Alien

(First I'd like to talk about the way Alien was filmed; It must be a somewhat different technique. I have the Oppo 103 DVD player and the LG PM 6700 Plasma THX 3DTV, and I use Dimensional Optics Active Shutter glasses. With great anticipation I put the Blu-ray of Alien in, opted for the Director's cut and hit play. With Ridley Scott talking about Alien being 25 years later, he was in excellent 3D.Then the movie started with no apparent 3D affect. I set the Oppo to maximum, went into the TV and set its 3D to maximum, and point of view to the maximum plus number. Only then did I get a barely minimal 3D affect.[ I had just watched the 1937 version of, "The Last of The Mohicans" in black and white with Randolph Scott. and the 3D affect was almost as good as Avatar, filmed in 3D.] It would be interesting to get feedback from people with other types of 3D TV's). I think it being the first serious and promoted sci-fi horror movie people didn't know what to expect and had a hard time resolving in what category to place it. The sci-fi crowd were not accustomed to the horror element, and the horror crowd had no idea of what to think of science fiction being a major part of the plot-to the horror crowd if you didn't have vampires, werewolves, demons, devil worship and the Frankenstein monster, you pretty much had nothing. Look at the 1972 "Kolchak The Night Stalker," a made for TV movie that rated a 54, meaning 1/2 the people in the country were watching it and that unheard of record stood for many years. Yes there were some B movies like you saw as part of a two movie double feature on Saturday, like "It The Terror From Beyond Space," or "20 million miles to Earth." Ray Harryhausen was a very busy special effects man. But nothing special. (Alien has been out since 1979 so I think its alright to talk about the various exploits of the movie. And I've owned a copy since it first became available on VHS.) A movie, something very different with a good story and great special effects, a budget, and a director who was not like everybody else, Ridley Scott. He paid attention to details; the scene where they find the seated alien pilot cost 1-million dollars alone ; he said he felt it was that essential in setting up as a clue what was to come and adding to the mystery. The Ship picks up a transmission and they are required to investigate it. They land and find a ship, enter and find a fossilized pilot In exploring they find a cavern full of pods/eggs and when Kane gets close one opens ejecting a scorpion like creature that wraps around his helmet and he has to be carried back. Ripley says Mother had deciphered part of the message and it appeared to be a warning not a distress signal. She refuses to let them in, but Ash the medical officer opens the door. They can't remove it because it bleeds acid, only to find later it has removed itself from him and its dead. The biggest surprise of the movie was where they are eating before going back into hypersleep and the chestburster scene where an alien creature comes out Kane's chest spraying everyone with blood, and Ash, "don't kill it" (wonder why?) . Brett and Parker rig up some motion trackers, electric prods, and flame throwers, to go after a creature they are unaware has grown over eight feet. After it kills Brett and takes his body up an air shaft they realize it is huge; Dallas is the next to die in an air shaft. (What works so well to make the movie scary is you only get glimpses of it; you don't really know what it looks like, what makes it vulnerable, or when you might run into it-once the Alien is loose there is a sense of claustrophobia that never leaves. After Dallas is dead Ripley takes over and finds out from Mother that Ash has been ordered by Nostromo's corporate employers to return the creature to their weapon's division-crew expendable.( I always wondered if the company knew of the signal from a probe and had the Nostromo follow a certain course so it would have to investigate.) There is a fight between Ripley and Ash and the remaining crew decapitates Ash, finding him to be an android; Ash's final words are that they will not survive, then they burn him. In the Director's Cut you see in Ash's quarters pornographic pictures taped to the wall and porn magazines. The fact he had them would lead one to suspect it was in his [deviant] programming-he brought them aboard before the Nostromo left Earth. Ridley Scott opened a whole can of worms here. Parker and Lambert are killed gathering cooling supplies, and Ripley initiates self destruct of the Nostromo. She manages to get aboard the escape pod with her cat Jones, only to find the Alien hidden there. This begs the question, Is the Alien intelligent? She seals Jones in a chamber, herself in a space suit, seated at the controls she gets the creature out by releasing coolant on it. As it comes out and stands behind her, she opens the door and explosive decompression blows it to the doorway where it grasps each side of the opening. She shoots it with a grappling hook which knocks it out into space. The door closes but the rope from the gun has the creature attached and attempting to crawl into an engine, but she fires them up blasting it free into space. The creature seems to be able to survive in space, but evolved from us and we can't, interesting. On LV 426 where they landed to explore the source of the signal and found all the eggs where was the queen? The pilot was there so long he was fossilized, but the eggs were alive? Was Mother correct that the signal was a warning, and as this was an alien race with no prior contact, how was she able to decipher any of it, and it such a short time? Did the company know something thereby placing an android aboard with a separate agenda than getting the ore to Earth? (Nostromo is Italian for "our meat," I wonder what the joke in that means?) Alien spawned literally a flood of movies where some creature made physical contact with man then morphed hidden in the guise of a human. Many did not try anything new, or even being clever, some were so shameless as to have creatures that looked very, very similar. If it is true that copying is the best form of compliment, Ridley Scott sits alone atop a mountain. I think Alien is one of the two scariest movies ever made, the other being The Exorcist. I rate it "a two bagger" (of microwave popcorn.) Just grab the biggest container of your favorite soft drink, sit back, and enjoy.

