The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I can't say that I was super-excited for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  Part of it had to do with my work schedule at the time I saw it --- a 12:01AM opening day showing during a time where I worked long and early hours every day --- and part of it had to do with the fact that I grew up with The Lord of the Rings books before I ever got around to The Hobbit.  While The Hobbit is charming and fun, it's not epic awesomeness.   Still, An Unexpected Journey was being made by the same people who made the excellent LotR trilogy, so there should be little to worry about, aside from a hilarious dose of homosexual undertones, right?  I was a little uneasy, though.  The Hobbit is not a particularly long book, and yet An Unexpected Journey is only the first part of a Hobbit trilogy, while the significantly larger The Lord of the Rings books were barely squeezed into one (very long) film each.  Doesn't it feel like Peter Jackson is milking this one a little too much?

In this prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we follow the young Bilbo Baggins (played by Martin Freeman here and Ian Holm in LotR) as he is enticed by a wizard, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), to embark on a dangerous adventure.  The goal is to help a clan of dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), reclaim the home of their ancestors.  Why does it need reclaiming?  Well, dwarves like to mine riches from the earth.  Dragons apparently like riches, too.  When the wealth of Thorin's granddaddy became well-known, a dragon decided to move in and fricassee anyone who interrupted his enjoyment of his ill-gotten riches.

Artist interpretation

Of course, they're not going to take on a dragon all alone.  To go along with Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin are a lot of other dwarves.  In case the preview didn't illustrate that point to you, here's an alternate movie poster:

Which one of them is the hobbit?

Bilbo isn't really built for adventuring; he's a hobbit, which means he is small and inexperienced with weapons and the dangers that fill Middle-Earth.  He's not ready to face trolls, orcs, or goblins, much less a dragon that could frighten battle-happy dwarves --- and he may never be ready.  This is the tale of Bilbo's struggles to find his place in the group and in the world outside of his home in Hobbiton.  Of course, something else important happens in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Bilbo finds that ring that everyone made such a fuss about in those other three hobbit-ish films.

The acting in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is good, but this isn't really a movie built around individual performances.  Martin Freeman plays a wonderful everyman, so casting him as the very suburban Bilbo was a good choice that paid off well.  As the audience's POV character, he did a good job being confused and frightened for the audience, and I thought he conveyed his character's emotional journey rather well.  Ian McKellen was good as Gandalf the Grey; he's obviously familiar with the part, but I liked that he was a little more temperamental and less wise in this film.  Of the dwarves, Richard Armitage was by far the most impressive; it helps that he got to play a bad-ass and didn't have to wear goofy facial prosthetics, but Armitage was awfully good at brooding, too.

***Glower***

Ken Stott was the next most interesting dwarf, as the white-bearded right hand to Thorin.  He didn't really do anything terribly cool, but he turned in one of the better acting performances in this series simply through his dialogue. 

Stott was so good that I almost never laughed at the Cousin It under his nose

Oddly enough, those two cover most of the acting amongst the thirteen dwarf characters.  You can argue that James Nesbitt had a few solid moments, or that Aidan Turner stuck out (if only because he looked like the heartthrob of the group), but they didn't really have much to do.  The rest of the dwarves made little to no impression at all.  A lot of actors from LotR came back for small parts, and they were all fine.  Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee showed up, said a few lines, and were gone again.  Andy Serkis reprised his role as Gollum and he was excellent.  Serkis really does a great job every time he puts on a motion capture suit, and I hope he one day gets some recognition for the pioneering work he's doing (fun fact: Serkis also served as a second unit director on these movies).  He doesn't steal the film, like he did in The Two Towers, but that's mainly due to screen time.  Note to Peter Jackson: there's always more room in the script for Gollum.

He's like Jell-O in that way

The only other actor worth mentioning is former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, who got to play Radagast, the batty wizard that was apparently named by a twelve year-old in 1992.  McCoy did a solid job with a goofy character, almost to the point where I forgot about the fake bird poop on his face.

Almost

The special effects were as stellar as you would expect from this series of films and these filmmakers.  It kind of sucks that this movie revisits so many things that we've seen before in Middle-Earth, because it gives a bit of a "been there, seen that" feel to the film.  Even with that in mind, the sets --- particularly the ancestral dwarf home --- are all awesome.  The CGI was excellent, even in the large battle scenes that clearly didn't have the actual actors fighting in them.  I wasn't a big fan of the makeup on the dwarves, though.  Too many just looked silly, even if they are faithful to how Tolkien wrote them.  It's not a big deal, in the big scheme of things, but it irritated me that there were bad guys who looked dirty and creepy...

