 Get ready for a whole new breed of Blu-ray with the Alien Anthology. Four powerful films....eight thrilling versions....together at last in dazzling, terrifying, high-def clarity and with the purest digital sound on the planet. Over 60 hours of special features and two bonus discs, including never-fore-seen content and the totally immersive MU-TH-UR mode Blu-ray interactive experience, make this the ultimate Alien movie collection your Blu-ray player has been begging for. The Alien Anthology includes: Aliens Alien3 Alien Resurrection Plus all the EXTRAS listed here. (on Disc 5 and Disc 6) The film that started it all, 1979's Alien, is an unholy amalgam—in the best possible way—of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Jaws, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the cinematic DNA of these iconic progenitors, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and then-young director Ridley Scott, like scientists whipping up life in a test tube, created a cinematic icon of their own, one that would mutate the already grotesque face of the horror genre. Alien is unsettling from its very first frames. A camera drifts through the Nostromo, a dilapidated space freighter. This is not an optimistic 1950s vision of bright, sterile space travel. The ship's corridors are dark, metallic, dank, more Das Boot than Star Trek. The crew is woken from cryo-sleep; the ship's computer, MU-TH-ER, has detected a signal coming from a nearby planetoid, and they're obligated by law to check it out. The source of the beacon is a derelict alien vessel. In its hull, Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), discovers a batch of leathery eggs. When he leans over one to investigate, an arachnid-ish creature pops out and attaches itself to his face. Warrant Officer Ripley (a then unknown Sigourney Weaver) knows that letting Kane back on board would violate the quarantine protocol, but she's overruled by Ash (Ian Holm), the ship's stoic science officer. Bad idea Ash. As it turns out, Kane is being used an incubator for an alien embryo, which soon explodes out of him in a scene known, by fans, as the "chestburster sequence." The titular alien, designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, is—hands down—one of the top-10 boogeymen in all of cinema. It starts small, a wormy, eyeless, silver-fanged fiend, but quickly grows into the phallic-shaped, highly sexualized, acid-bleeding, mucous-dripping monster we all know and love and fear, a creature of pure id that exists solely to propagate its kind. If that means chomping you to gory bits or hitching a ride on your spacecraft, then so be it—this thing's a survivor, an amoral killing machine. Hence, O'Bannon pitching the film to 20th Century Fox as "Jaws in space." And like Jaws, the monster here is scary, yes—in its unexpectedness—but it's really not the star of the show. Before the beastie ever erupts forth from John Hurt's chest, Ridley Scott has established a real world filled with real characters, making the first half of Alien play almost like a documentary of the grim, unglamorous realities of space travel in the 22nd century. Everyone seems tired, hassled, on edge. Engineers Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) bitch about how little they're getting paid. The captain, an impressively bearded Tom Skerritt, is constantly beleaguered by complaints and proves poor at delegating responsibility. The two female crewmembers, played by Weaver and Veronica Cartwright, get no respect. You know how airline pilots jokingly call themselves glorified bus drivers? In Alien, astronauts are glorified long haul truckers, and its dirty, thankless work. That the cast is so convincing—and what a great cast!— goes a long way to help us invest in the story. Of course, we know—basically—what's going to happen, minus a few strategic twists. The alien is essentially Michael Meyers in reptilian form, jumping out from the shadows to kill the crew members one by one. But what separates Alien from the slasher pack is its emphasis on suspense over gore and graphic kills. The film is at its scariest when nothing is happening, as Ridley Scott allows plenty of space for our imaginations to run wild, turning every dark recess and shhh-what-was-that noise into a potential nightmare scenario. The jump scares are huge here—although less inherently terrifying than the stretches of Hitchcockian tension that lie between them—and it helps that the creature looks different nearly every time we see it. We may know what's going to happen, but we have no idea what to expect at any given moment, a quality that fills the whole film with lingering dread. Cast Notes: Complete credited cast:), Tom Skerritt (Captain A.J. Dallas), Sigourney Weaver (Warrant Officer Lieutenant Ellen L. Ripley), Veronica Cartwright (Navigator J.M. Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Engineering Technician S.E. Brett), John Hurt (Engineer G.W. Kane), Ian Holm (Science Officer Ash), Yaphet Kotto (Chief Engineer J.T. Parker), Bolaji Badejo ('Alien'), Helen Horton (Mother). IMDb Rating (11/05/10): 8.5/10 from 183,796 users Top 250: #46
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