Alien

Just two months ago, I found the first three Alien movies at Best Buy for $5 apiece. I decided to go ahead and splurge on the trilogy. The move made sense, mostly. At the time, I had just 13 DVDs still backlogged and nine of them were TV sets; with just Saving Private Ryan, The Fugitive, The Naked Gun, and Drag Me to Hell remaining, I figured an expanse of three new movies couldn't hurt. Now, having seen all of the aforementioned flicks besides Saving Private Ryan (which I have had since 2003 and which has become the symbolic poster child of my movie backlog), this is technically the junior ranking member of my movie backlog. Or at least, it was before tonight; I've now completed Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic. I know this movie is thirty years old and thus thirty years outdated, but it just didn't blow me away like I hoped it would. Sweeney, who half-watched it with me while playing Final Fantasy on GBA (nice commitment!), pointed out that horror movie conventions that seem cliche today probably hadn't been fully established in 1979, so maybe the very predictable occurrences throughout the film were surprising at the time of original release. I'll admit that the acting was fantastic and the writing quite believable, but the whole thing - which must have had amazing special effects for its day - just felt very campy. But hey, movies have come a long, long way in the past thirty years. And it shows. Either way, I'm happy to have finally seen this classic horror flick, especially because now I can move on to James Cameron's sequel, Aliens, which seems to be widely considered the best movie in the franchise and a true gem of the 1980s. Here's hoping for something that feels just a little less dated.