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July 06, 2002
Alien
A trailblazer, but not as scary any more
Everyone knows the story, but anyway here goes. The crew of the mining ship Nostromo are awakened from cryogenic sleep to go and investigate a signal from a deserted planet. Whilst exploring, a creature (face hugger) attaches itself to John Hurt's face. Back on the ship it is eventually removed, but in probably the most famous SF/horror scene ever, a few hours later an alien (chest ripper) rips out through his chest and escapes into the ship.
Cue chasing around to get it, while it gets bigger and scarier and kills everyone except Sigourney Weaver ( Ripley ).
As the last survivor, she decides that the only option is to destroy the ship and use the escape capsule to get away herself. This just about works and she goes into cryogenic sleep waiting for her company to pick her up.
It's justly a classic, and spawned a whole industry not just with the Alien franchise of films, games and comics, but also with the whole outer-space horror film as successful money-spinner thing.
Even on DVD widescreen, with surround sound and the lights turned down, this fails to scare me now. Maybe I'm too familiar with it to let myself be scared, maybe the suspense doesn't work as I know exactly what is about to happen. I enjoyed HR Giger's designs a lot, and the performances are good, but I think that too little actually happens to keep me interested anymore, which is a shame, but there is always Aliens!
AE0, even counting the scene with Weaver in her pants.
Posted by se71 at July 6, 2002 10:58 AM
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