...and then there would be good guys who looked like complete cartoon characters.

This is actually one of the better-looking dwarves

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit.  As far as his co-writing credit goes (the script was basically done by him and his partner, Fran Walsh), I was impressed that An Unexpected Journey felt like a complete story.  Bilbo and Thorin had decently crafted character arcs, there was a natural ending point, and there was no cliffhanger ending.  That's tough to do with source material that originally had only 310 pages --- and keep in mind that two more movies are on their way from that same material.  I have no idea what the next two films will contain, but I'm alright with the contents of this one.  If you're wondering where the hell Jackson and co. found the rest of the material to pad this story enough to get three movies out of it, that was touched on a bit in this interview Peter Jackson had on The Colbert Report:

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As a director, I was a little less pleased with Peter Jackson.  The tale was definitely told competently.  The movie looked absolutely gorgeous, and the pacing was brisk; while my mind keeps telling me that this story was stretched out, it didn't feel that way when I was watching it.  I wasn't a huge fan of the action sequences; without someone awesome to focus on (like Legolas in LotR), I was faced with a bunch of characters I didn't really care much about in situations that didn't seem all that dire.  Admittedly, part of that impression is due to the fact that this movie looks so much like the Lord of the Rings movies that it suffers when you compare them by scale --- having fifteen good guys fighting a handful of orcs pales in comparison to the odds faced in LotR.  But the problems are not just by comparison.  Less than a third of this cast was fleshed out at all, so their survival meant little to me. 

I only cared about the guy who isn't attending a rap-metal show at the Renaissance fair

That's on Jackson.  There is no excuse to have all these characters left undeveloped, especially when there are three movies to fill.  Another option would be to imply how unimportant some of them are, but each one has enough quirkiness to make the viewer wonder about them.  This movie also suffered a bit from a lack of truly stellar bad guys.  The goblin king was kind of gross, but he struck me as more of a bloated tumor than a credible threat.

He has a tumor the size of a grapefruit an obese cave dweller

The albino orc looked fairly cool, but he didn't get the chance to actually do anything cool.  He just posed and growled.  He was so underwhelming that the top Google image hits for him are either blurry or behind-the-scenes shots.

This was the best pic I could find of Azog, the Defiler.  I mean "best" in every way possible.

Sure, Gollum was awesome (again), but he A) wasn't the primary threat B) only threatened Bilbo and C) obviously survived, along with Bilbo, because they are both in The Lord of the Rings. 

My biggest complaint with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, though, is with its tone.  This story is not as epic as LotR, but it is being presented in the same way.  As Stephen Colbert pointed out, Tolkien tried to go back and write an epic version of The Hobbit, but was later convinced that it was a bad idea.  It seems odd that the filmmakers would make the same mistake.  There's enough grandiosity in Middle-Earth to make this an epic tale, I suppose, but it just doesn't seem like the right fit.

It troubles Gandalf, too

I guess the easiest way to sum this movie up is to say that An Unexpected Journey is missing a lot of the charm that I expected to find, going into the movie.  That doesn't mean that it is a bad movie, by any means.  It's just not what I expected or, really, wanted in a film adaptation of The Hobbit.  It is still a good movie and totally worth seeing.  There is a lot to like here.  In fact, there is just under three hours of movie to like here (and we have six more hours on the way!).  It's just not as overwhelmingly, jaw-droppingly fantastic as the Lord of the Rings movies were.  I think that is because this feels like a continuation of those films, instead of a new trilogy with its own identity.  Hopefully, the sequels will course-correct that a little.

A quick aside on the format of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:  I have now seen this film in the standard 24 frames per second and in 3D 48 frames per second.  The former was a much better experience for me.  The 3D was fine when I saw it on opening night, but the action scenes looked terrible.  However, my experience doesn't match up with any of the other complaints I've read online regarding the 48 fps presentation.  Instead of looking like a video game, or looking "too real," or looking like the ClearMotion option on a Samsung TV, all the action looked like it was sped up.  It felt like I was watching something out of the silent movie era, or at least an action scene from an early James Bond movie.  My assumption is that someone played the 48 fps version of the movie at 24 fps (because that's how fast-motion scenes are conveyed in those other examples).  If you have a better theory, I'd love to hear it. 

