ALIEN 45th Anniversary

45 years after its release, ALIEN manages to scare and enthrall viewers both old and new alike.

There’s a scene in ALIEN that still gets me every time, which is pretty darned impressive considering that I’ve been watching this film since I was 11. Ridley Scott’s original science-fiction experiment has become a cultural icon, but it’s something more than that as well: it’s timeless good moviemaking.

The classic science fiction horror masterpiece has been given now life in cinemas this week as part of its 45th anniversary tour, and I was lucky enough to have time to see it at my local cinema. I went with a friend and surrogate big-brother, which is apropos to how I used to watch the film as a kid: with my dad. (I also used to watch ALIEN while wearing an old army helmet and tucked into a fortress of defensive pillows).

We piled into the cinema with a handful of other late-night moviegoers, some of whom were clearly fans who had seen the film when it first came out. My friend reminisced about his own experience seeing it for the first time, where a woman next to him got so scared that she jerked backwards in her chair so hard she almost broke her elbow.

But not everyone had seen ALIEN before.