Reed Alexander FINALLY reviews the greatest movie of all time 'Alien' (1979)

You may know that I occasionally do spoof reviews. Like my review of Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom (2015), where I jokingly explain why an intentionally bad movie is literally god's gift to cinema and modern culture. Here's the thing about my love for Alien (1979), I think it IS a gift to cinema and modern culture. No god required. I will die on the hill that this is the greatest movie of all time. Note, not the greatest horror movie, the greatest movie period. I love it that much.

This is actually one of the reasons I never reviewed Alien (1979), because I'd basically just be sucking Ridley Scott's dick the whole time. I am literally incapable of being remotely objective, and that's coming from a guy who doesn't even believe in objectivity. However, the 45th anniversary of Alien just came and went and this lucky little fellow JUST GOT TO SEE IT IN THEATERS FOR THE FIRST FUCKING TIME!!!!!!

So now I'm just gonna infodump and tell you WHY I love it so much. Prepare yourself.

SPOILERS!!!

Can we just fucking start with the god damn alien design? Why save the best for last? It was designed by motherfucking H. R. Giger. Half the damn set and the mutherfucking alien ship were designed by Giger. His works were so damn good, they pushed this movie into greatness. The xenomorph design is hands down, the greatest in practical FX, out of all rubber monsters. Even my favorite, Ol Drooly Pumpkinhead (1988) doesn't even come close. There has NEVER been a rubber monster that even looked close to as good. So damn good that COUNTLESS movies like Split Second (1992) and Creature (1985) tried to snatch that style. It's not just one of the most iconic designs in horror, it's one of the most iconic designs in cinema. People who don't know shit about horror still know the xenomorph. The creature alone carried the franchise.

But it doesn't end with just the Giger designs, even the shit he didn't have his hands on looked good. The ship design and sets were fucking incredible. It defined a style of sci-fi that stuck with that genre to this day. Super tech that looks like it came out of the 80s is now its own style, just like Flash Gordon defined a style. And don't even get me started on the sound FX and soundtrack. Spiders on violin strings was a sound that this movie basically made a staple in horror. It was all simply brilliant.

The plot itself is pretty simple. An intergalactic towing company gets a "destress signal" from a galactic system they're passing. This leads to the xenomorph getting aboard and killing the crew. That is the most basic creature feature concept. There is absolutely nothing particularly clever about it. However, everything that built up that plot gave it a depth that many creature features fail to come close to. Hidden in the general banter of the crew before the twist is revealed, you slowly begin to understand the world the crew lives in. They talk about shares, and regulations, like union workers arguing over pay and benefits. We learn about Waylan/Utani this way. The twist being that the company who hired this towing crew was willing to sacrifice them to capture a specimen of the xenomorph for its weapons research.

This is how we also discover that Ash, played by Ian Holm, is an android deployed by Waylan/Utani to assure the cooperation of the crew, even if it means killing decenters like Ellen Ripley, played by the one and only Sigourney Weaver. That also sets up the characters themselves. They're just blue-collar working slobs. This understanding really fleshes out all the characters. You begin to understand their behaviors and motivations clearly, just by a simple understanding of who they represent. So yes, the acting is, in one word, Amazing. It's so fleshed out it sets the standard for horror that few movies would ever be able to live up to.

And that's not even approaching the gestation of the Xenomorph which, in of itself, is fascination. First of all, the existence of the derelict alien spacecraft creates more fascinating questions than it answers. Why was the "Navigator" a part of the ship? Why was it carrying eggs? How did one of the face huggers get out and impregnate the Navigator? This is how we discover the biology of the Xenomorph. It starts out as a secondary organism which implats the primary organism into a living host. That is the first time, I think, that anyone had ever really created sexual reproduction that requires a secondary organism. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Slither (2006). The level of thought that went into the xenomorph reproduction is one of the things that makes Alien great sci-fi as well as great horror. It stands beside sci-fi classics like 2010: A Space Odyssey (1984).

There is a giant plot hole that I'm not even going to talk about. I want you to watch the movie and try to find it.

If you have never seen this movie, I don't care who you are or what genres you're into, you simply must watch it. Full stop.