Bless the Child

31 Days of Horror: Day 2

There are three important things you can take from the promotional poster for Bless the Child.  First and foremost, there is a "child" that "just turned six," so we have a horror movie with a child actor.  Not necessarily a bad sign, but worth noting.  Second, the word "bless" and the upside-down(-ish) crucifix of light imply that this is a story that will deal with Christian (probably Catholic) beliefs.  That means demons, the devil and/or possession; given the large number of crappy possession movies out there, that should set off a warning light.  Finally, the tagline "Mankind's last hope just turned six" tells us that the advertising team did not have anything cool in the script to draw from.  To put that in perspective, Leprechaun: In the Hood has the tagline "Evil's in the house."  I think it's safe to say that this is going to be a rough one to watch.

Bless the Child begins with Maggie (Kim Basinger) coming home after a long day of nurse work.  Waiting on her front stoop, though, is a bum. Maggie does her best to shoo the bum away, but it turns out that the bum is actually her sister, Jenna (Angela Bettis)!  Jenna has always been the black sheep of the family, and it's been years since the two have seen each other.  So, Jenna, how're you doing?

Yeesh.  Not so well, it seems.  The titular child that needs blessing happens to be Jenna's.  Jenna appears to be homeless and jobless, with a heroin habit and a brand-new baby from an unknown father.  On the other hand, it looks like she lost the baby weight ridiculously fast.  Well, that's heroin for you.  After some clumsy exposition where the two family members make sure to explain their motives and history out loud to each other, Jenna shouts "not it" (not really) and scrambles out into the streets, leaving Maggie to raise the infant on her own (really).  Fast-forward a few years and the infant is now Cody (Holliston Coleman), a six-year-old autistic child.  And if you've seen enough movies, then you know that "autistic" is interchangeable with "unique."  In Cody's case, she is able to do all sorts of cool stuff, like spin things with her mind and raise the dead.  Oddly enough, adults seem oblivious to these talents, probably because they're common symptoms of autism.  Maggie only appears to be impressed with Cody's ability to chase away her boyfriends.

"I know you look like Kim Basinger and all, but women who care about kids are a major turn-off.  Later."

Meanwhile, local police have been baffled by a number of child murders in the area.  An FBI occult expert, Agent Travis (Jimmy Smits), believes that the murders have been made in a ritualistic, Satan-worshiping kind of way.  But why?  And how are they getting all these six-year-old kids?

"Hey kid, do you want a nice, warm bowl of murder?"

That is when Jenna shows up again, cleaned up and with a rich husband in tow.  Her husband, Eric (Rufus Sewell), is the multimillionaire leader of a child outreach group/satanic cult, which doesn't sound like it should be a lucrative profession.

"Most of my money comes from pleasuring hobos"

Jenna and Eric want custody of Cody.  But Cody doesn't even know them, much less trust them or feel safe around them.  Eric gives Maggie an ultimatum --- if she fights them, he will crush her in court.  But if she considers giving them custody, they will steal away Cody when she's not looking.  They're tough negotiators.  Why do Jenna and Eric want Cody so badly, all of a sudden?  What's the deal with all the dead kids?  Is it important that Cody has the same birthday as them?  And why does Cody appear to have super-spinning powers?  Let's just say that someone born on that particular day, six years ago, might be a child of God.  Does that clear everything up?  No?  Tough.

Basinger, after the script hit her on the head with Christ parallels

The acting in Bless the Child should, for the most part, be varnished to keep it from harm while you try to destroy your copy of the movie.  Kim Basinger is bland, at best, in the lead role. It almost feels like she doesn't understand English, and she just memorized her lines phonetically; she would say "we're out of milk" with the same emphasis as "a naked man is wearing a horse carcass in my bathroom."  Maybe she thought her character was unfamiliar with the concept of human emotions, or maybe Basinger is a bad actress.  Rufus Sewell, who typically relishes villain roles, isn't much better.  His problem is that his character is supposed to be evil, and Sewell sleepwalks through the scenes where he is killing and drugging folks.  He puts most of his effort into the scenes where he tries (and fails) to out-argue a six-year-old.  As far as evil goes, that's some pretty minor league stuff, Mr. Movie Villain.  Jimmy Smits is actually okay, but I question the likelihood of a single FBI agent having the freedom to follow whatever cases he likes.  What is this, The X-Files?  Christina Ricci also makes a brief appearance as a former cult member.  She gives the best performance in the movie, and she isn't even that impressive.  She just spoke like a rational person.

