, and the ship’s computer revives the crew from cryo-sleep.

When the crew land on a dismal planet, they move out in search of the signal’s origin. Instead of finding people in distress, they find a downed ship.

Kane, played by John Hurt, strolls around in his spacesuit and falls off a platform. When he gets up, he’s surrounded by several large, grimy pods.

The alien pods look like enormous avocados. Kane, for some reason, is fascinated by the pods and wants to take a closer look. Even when the pod slowly opens from the top and gurgles at Kane, the genius moves his head closer to the opening.

The gurgling increases, and an alien that looks like a combination of a crab and a scorpion springs onto Kane’s helmet. It’s a scene that’s intended to make you jump, and it does. It scarred the heck out of me when I was a kid.

Young Ripley… look into the light!

One night, in a hotel room in Pell City, Alabama, in 1981, I tried to watch Alien while I pretended to be asleep. My family was traveling to Texas, and we stopped in Alabama at the halfway point.

I remember my Dad telling me to go to sleep when he saw me watching the beginning of Alien. He didn’t change the channel. He sat on the other bed and watched the movie while I practiced my best impression of an obedient, sleeping six-year-old.

Telling a young kid, not to watch a movie with spaceships, aliens, and Sigourney Weaver is like asking Lenny the arsonist to burn with care when you hand him a flame thrower at a paper factory.

I watched the first space shuttle launch from a television wheeled in by my kindergarten teacher. Of course, I wanted to watch an R-rated killer alien movie.

However, my tolerance for horror and gore was at a low point when I was six. When the alien attacks Kane, I gave up trying to watch the movie and settled for viewing it in my nightmares that night.

Until the alien makes an appearance, Alien is slower-paced, but the last half of the film is a marathon of suspense and terror. There is a lot of running, sweating, alien drool, loud alarms, flashing lights, and milky android vomit.

If you want to take your mind off of the current state of gloom, try watching films where people deal with unbelievably horrible situations like Alien. It always makes me feel better.

Absurd comedies can also take your mind off of things, and another option is the American DaVinci, Bob Ross. Horror, comedy, or a brilliant artist with a huge afro. Take your pick. All three are distracting.