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| Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt and Tom Skerritt in ALIEN Year: 1979 Rating: ****1/2 |
In the first act of Ridley Scott's science-fiction horror classic ALIEN, composer Jerry Goldsmith's otherwise meticulously taut score is optimistically adventurous when three of seven spaceship crew-members are investigating a planet that will lead to John Hurt getting the worst stomachache in the history of exploitation cinema...
He's even the first to awake from a cryogenic slumber, being one of two Janet Leigh PSYCHO-inspired characters — deliberately misleading the audience into thinking will be around much longer...
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Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm and Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN
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Reverse for Sigourney Weaver's final-girl Ripley... who's not in charge, a role belonging to Tom Skerritt's intrepid, logically-inclined Dallas... Yet she's the most professional and downright sensible, much to the subtle chagrin of who's technically most important character upon re-watching...
Ian Holm's Ash is the film's biggest secret, igniting the middle-twist by the time this mechanically slow-burn thriller turns into a frenzied final-act emergency situation that includes a lot of loud screaming and violent deaths...
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| Yaphet Kotto in ALIEN |
The first thanks (or no thanks) to former BIRDS child starlet Veronica Cartwright, whose entire purpose is to make everyone — from the audience to her fellow astronauts — more panicked and doomed than they'd be (or feel) otherwise...
Especially the bitterly caustic yet wholly likable, scene-stealing fan-favorite in Yaphet Kotto's Parker, who, along with Harry Dean Stanton, are the wage-seeking blue collar mechanics aboard this particular future's standard government vessel — more an interstellar garbage truck than the kind of exploration/star-cruising rescue-ship they're misled into becoming...
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| The baby Alien from ALIEN |
Bringing aboard the titular ALIEN, a sinister-quick, creature-feature spree-killer that takes out a relatively small band of people we get to know from the inside-out, literally in some cases... so everyone has a uniquely strategic and individualized life and death all their own...
Particularly (and most famously) John Hurt's Kane, in the alien-protruding-from-the-stomach interrupted-lunch-break that ALIEN is mostly known for, igniting a brutally bloody sequence that's never been equaled (only parodied) since...
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| Tom Skerritt (with Mother) in ALIEN |
Meanwhile, visually, mostly backed by gothic artist H.R. Giger's Kafkaesque steel-purgatory visuals, director Ridgey Scott borrowed the used future vision of George Lucas's epic yet sparsely basic, white-walled, digital-grid-monitored STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE...
Which progressed the groundbreaking special-effects from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY — that Scott atmospherically reverts back into his personal mentor (Kubrick's) claustrophobic tension: yet dealing with a far more lethal antagonist...
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| Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton and John Hurt in Alien |
Famously providing Sigourney Weaver not only a career-defining, strong-female role but an equal amount of importance to Tom Skerritt's otherwise capably stalwart leadership, making his fate that much more ill-timed and nightmarish — leaving the frantic last-half a frenzied aftermath of his own tragic (and suspensefully torturous) departure: becoming the second PSYCHO "too important to leave so soon" Janet Leigh character...
In a unique space thriller with so many twists and turns that, by the girl-verses-foe finale, we've already been put through the ringer, and beyond — making ALIEN (unlike any of its sequels) far more centered around the people than the creature.
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| Tom Skerritt in ALIEN |
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| Tom Skerritt and Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver, Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright in ALIEN |
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| Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Ian Holm and John Hurt in ALIEN |
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| John Hurt, Tom Skerritt and Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Tom Skerritt and Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Harry Dean Stanton in ALIEN |
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Harry Dean Stanton in ALIEN with Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright
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| Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt and Tom Skerritt in ALIEN |
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| Ian Holm in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN |
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| Harry Dean Stanton in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN |
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| Tom Skerritt in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN |
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| Tom Skerritt in ALIEN |
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| Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt in ALIEN |
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