"Seriously, it's not that hard.  What's wrong with the rest of you?"

Ian Holm has an even smaller part, and is gone after a handfull of lines.  As for the rest of the allegedly main cast, Angela Bettis is uniformly awful and alters her performance significantly in every scene she is in.  Little Holliston Coleman is fine as far as child actors go, but her role is more of an object than a character, so she doesn't make a great impact on the film, one way or the other.

Bless the Child was directed by Chuck Russell, who was presumably hired for his horror-directing experience.  I don't know what to say about his direction. Well, I don't know what nice things I can say about his direction.  Just because the man is a veteran in the genre doesn't mean he has the slightest clue as to how a supernatural horror movie should work.  The acting is all over the place, from incredibly bland to inappropriately manic, to hilariously melodramatic.  The action is handled poorly and unconvincingly; Russell apparently believes that severing heads doesn't get messy until the head falls off the body.

Look ma, no arterial spray!

The pacing is abysmal.  How long would it take for a complete stranger to convince you to kidnap a child from her wealthy and powerful rightful parents?  If you answered anything longer than "two minutes," then you are simply not qualified to direct Bless the Child.  Let me put it to you another way; in a movie about ritual worship and devil worshipers, the scariest thing is a ginger with an afro.

He sees the world with his dark eye and the nether realm with the pale one

There are two conventional ways for a supernatural horror movie to be frightening.  Either a supernatural being shows up and starts some shit, or humans acting on behalf of a creature do some extraordinarily reprehensible stuff, like eating human hearts or something like that.  Bless the Child opts for "C: None of the Above."  Sure, there is some dabbling in both of those key areas, but the otherworldly do little damage and the most reprehensible things in the script happen completely off-camera.  There are only three on-screen deaths before the climax of this movie.  One is a bum who is set on fire, another is a dude who gets knitting needles in his eyes, and the other is the victim of allergies (assuming she was allergic to blunt force trauma and knives).  None of these are mysterious, creepy, or show any direct connection to the supernatural stuff that is happening in the rest of the movie.  It doesn't fit the tone that the film is failing to set.

Bless the Child isn't just a bad movie, though. It is thoroughly and unintentionally ridiculous. Let's take the cult as an example. It is most popular with teens and twentysomethings, which makes sense, because most parents support their child's aspirations to someday drink the Kool-Aid. What I love to laugh at with the cult is that the kids --- the ones on the inner circle, anyway --- all dress in black, wear trench coats, and have bad haircuts. Because nothing says "join our cult" like surly teens dressed like Bauhaus fans. The logic of the cult members is hilarious, too. There's a fire in a church at the climax of the movie, and some serious shit goes down. Apparently, though, nobody left the burning building until the police showed up; some even stayed in the fire, apparently so they could jump out and get shot by cops.  Nothing tops the arguments between Eric and Cody, though.  Eric wants Cody to accept the Devil as her buddy because God doesn't exist (because one existing without the other makes total sense).  How does he plan to force this six-year-old to join his side?  Not by threatening to kill the only mother Cody has ever known.  Not by promising to reunite her with the biological mother that she has never seen.  Not even through something primal and ugly, like mutilation.  No, Eric tries to convince her through logic. And fails miserably.

This was in response to her saying "You first."  Honest.

Dude.  She's six.  If you can't change a six-year-old's mind, how the hell do you run a cult?  There are all sorts of idiotic moments in Bless the Child, and their silliness is the only thing that makes this movie bearable.

Oh, and you know how a real horror movie would have the bad guys try to kill Maggie?  They would probably chain her up, or feed her to a demon or something awesome. Not in this movie.  No, these jerks capture her, drug her, place her in a car and stage a car accident.  But they don't kill her and then fix the car to drive off a cliff, or anything reasonably simple like that.

