Alien

So uh... yeah. This movie. It was good, especially for its time. Around then, Star Wars was all the rage, but Alien ignores it for a view of space travel that is much more gritty and uninviting. The crew has to go into a frozen sleep because of the length of the journey, and the ship looks like it was made out of pieces of a refinery somewhere. It's kind of silly now that all of the computers lack anything close to modern interfaces (and even sillier that the sequels don't change it, I understand wanting to be consistent, but with the time passing between the movies there's plenty of justification for an upgrade), but it does contribute to the atmosphere. The movie is a slow burn, as plenty of time passes just establishing the crew and mission before anything goes wrong, and even when it does, it takes its time getting really bad.

There aren't many people left who don't know how the alien gets on the ship, although the entire sequence of events remain interesting and disturbing to watch. I can't say I got the same thrill when I knew exactly what was going to happen at certain points, but I still appreciated the craft at work. As I've said before, Ridley Scott is a man who knows how to shoot a scene. Once the alien gets loose in the ship it becomes more of a standard horror movie, with fake-out jump scares, bad decisions (Hey I know there's a monster on the ship trying to pick us off one by one but we just decided to go make you find the cat by yourself), and brief glimpses of the killer as it makes quick work of the people on board. The only disappointment was the alien itself. They went through great pains to make it not appear to be a man in a suit, but it's totally a man in a suit, and most of the kills are too quick and confusing to totally appreciate what's happening. By the end it's just Sigourney Weaver who remains, and she has a chance to creep around in her underwear for a bit before destroying the creature and the ship, and going back to sleep intact for a sequel. Scott originally wanted to kill her off in the end I think, but her character of Ripley is the one common thread through the series (besides the aliens obviously), and at least for a while it seems to have been a good decision.