Reseñas de la crítica

It may be a sign of how much blockbuster standards have eroded that critics once panned Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror landmark as the epitome of soulless, mechanical junk. Today it plays like an art film — astonishingly quiet, daringly slow, a work of unnerving elegance that (with apologies to John Hurt) takes its sweet time slithering its way into your chest.

The movie's defining quality is rooted not simply in its thrills or its vivid imaginative palette, but in its slow, patient, nerveless storytelling, so different from the mad rush of images in much contemporary filmmaking.

ALIEN's innovative, languorously developed, and politically relevant narrative structure is also accompanied by simultaneously punishing and dazzling sound-effects work, romanticizing the harsh interstellar environment with a progressively intense and surprisingly passionate lullaby of humming, clicking, whirring, dripping, hissing, and shrieking noises.

For all that its producers, writers and cast are predominantly American, this gorgeous, leisurely horror film expresses a spectacularly British xenophobia, a parenthetical nightmare of invasion envisioned between an awakening (at the start of the film) and a return to sleep (at its close).