40 years after release and after becoming one of the most iconic scifi/horror franchises during that time, do I really need to tell you what the movie Alien is about? A deep space refining starship intercepts a mysterious beacon and is rerouted to investigate its origin. When they reach the planet it is emanating from, one of the crew is impregnated by an alien, whose progeny proceeds to kill off the crew one by one. Yeah, not the most complex of plots. In fact, I admire its purity. It's the execution of the movie and the acting that elevate it to another level of filmmaking, that of a masterpiece. The filmmakers and the actors were at the top of their games. Alien in some ways reminded me of the original Star Wars. What you had were two hungry directors who, technically, at least were virtuosos, in terms of framing and setting up scenes. You could tell the directors knew exactly what they wanted. Unfortunately for Lucas, the original Star Wars film was his last great one, whereas Scott moved on to do Blade Runner right after this. All the actors are great, and I think it would have been a lesser picture if any of the cast had been played by anyone else. They just all seemed to fit the roles so well. I can't even imagine seeing Sigourney Weaver in this first film role back in the day. I mean she explodes off the screen with magnetism and sexiness and toughness. At a time when those kind of female roles were sadly lacking in any kind of action terms. The visual designs of the aliens and their tech was done by HR Giger. Nobody can say that guy thought along the same visual and conceptual lines of regular human beings. He was so original that his designs SEEM alien but at the same time familiar to humanoid life. The atmosphere of the film was greatly aided by the lighting and sound design, along with Jerry Goldsmith's score. Scott used a lot of natural light, in the sense that when it's dark, the corridor is dark. It doesn't feel like he wanted any light that didn't belong there. For instance, when Dallas is trying to flush the alien out of the air shafts, the only lighting is from his flamethrower. Or when part of the crew visits the alien derelict, the light is only coming from the lamps on top of their helmets. There are lots of dark corners and spaces that make it more suspenseful. The sound design also makes the film more tense. I don't know if most people notice but I can't remember a scene of the movie where I did not hear breathing. Whether it was wind travelling through the ship, or when the face hugger is on Kaine's face, or when the crew interfaces with the ship's computer, there is always the sound of some kind of respiration. And not in a zen like way. Almost in a sense that there is always something "out there", watching you, hunting you. Of course, what needs to be said about Jerry Goldsmith, who is one of the greats, even 40 years ago, he was already a legend. Like HR Giger, in his soundscapes, Goldsmith was able to use the orchestra to make its instruments sound otherworldly and somehow instill dread, terror, beauty, and yes, even WONDER into the context of the film. It was just spot on the whole way through without EVER going over the top. After watching the film, the next night I rewatched it with the commentary by the cast and crew and enjoyed just the same. They had almost everyone that worked on the film, except Yaphet Kotto, who played Parker. The director, the editor, the writers, and all of the actors chimed in on the making of the movie and its most classic scenes. Oh, Ian Holm wasn't on it. Weaver, Skerritt, Stanton, and Cartwright were though. I think its incredible that one director in two movies made two of my favorite and critically lauded scifi films of all time. Both Alien and Blade Runner were movies I watched over and over on my dad's laserdisc player back in the 80s. Even that young, I could sense how special they were. This blu-ray features both the original 1979 theatrical release and the 2003 directors cut with Jerry Goldsmith's eerie score possible to isolate on both. Ridley Scott added in about 12 minutes of new footage to the directors cut. The great thing about Alien is that everyone knew they were making a monster movie. But somewhere along the way, the entire cast and crew realized they were so good that they elevated it subconsciously or consciously into a great work of art.

4k video is amazing, the best the film has ever looked. Sci fi horror classic that stands the test of time.

