Alien

The Basic Plot in the Form of a Haiku:

My Basic Ramblings: Movies in the future always portray their surroundings as dingy, dirty, and in need of a real good scrubbing. Apparently the concept of Lysol and Scrubbing Bubbles got lost in the future somewhere.  This movie, however, has a legitimate reason - they're basically a big truck rig in space, haulin' space coal back to earth.

In quick order, we meet the seven crew members of the Nostromo. They are:

The spirit of exploration and common sense do not go hand-in-hand. Think about it. If you were on a mysterious planet, would you go traipsing around the surface, mucking around with weird eggs? Part of exploration is laughing in the face of danger; of saying "I'm not going to turn back!  I'm going to go out there and explore that thing!"

Sometimes, you end up like Columbus, and get a federal holiday and a few movies made about you. Sometimes you end up like Kane and get implanted with an evil chest-bursting alien thingy.

Soon the crew is running around nilly-willy trying to trap the evil chest-bursting alien thingy. And here's where I begin to have questions.

When the motion detectors are first used (I forget who created them; Ash, maybe?), it is explained that they are activated by changes in air density. That's fine, makes sense, understandable. But wouldn't the motion detectors be rendered useless by holding one while walking? Wouldn't the change in the density of the air pushing against the detector because you're walking set it off?  Anyone taken Physics less than seven years ago who can help me on this one?

Here's another question: Ripley tells Parker and Lambert to gather as many coolant tanks as they can, for the shuttle, right?  So while Ripley prepares the shuttle and traipses off on her little Capture the Jonesy Adventure, Parker and Lambert are furiously whipping coolant cartridges out of storage. Then, of course, they meet up with Mr. E. Chest-Bursting Alien Thingy and, well, their screen time ends there. But later, Ripley is able to survive in the shuttle without any of the coolant tanks Parker and Lambert were supposed to get.  So why did Ripley tell them to go get them?

Then there's the whole thing with the cat, Jones. Now, I am a cat person.  Always have been, always will be. My family got our first cat, Phoebe, when I was in kindergarten; she died my senior year of college. Maybe a year after that, my folks practically yanked our second cat, Hannah, from death's door. My sister and brother-in-law have two adorable cats, Danny and Blossom. My mother-in-law has three, Zeus, Apollo and Tiffany. They're all wonderful creatures and I think they're great. But, if I'm just about to escape a spaceship that is presently inhabited by the aforementioned evil chest-bursting alien thing, and over the loudspeaker I hear one of the cats meowing, lo siento, but I'm going to keep going. The cat would probably have a better chance of survival than the evil chest-bursting alien thingy, anyway - it could sneak into tiny little places. (Except if you blow up the ship. Then, the cat and the evil chest-bursting alien thingy would probably have the same chances of survival.)

Anyway, all goofy little questions aside, I'm kind of bummed that I'm seeing the film now, twenty years after its initial release. Not because the movie doesn't hold up well over time, it does, but rather for two reasons.

1.  I'm seeing the movie after I know everything that happens. Even if I hadn't seen Alien: Resurrection, I would've known lots about the movie (and the series, in general) from hearing other people discuss it, from watching commercials for the sequels. I knew Sigourney Weaver's character lives. I know the alien's gonna jump out of the guy's chest. I knew about the face-huggers. There's no real suspense. It's not a matter of Oh, what's going to happen next?, but rather When in the movie does X happen?

2.  I saw the movie from a 1999 societal standpoint, not a 1979 one. Replace the spaceship with a summer camp, the alien with a knife-wielding psycho, and you've got a fairly standard slasher flick. The characters split up when they should stay together, one character runs back for something and is almost killed for her efforts, the evil presence returns for one more battle when you think it's gone, the last surviving cast member is female. Pretty standard stuff these days.

But when this movie was released, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street and all their derivative spin-offs hadn't been filmed yet.  The plot was still new; it hadn't been yanked apart by Kevin Williamson and his I Don't Care What You Did Last Guy Fawkes' Day ilk.