Maggie, explaining the way they should have killed her

Instead, they set it up so that Maggie's car is speeding across a bridge during rush hour in the wrong lane; Maggie (who was drugged, but not killed) wakes up just in time to swerve out of traffic, and a nice stranger helps her not plummet to her death in the water below.  Think about that for a few moments.  Yes, it's kind of a waste for a complete random to be the one who saves Maggie, but that's not what irks me about this part.  These cult punks are complete morons (which might explain their involvement in a cult...).  First of all, Maggie is drugged, but they skimped on the knockout juice?  That's incompetent, but I suppose waste not, want not; if she had died, they could save the drugs they saved on their next Oscar-winning victim.  The choice in where to stage the crash was pretty odd, though.  Since she was unconscious, wouldn't the cult need to spend a good amount of time and effort getting her in place and the car rigged to make the plan work?  How does a downtown metropolitan area with a heavily-traveled bridge fit in to those requirements?  It seems to me like they would have had to stop traffic, set up the car, toss Maggie in, and aim it at oncoming traffic.  At that point, wouldn't it just be subtler to dismember her body on live television?

This is the proper reaction to that scene

I understand that a director can only do so much when the script he's working with can't even stimulate a mediocre tagline, but there's a lot of obviously stupid stuff in this movie.  Had the acting been better or if the mood was even a little tense or suspenseful, I would give the director a break.  Oh, well.  The only thing Chuck Russell did right was editing it into a comprehensible narrative.  Sadly, this movie is too slow-paced and the funny bits are too rare to make this film even approach the realm of so-bad-it's-good.  Instead, this is simply an awful movie made more noteworthy by the fact that this (and I Dreamed of Africa) was Kim Basinger's first post-Oscar work.  That puts Bless the Child into the same conversations where Halle Berry's Catwoman pops up, and that's never a good thing.

...and I'm only being this generous because the car crash scene almost made me spit out my beer.

Alien

There is never a bad reason to revisit the Alien franchise.  I've seen them all, every single Alien (the original, -s, -³, Resurrection, vs. Predator and vP: Requiem) and almost all of them are worth seeing, even if they're utter crap.  For whatever reason, as I waited to for a suitable time to go see Prometheus, I realized I hadn't watched the first two movies in almost a decade.  I can honestly do without the rest of the series (although AvP:R was pretty amusing), but those two are examples of greatness that do not often come along in science fiction.

Like curly hair and over-the-head headsets

I doubt I have anything too original to add to the chorus of positive reviews for Alien.  That won't stop me from reviewing it, but it does make outlining the plot in detail seem a bit unnecessary.  In short, some glorified intergalactic truckers on the spaceship Nostromo are forced (economically, not physically) to investigate a distress signal deep in Nebraska (AKA "middle-of-nowhere") space.  The signal comes from an alien vessel, and the aliens that sent it are long dead.  However, in the process of determining that fact, the crew of the Nostromo also accidentally encounter the creatures that killed off the aliens.  Worse, they bring one onto the ship with them and continue their voyage home.  Hence the tagline, "In space, no one an hear you scream."

"...Unless you have radios in your space suits, that is"

There's quite a bit more to it that just that, but explaining science fiction plots typically leads me to over-explaining them because I tend to find the little details in these movies fascinating.  And for people who enjoy reading into the production values of sci-fi movies, Alien is a treat.  Unlike just about every space flick before this one (Star Wars may be the earliest example I can think of for this), the spaceship and crew are not flawlessly clean; this is a universe where space travel has been around for a while, and there are spaceship equivalents of rust buckets.  This isn't a film that relies on special effects or fancy production values to succeed, but the unspoken history that the production design implies --- for the ship, for the spacesuits, for the alien species and crashed ship, etc. --- is very cool. 

Implication of the crew's appearance: fashion peaked in 1979

The acting in Alien is quite good for something that, on paper, amounts to a genre mish-mash.  I didn't realize it until I started browsing through their filmographies, but most of the cast in this film was fairly unknown at the time of its release; while many of the actors had been working for ten or fifteen years, they primarily played small character roles.  That means that the highest-profile actor in Alien is John Hurt, who received some award nominations the year before for his work in The Midnight Express.  As far as his performance goes, it was fine until it was rudely interrupted by his impending death.

