Alien

I expected more than thrills from Alien. Science fiction has a philosophical connotation to me, but Alien, unless I missed some symbolism, was just a thriller set in space. It borrowed aesthetics from 2001 but none of its pondering. Yet what a thriller it was! I liked the bleak direction: for a lot of the horror, there was no music or even screaming, just panting and sweating. Weaver toward the end was a marvel in her desperation. I also particularly liked Bilbo's performance -- for someone playing a robot, he may have acted more humanly than anyone else! That's good acting for 1979. Unfortunately some of the effects showed their age -- the alien itself, the explosion of the ship, the severed head -- but a lot of the effects were surprisingly effective, like the early form of the thing when it's on Kane's face, and what spills out of Ash, etc. There was some bad dialogue, but more awesome intensity than I expected for a movie from the 70s. How did Kubrick manage to control the cheese so well in 1968? Largely by avoiding dialogue, and avoiding entertainment -- entertainment ages faster than art. What's humorous or cool to the mainstream fades fast by its very nature. Humor and a sense of cool are inherently transient. Kubrick skipped both, dealing just with humanity's biggest questions and with clean, brutal visuals. So his movie ages better than almost any other sci fi. Alien kept some of that brutality though, so I'm pleased to say I enjoyed it all these years later. I just wish it had dealt with more interesting ideas, if I am to watch any of the others in the series.