Rid­ley Scott has a ten­dency to make really great movies that rede­fine par­tic­u­lar gen­res, but it’s even more rare when it’s done twice.

Alien (IMDB/Ama­zon) was the first movie that Rid­ley Scott made that rede­fined sci­ence fic­tion; the other, of course, is Blade Run­ner.

Alien takes place off of LV-426, described as a plan­e­toid only 1200 km wide, where the crew of the ill-fated Nos­tromo are wak­ened to respond to an repeat­ing, unknown sig­nal. What they find is that the sig­nal is not a dis­tress call for help, but instead is a warn­ing to stay the heck away. Despite that, crew mem­bers had dis­patched to the sur­face to dis­cover the source of the sig­nal, which ended up suck­ing itself onto the face of one of the crew in a spec­tac­u­larly scary scene: The Facehugger.

Break­ing quar­an­tine, the crew come onto the ship despite objec­tions from prob­a­bly the smartest crew mem­ber in the bunch who becomes the sole sur­vivor. The best and most clear advice came from the ship’s mechanic who said, “Why don’t you guys just freeze him?” about 30 times before we wit­ness one of the most bizarre and clas­sic scenes in sci-fi: The Chestburster.

After the lit­tle alien who birthed itself con­vinc­ingly from the crew member’s chest ran off, it quickly grew in size to over six-feet-tall; and at times walked like a slow-moving robot and other times like a really crafty hide-and-go-seek professional.

REALISM GRADE > WORLDS: A

The world of LV-426 was extremely real­is­tic. Nearly inhos­pitable, for­bod­ing and prob­a­bly the kind of rock you wouldn’t want to crash on. EVAR

REALISM GRADE > TECH: A

The tech in the movie was really great, but very very old school. The mon­i­tors had really crappy old graph­ics and had a com­mand line inter­face which was used to speak to Mother, the ship’s com­puter. And, hey Rid­ley, I hap­pened to notice that you used some of the graph­ics in Blade Run­ner in the Spin­ner, but I didn’t know this until I got a DVD player.

REALISM GRADE > ANDROIDS: A

One of the most inter­est­ing things about the movie is the unsus­pect­ing appear­ance of an android and he was done very well. Even after watch­ing the movie yes­ter­day again, I must admit that see­ing the guts of that android belayed some really well-thought out con­struc­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, the scene where his head was talk­ing was spliced hor­ri­bly, but an edit­ing fault shouldn’t degrade the sci­ence part.

REALISM GRADE > ALIENS: B

This alien, seen in three dif­fer­ent stages of a life cycle, had to be one of (if not the first) that really showed you this sort of growth. It was really, really impressive.

But I really have to knock off a point for the robot-walking alien which looked so fake and because that lit­tle clip was just so unnec­es­sary to the film. It could have been left out com­pletely and it would have built more sus­pense to see the alien later on and wouldn’t have avoided my expec­ta­tion that it would start pop­ping and locking.

REALISM GRADE > OVERALL: A

This film was just really fan­tas­tic. It is also one of most sus­pense­ful I’ve ever seen. Watch­ing the inter­ac­tion between the space-truckers is always fun and makes them human and you feel sorry for them. But it’s hard to guess who will sur­vive until the end and you don’t even know if any­one gets out alive. Very scary, indeed.

I give it an A.

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