Less erotic than it looks

Isn't that cool, though?  It's not something that a modern audience would think twice about, what with Sigourney Weaver starring in three other Alien pics, but having Hurt play the first victim is on par with Janet Leigh's surprise death in Psycho or Drew Barrymore's in Scream; you just don't expect the most well-known actor in the film to exit that early.  Thankfully, the non-Hurt cast is pretty respectable, so you don't really miss Hurt's gravelly voice too much as you're being sucked into this movie.  Obviously, Weaver is the star; she does a very good job here, assuming the lead as she makes smart and hard decisions and takes control when she has to.  This was her first major role, and she was pretty bad-ass for a lady with awful hair.  Tom Skerritt was definitely the second most likable and logical character in the film; Skerritt has never really wowed me as an actor, but he has always played authority figures well, even before he started going gray.  Yaphet Kotto, who I generally like, starts out the film utterly annoying, but he more than redeems himself by the end, playing up his fear and machismo as much as his small role would allow.  Harry Dean Stanton was Kotto's partner in crime, and he gave a typical Stanton performance.  He wasn't outstanding, but he always adds a bit of world-weariness to any role he's given.  Probably the best supporting character, though, was played by Ian Holm.  Already a veteran British Shakespearean actor by this point, Holm had yet to make much of an impression in an American film.  What I like about his performance is that it is subtle...until it suddenly isn't.

Tapioca and marbles: not key elements in "subtle"

Then he gets honest-to-goodness action scenes and a pretty fantastic special effects scene.  His character's reveal is a shock the first time you view it (unless you're familiar with the sequels, I suppose), and I really liked how his character acquiesced to certain things early on, but was still such a sinister company man at heart.  The only actor I didn't really care for was Veronica Cartwright, who more or less represented what Scott hoped the audience was feeling.  In other words, she whimpered and yelped a lot.

While I do like the acting in Alien, this is definitely not a film that relies heavily on a power performance.  This is a mood piece, more than anything else.  This was only the second film to be directed by Ridley Scott, but his direction is what makes this film so fantastic.  If Alien was simply a science fiction film, we would still be talking about Ridley Scott's team pre-production team.  I loved the look and feel of the ship, I liked the alien planet, and the futuristic tech on display (mostly in the form of the android) was very cool.  Of course, the best part of the production was the design of the xenomorph (AKA the titular alien).  How awesome is this thing?

It looks like a shark-person made with the sexy time to some demon scorpion and then covered their love-spawn in Nickelodeon Gak.  This alien is one of the most visually impressive creatures to ever hit the big screen, and that's even before seeing it in action.  When you combine the fantastic production with practical effects --- as good as it looks, most of the special effects are made with puppets and creativity --- this movie becomes something more.  It moves from "cool idea" to "cool movie," and that's still disregarding what actually happens in the film.  With Scott's talent for building suspense, you wind up with something truly special.  And when I reference the suspense in this film, I'm not talking about "Don't go into the basement, dumbass!"  I'm not even talking about "Wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...oh, it's only the cat ---- KNIFE IN THE FACE!"  I'm talking about a pervasive sense of dread that few horror films come close to matching.  Scott slowly reveals more and more about the alien menace, but still keeps the audiences off-guard.  The alien changes its appearance and the way it attacks throughout the film, so you're never quite sure what to expect.

Except death.  You always expect death

One of the things that I like best about Alien, though, is the immorality of The Corporation.  It's one thing to make a monster movie, but adding duplicity and cutthroat capitalism changes the threat from a simple (although dangerous) external one, to a two-front war, where the characters have to watch their backs, too.  Most movies would be happy to have just one of these layers, which is another reason Alien is such an interesting watch.

This is only the second or third time I have sat down to watch Alien, and it impresses me more and more each time.  I love when films transcend their genres, so the way Alien combines awesome sci-fi with horror just blows me away.  When watching movies with my friends, we often skip over this film in favor of the louder and more action-packed Aliens, but Ridley Scott's direction has won me over.  I am finally convinced that this is the best Alien movie.  Everything about it, from the slow reveal of the title in the opening credits to the genuinely shocking chest-burst scene, all the way to the fourth act scares is wonderful.

What a rip-off!  They did the same thing in Spaceballs!

I don't even mind the stupidity of the characters risking their lives for a cat or the fact that the iconic egg image on the movie poster doesn't resemble the actual eggs in the film very much.  This is a complex story with good, old-fashioned special effects and a slow-burning story that effectively amps up the terror in the plot.  And that's all it's about.  There are no distractions --- how many other filmmakers would have horned in a romantic subplot here? --- because this is all about dread and terror, and Alien does what it does so very, very well.