The entire canon of hard sci-fi is indebted to Alien, a movie that rises above it’s subject matter to be so much more than it really should be. Ebert compares it to Jaws (coming up in another review from me), and he’s not far off. Like Jaws, Alien knows that the scariest things exist in our imagination. Both movies keep their respective monsters off screen for more than an hour and, in my opinion, both movies are their thinnest when their monsters are engaged in monsterly duties i.e.: lurking, maiming, startling, and of course killing. Yes, the monster gets …more