It's not every science fiction horror thriller that can terrify you twice. But "Alien," quite literally the scariest movie I have ever seen (and I've seen a great many), is unlike most others. Even 35 years later, even when the the story and sequence of events have long been burned into my consciousness from the first time I saw it, on the big screen the year it came out (1979), it makes my blood run ice cold. It may be harder for newer audiences to be as thoroughly terrified as I was when I first saw it in the theater. After all, "Alien" has become embedded in the culture — not least for its iconic status as one of the scariest movies ever made. But the many pop culture references to (and spoofs of) it can make it hard to enjoy for the first time. My 14-year-old son liked the movie a great deal, but was found it nowhere near as terrifying. Reasons for his reaction range from his having heard of some of the archetypally horrific scenes from friends or on TV shows growing up — or possibly due to his homeroom teacher having brought in a plush version of the film's anti-hero to show the class just this year. For my part, I find it utterly startling just how impressively the movie has weathered the ages since it was made in the late 1970's. Of course, this was the age when some of the great masterpieces of space-oriented science fiction came to the screen. "Star Wars" (and its wonderfully visionary holographic displays) had come out a scant three years earlier, less than a decade after Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" set a new plateau for space realism. And Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was similarly believable — although much of the action took place on present-day Earth. All these movies were made before the emergence of sophisticated computer graphics in the 1990's. But unlike these others, director Ridley Scott was able to create an extremely realistic universe that seamlessly stitches together a pastiche of multiple cultures, some of whom are utterly alien, but one that is at once futuristic and removed from, and at the same time completely familiar and instantly recognizable from our current culture. The foreignness of these alien cultures, experienced mostly as remnants (and thanks in no small part to the haunting, other-worldly artistry of H.R. Giger, whom Scott uses beautifully in this film), are woven together into an utterly convincing, uniquely human universe. It's not just a realistic human-built spaceship (or two or three) that Scott creates, but an entire socio-political universe, filled with the unseen hands of giant corporations, labor tensions, corruption and malfeasance. Scott expertly situates his characters in this universe, replete with the frustrations and ennui of humans coping with the realities of the vast distances of space, the enormous ship in their charge, the regulations of the overbearing corporation that owns the enterprise, and the cramped living quarters in which they live — all of which are at once instantly recognizable and effortlessly believable. The story takes place in the (presumably) not-too-distant future, when merchant ships traverse between stars much as cargo ships routinely travel the oceans today. With the small and, to this reviewer, utterly forgivable exception of the now-dated-looking, monochromatic, green LED computer displays, the realism of Scott's vision is utter, and still feels effortlessly convincing (if a bit claustrophobic for my tastes). I was surprised by the range and performance of excellent actors in the movie, most of whose names I had forgotten in the ensuing 35 years. Of course I remembered Sigourney Weaver, but had forgotten the superb performances turned in by the rest of a luminous cast: Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartright, Tom Skerritt and Harry Dean Stanton — to say nothing of the sparkling Brits Ian Holm and John Hurt. Relevant? All the more so now than when it was made. Recommended? Highly. "Alien" remains a masterwork of film craftsmanship and storytelling, with characters you care about — in a place where, even in your worst nightmares, you dare not go.

The writing on the box art is in Spanish and it is a huge give away putting the Alien on the cover for people who are new to the film. Otherwise, this holds up. The Blu ray really transfers the deep black shadows and soft lighting. Recommend to even those who are not into scifi or horror. You owe it to yourself to see one of the most influential movies ever made.

Package finally arrived in perfect condition. Digital code worked fine. The insert said the code is "subject to expiration" but gave no date and worked at Movies Anywhere.

I love this movie. It reminds me of better times. I do like it in 4k, and with my home theater system.

