Alien

What’s the Story?

The Nostromo, a cavernous and ill-lit interstellar mining ship, is manned by a miniscule crew of seven. They are awakened out of hibernation by an order from faraway Earth to investigate a mysterious distress signal on a dark and stormy planet. There the miners find a huge, grounded spaceship from an unknown civilization, with a long-dead alien pilot. A parasite, apparently the same type that took down the other craft, affixes to the face of a Nostromo crewman. After the crewman seems to recover, a hostile newborn alien bursts out of the doomed man's chest in front of the rest of the crew. The crew struggles to kill the fast-moving, fast-growing, unwelcome visitor before it gets them.

Is It Any Good?

Kids like scary movies. And being scary, in new and disturbing ways that hadn't been done before, was the mission of ALIEN. For a generation of moviegoers, Alien was a state-of-the-art shocker, even though it basically has a second-hand monster plot and characters that behave like cliched horror-movie victims, wandering alone in the dark or waiting like sitting ducks to be picked off. Alien did defy stereotypes of its time in the brilliant move of making the ultimate survivor a vulnerable-looking young woman, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who in the intense finale is literally paralyzed with terror, yet manages to fight back against the alien marauder.

The 25th-annivesary DVD of Alien includes a few minutes of restored footage of what the alien does with captured prey -- stuff that was once considered too grim for 1979, but no surprise for anyone who saw the sequel Aliens, or any of the later follow-ups. Most of the violence here, in fact, is suggested in quick edits rather than directly shown, just like the skittering, skeletal/serpentine alien parasite itself. While this once-shadowy monster species has since been exposed via inferior sequels, video games and comic books (even Superman battled them!) some of the best minds in cinema tried to ensure this movie would be a nightmare-inducer, and parents should keep that in mind. Small kids are better off with E.T. Adolescents Teens can take it for the thrill-ride that it is.