Alien (1979) movie poster

Alien (1979)

"In space no one can hear you scream."
ThumbScore
👍 87%Google users liked it ⓘ
Critics Score
🎬 91%
HorrorScience Fiction

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Where to Watch

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Director
Runtime
1h 57m
Rated
R
Country
United States of America, United Kingdom
Language
English
TMDB Rating
8.2/10 (16,111 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes
93%
Metacritic
89

Cast

Tom Skerritt as Dallas · 70% avg
Sigourney Weaver as Ripley · 74% avg
Veronica Cartwright as Lambert · 76% avg
Harry Dean Stanton as Brett · 74% avg
John Hurt as Kane · 74% avg
Ian Holm as Ash · 76% avg
Yaphet Kotto as Parker · 77% avg
Bolaji Badejo as Alien

Is Alien good?

Yes. 87% of real audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 91%.

Where it ranks on ThumbScore

Rank in its genre
#96 / 1168 · Horror
Rank in its year
#11 / 32 · 1979
Rank among its director's films
#4 / 27 · Ridley Scott

By audience score, among films with 500 or more votes.

Overview

During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed. Wikipedia ↗

About the Film

Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott. The film follows the seven crew members of the commercial towing vessel Nostromo, who are awakened from cryogenic sleep during their return trip to Earth to investigate a transmission from an uncharted planetoid. When Executive Officer Kane, played by John Hurt, is attacked by a parasitic organism that attaches to his face, the crew brings him back aboard the ship against quarantine protocol.

What hatches from Kane during the now-legendary chestburster scene — staged so that the cast's horrified reactions were genuine, as they hadn't been warned about the practical effects — begins hunting the crew through the ship's claustrophobic corridors. Alien was a groundbreaking fusion of science fiction and horror that elevated both genres. Ridley Scott created an atmosphere of suffocating dread through his meticulous attention to the industrial, lived-in design of the Nostromo — a stark contrast to the sleek spacecraft of most science fiction films.

H.R. Giger's Oscar-winning alien creature design, with its biomechanical aesthetic blending organic and mechanical elements, created one of cinema's most terrifying and enduring monsters. Sigourney Weaver's performance as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley was groundbreaking — in an era when horror films routinely relegated women to victim roles, Ripley emerged as the film's most competent and resourceful character, establishing a template for the female action hero that would influence cinema for decades.

Alien earned $203 million worldwide on an $11 million budget and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The film launched a multimedia franchise spanning multiple sequels, prequels, crossovers, video games, and comics, and is consistently ranked among the greatest science fiction and horror films ever made.

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What Reddit Thinks

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Top comment: "did people really believe that Disney would pay $71 Billion for fox and just not use their IP's and..."
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