Short version: If you haven't seen Alien yet (or haven't watched it lately), wait until late at night, turn off all the lights, press "play" and enjoy... ;) Long version: It's almost hard to believe that Alien came out over 40 years ago. I was 13 when I saw it on the big screen, and I still remember watching it in a dark, almost empty theater. To say it scared me back then would be an understatement. The plot is simple - an alien gets onboard a tug/freighter spaceship, and the crew attempts to kill it as it picks them off one-by-one. On paper it doesn't sound exciting or scary, but the atmosphere, pacing and overwhelming sense of dread steadily turn up the tension. Make no mistake - this isn't a fast-paced pace, Michael Bay action flick - it's a dark, claustrophobic, slow burn horror film 1st and foremost. The various versions of the title creature were very unique (at the time), terrifying and visceral. HR Giger's designs - both for the alien, the derelict ship, and its pilot - and were very unsettling in a way that's still hard to describe today. Giger's biomechanical art style has been imitated in films many, many times over the years - but in my opinion its never been improved upon. The only film to successfully use Giger's biomechanical design/style - and build upon it in a lateral sort of way - was the sequel "Aliens" (an equally impressive film for completely different reasons). (Side-note: An incredibly talented high school classmate of mine went into the special effects industry, citing Giger's' work as a major influence. He even met and spent some time with Giger prior to his death in 2014). The film was a stark contrast to Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc., where the spacecraft interiors were smooth, clean, and sterile in appearance. It was easy to believe that the characters actually worked on/in their ship (the Nostromo), which had an appropriately grimy, gritty, worn and "used" feeling. The Nostromo also had a vastly different exterior design and overall feeling than other spaceships portrayed in film at the time. It was big, bulky, and decidedly not aerodynamic nor sleek in any way (it was designed to give the impression of a riverboat tug that takes 1 or 2 miles to slow down and execute a simple turn to go back the way it came). Landing on the planet (to investigate the alien "distress" signal) is portrayed as a slow, difficult, and inherently risky/dangerous process (no transporters here to beam the crew to/from the planet). Space travel is also depicted in a unique and more realistic manner than in many previous sci-fi films - travelling to/from star systems takes months or years vs hours/minutes/days. Costume design for the crew follows the same "well-used and worked-in" theme as the spaceship interior and exterior - no skin-tight spandex jumpsuits here. This further reinforces the idea that the crew are akin to a sea-going freighter crew (captain/pilot/radio operator/mechanics/etc.) that just happen to work in space. Although there's little time for character development, the acting is solid across the board. The entire cast went on to have long, impressive careers - with several of the surviving actors/actresses still active today. The title creature isn't shown in full until very late in the film - the viewer only gets a partial glimpse here and there - a formula other good creature films often follow. When it is finally revealed (after having blended perfectly into its surroundings – VERY creepy) its horrific yet somehow elegant & captivating at the same time. In my opinion, the film has held up very well over the years. Only a few scenes/props/special effects betray the movies' age. The 1st being the computer interface(s) various crew members interact with, and the 2nd when the science officer is being questioned about the alien (after he is the victim of a VERY traumatic injury). Even with its minor flaws, Alien (and the Aliens sequel) is a 1st class Sci-Fi film that set a high standard (a standard that few sci-fi films have matched even to this day) and is highly recommended. Trivia 1: In an the early versions of the script, the alien derelict ship is found and explored - but they only find the dead pilot - the alien eggs aren't onboard. Later, while the crew ponders what happened to the crew of the derelict, they locate a nearby pyramid-like structure. When they investigate it, they discover strange hieroglyphics on the walls and ultimately the alien eggs. (The final script/plot for Alien removed the alien pyramid completely, and the alien eggs are found aboard the derelict). This basic plot structure (pyramid included) was later used in the low budget film "Galaxy of Terror" which was released only two years after Alien. A spaceship crew (this time on a rescue mission) lands on an alien planet only to find a derelict (human) ship with dead/missing crew. They later investigate a mysterious pyramid nearby which contains numerous, unspeakable horrors. (Interestingly enough, James Cameron worked on Galaxy of Terror as the production designer and 2nd unit director and was responsible for much of the special effects). Aliens (the direct sequel to Alien) was directed by Cameron 7 years after Alien (and 5 years after he worked on Galaxy of Terror) and utilized the same basic story structure as Galaxy of Terror. However, instead of exploring a derelict ship, the protagonists/rescuers explore the abandoned/empty colony of "Hadley's Hope". Later they explore the vaguely pyramid shaped atmosphere processor and find alien eggs, multiple aliens and ultimately the alien responsible for laying all those eggs... Trivia 2: Several design elements in early, preproduction sketches of the Nostromo (named "Snark" at the time), found their way into the design of the Prometheus ship in Ridley Scotts (non-Alien sequel) film of the same name. Prometheus also has a dome/pyramid structure (with a menacing skull/face on it's top) as the main environment the crew investigates. The exterior design is reminiscent of both the (unused) pyramid design from Alien and another pyramid/dome structure Giger designed for the movie "Dune". The dome structure in Prometheus also contained a large number of mysterious urns on the floor - very reminiscent of the egg chamber seen in Alien. On the walls of the urn chamber are numerous hieroglyphics, many of which are taken directly from HR Giger's early, preproduction artwork/paintings of the alien's life cycle.