Just watched all four Alien movies in the last two days...
Edit: I just noticed that the egg on the poster is not at all the eggs from the movies.
Alien
Admittedly, I was pretty high when I watched this, so that may account for how awesome the movie was. I'd only actually ever seen it once, and that was this year, so this is still a pretty new movie to me.
So many things I noticed that just made it cool as hell.
*spoilers*
Like, there's always some kind of sustained noise, going from the opening credits, to the very end, that just makes the whole movie feel tense ALL THE TIME. Often it's pretty ambient: sometimes it's just music, sometimes it's the quiet hum of the ship's engines, or maybe beeps from electronic equipment.
But other times it's more in the forefront, which really ups the tension: the sound of the motion tracker... I was high, so I forget some things.
All this really primes you to jump when something happens. Each jump scare (like when the facehugger leaps from the egg, or the alien grabs Dallas in the ventilation shaft) is accompanied by a very sudden, very loud noise that honestly startles me far more than the jump scare itself.
In one particular scene, these two ideas (sustained, ambient sound and sudden, loud noises) are combined in the most ****ed up part of the movie. Ya know what I'm talking about, when the alien impales the girl on its tale and then it cuts to Ripley running down a hallway while the victim's screams on the intercom just go on and on and on.
I'm finding that noise is far more terrifying in movies than visuals, and often times even more than my own imagination, and
Alien is just brilliant at this.
My only real complaint about the movie (besides some of the dated acting) is that after the chestburster scene, the movie slightly drops in quality. The first half or so is more sci fi than horror, and it's just one of the best sci fi movies I've ever seen. From the human and alien ship designs, to the egg chamber, to the scientific way the crew investigates the facehugger once it's on that guy's face, everything is just so imaginative and engrossing.
But once the story becomes about the alien trying to kill everybody, it basically just turns into a very high quality creature feature. Also, the tension of the movie loses a little steam once the **** hits the fan, since the thing that we were waiting the whole movie to happen is finally happening. Still a great last half, but just not as much as the first.
One thing I do appreciate about the latter half of the movie though, is that most horror movies that don't suck rarely show the monster. In this movie however, while the alien's appearances are relatively few and deliberate, it isn't half-shown when the time comes. You get to see it in all its glory. Generally, most of those movies that don't show the monster do so because the audience's imaginations are far more terrifying than actually showing the monster, whereas in
Alien the monster has been designed by someone whose imagination can conjure images far more disturbing than anything we could ever hope to come up with.
So **** subtlety I guess.
Another thing that I love about
Alien is just how helpless the crew is at all times. They're woken up by a machine, have to go down to the planet's surface due to company policy, and obviously can do **** all against an alien murder machine. Ripley is even largely helpless during the end sequence: at any time the alien could have killed her, but it just decided it wanted to play with its prey, miraculously giving Ripley the time to actually do something about it.
And one of the few times the crew is trying to make an actual decision -- when Ripley and Dallas are arguing about letting the infected crewman on board -- the decision is made for them by a robot following company orders.
One last thing I'll mention before going (I'd say stuff about the other three movies, but I'm ****ing lazy and this post is long enough.) This is some quality nightmare fuel as far as I'm concerned: it's well observed that the alien toys with its victims, taking pleasure in killing; it could be seen as cheap that a creature like the alien would have any motivation other than instinct, but when you think about how organisms are motivated to do certain things by instinctual stimuli, it's usually by making the action pleasurable (eating, sex, etc).
So, it can be argued that in order to make the alien so hyper-aggressive, whatever passes for its biology has basically turned it into a sexual sadist, hungry for murder. I hear Ridley Scott has said that the aliens are a metaphor for rape (I shouldn't have explain why), which makes that tail impalement scene almost literally a rape scene -- especially when you consider just where that tail may very well have entered her body.
Definitely the best movie in the franchise.