In a undisclosed future year, a
deep space mining crew is woken up from hyper sleep to respond to a distress
signal, coming from a ancient alien ship. While in the ship, a crew member is
attacked by a alien parasite that attached itself to his face. When the captain
of the crew tried to remove the parasite from his face, it bleed acid which
meant that it could not be removed. Hours later, the parasite seemed to die on
its own and the crew member seemed fine. Unbeknownst to the crew, the parasite
had laid a egg in Kane’s throat and the egg violently hatched and the ‘larvae’
broke through Kane’s chest. After the larvae escaped, the crew went hunting for
it until a lone member of the crew found it after it had grown into a 6 foot
killing machine. The alien kills the remainder of the crew except for Ellen
Ripley, who attempts to blow up the ship to kill the Alien, only to have it
escape with her on the escape pod. She then lows it out through the airlock and
goes into hyper sleep, waiting to be picked up.
The use of the camera angles and
lighting were used so the audience never had a good view of the alien until the
very end of the movie in order to build suspense. You knew you were supposed to
be afraid of this….Thing but you never knew what exactly it looked like. You
had glimpses, a domed head, a second mouth set on a tongue, no eyes, a tail,
but you didn’t know. The background noises also set the mood. Clinking chains,
alarms, steaming pipes, dripping water; all set the viewer in a state of fear. The
film is a mixture of scifi and horror. At the time, when people thought of
space travel, they thought of pristine, shiny, white hallways and everything is
refined and pleasing to the eye. This film brought a realistic horror aspect by
making everything gritty and dirty, like a oil rig. The characters are trapped
on a dirty, dark space ship with no weapons except what they build, fighting to
against a monster that they don’t dare kill on the ship because it has acid for
blood. It challenged the idea of space travel and it made the Hero a woman,
which wasn’t often done back then. The movie has been parodied many times and
has had multiple sequels and crossovers. I greatly enjoyed the movie for its
dark atmosphere, the characters, the designs, and because I have always enjoyed
monster movies.
