Watched “Alien” with two of my flat mates tonight.

As a commercial towing ship is on its way home to Earth, the computer detects a signal, and wakes its crew. They believe this to be some kind of distress signal, and decide to go check it out, in case theree’s something they can do to help. However, when they land, they find an alien ship with a fossilised crewman who looks like he exploded from the inside, and a hull full of eggs. About the same time as one of these eggs bursts open and its inhabitor sucks onto one of the humans’ face, the second-in-command of the towing ship discovers that it wasn’t a distress signal at all, but a warning, advising others to stay away…

This is supposed to be a legendary sci-fi horror movie, and it’s apparently number 54 at IMDB’s top 250 list. And I can understand why people like it , as the acting’s brilliant, the special effects quite stunning for their time, and the general mood of the film’s rather believable.

This isn’t my kind of movie, though. The alien reminds me of the giant moths of “Perdido Street Station” (one of the most disappointing books I’ve read, like, ever), and as I’ve probably said before, I am not a fan of books and movies where the “bad guy” or what have you is an animal that just follows its instincts. I like consciousness, I like verbal interaction, I like plans and long term goals beyond “eat, survive, reproduce”. And with animals, these are few and far between. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, humans and other, more self-aware aliens are animals, too. But you know what I mean, so leave those splinters alone, and go whittle something else.)

Also, I’ve never been much of a fan of horror movies, especially not the ones where people run, get hunted, butchered, and only one person escapes, without anything more to it. Of course, with the Ash subplot, “Alien” can be said to have something more, but this subplot doesn’t have much of an impact on the movie, beyond the obvious exposition and superficial stuff.

To sum things up, I didn’t like “Scream”, and I didn’t like “Alien”, or “Scream in Space”, as I call it. At least not very much. 5.0/10.