Movie Review: Alien (1979)

[Dave Gray]

Premise: A group of space miners is awoken from hypersleep, to repond to a distress call.  While investigating, one of the crew becomes host to an undiscovered species of alien, which runs free on their ship, and threatens to kill them all.

Rating: Very Good

I don't generally like Ridley Scott.  Even in this film, I think that it's well done, but his direction is sometimes irritating.  The print is so dreadfully dark, that you can't ever see anything.  I realize that it builds atmosphere, but I believe it goes a little overboard.  Several minutes pass at a time, where you can't tell what you're looking at.  Overall, though, the movie is very, very good.  They take themselves seriously and there are no corny one-liners, that plague movies of this type today.

I have two questions, though: SPOILERS

1) What ends up killing the parasite that was attached to the guy's face?  I believe they said that it died on its own, but then why was it crawling around on the ceiling....just dumb luck that Ripley was walking underneath it, when it keeled?

2) At the end, when Ripley blows the hatch in the escape ship to have the alien sucked out in to space, what re-seals the hull?  At the beginning of Aliens, a resuce team is shown cutting through the hull to get at Ripley.

[JVides]

) What ends up killing the parasite that was attached to the guy's face?  I believe they said that it died on its own, but then why was it crawling around on the ceiling....just dumb luck that Ripley was walking underneath it, when it keeled?

As I remember, the face huggers live long enough to deliver the egg (that eventually bursts from your chest) into their victims, then die.

2) At the end, when Ripley blows the hatch in the escape ship to have the alien sucked out in to space, what re-seals the hull?  At the beginning of Aliens, a resuce team is shown cutting through the hull to get at Ripley.

Doesn't she re-seal the airlock?  I'm not sure about this one. 

Great movie, especially since they couldn't show the alien much (special effects issues).

[GUATARICCAN]

I was always concerned about those milk spitting Androids.