Read Part 1 of this review first if you missed it: Alien Review, Part 1 | Mind Matters

In the previous review, we began discussing the sci-fi classic, Alien, and we left off with one of the Nostromo’s crewmembers, Kane, waking up after being attacked by a strange creature which had essentially glued itself to his face. Now, the creature is dead, and all seems well. Since Kane appears to be alright, and the crew begins eating another meal, preparing to renter cryosleep for their return journey to Earth. But as they are eating, Kane begins to scream in pain. The other’s try to help him, but they have no idea what’s going on. Finally, another alien explodes from Kane’s chest and scampers off. The situation has just gone from bad to worse.

The crew holds a brief funeral for Kane before jettisoning his body into space. Then they turn their attention to finding the alien. Their plan is simple. Ash constructs some handheld sensors, and one of the crewmen gives the others electric prods to stun the creature so they can capture it. They break off into groups and begin exploring the ship. Ripley, Brett, and Parker are in one group, and they quickly come across something as they hunt, a cat. This annoyed me. Why in the world is there a cat in space? I think the idea was that it had been put into cyrosleep with Ripley. The cat is presumably hers. But at this point in the film, Ripley acts like she doesn’t recognize it, and if she is the feline’s owner, then why did she let it run loose on the ship? The ship is huge, large enough to take days to explore. It’s bad enough that they have a creepy alien running around, but how did she plan to find the cat when they returned the earth? Now, the Nostromo is described as a tugboat, implying that it simply carries a larger ship behind it, but the crew still has access to both the smaller and larger vessels, and therefore, so does the alien. For plot reasons, Brett is tasked with finding the cat even though he’s not the owner. He meanders around the ship for a while, and just when he finds the cat. He is attacked by the alien and killed, but here’s the thing. The alien is huge! How much time does it take to jettison a body and begin looking for a creature that could potentially kill everyone on the ship, less than a day? What did this thing eat to gain so much mass so quickly? It wasn’t Kane. If it had taken that big a bite out of Kane there wouldn’t be anything left of the man before it . . . hatched.

Putting that question aside, the situation has escalated yet again. They deduce that the alien must be using the air ducts to move around. They conclude this is the only way a creature large enough to kill a man could move around the ship without being noticed, which is something I didn’t buy because, again, the ship is huge! At any rate, Captain Dallas decides the best thing to do is to try and herd the creature through the air ducts and force it inside a chamber where they can suck the creature into space.

This is a terrible plan. Care to guess why? The ship is huge! There’s no reason to crawl into the air ducts where the trashy thing can get the jump on you when all you have to do is locate the thing is and close off that part of the ship. You might not get to take a nice cryonap while the thing is on board, but as long as they can keep it from eating anyone else, it’ll eventually starve to death. Then they can go to sleep. And let’s talk about the food issue. There is no reason to hunt this thing in the first place. It’s going to get hungry and eventually come after the crew no matter what they do, so why not wait for it and choose their battleground?  One of the crew mentions that the air ducts can be closed, so why not force it onto the ship, and make it come to you through one of the hallways? That way they could burn it to a crisp with their flamethrowers.

I’m not saying this would be a full proof plan, but it’s better than running around the air ducts just to be cornered at the worst possible moment. So, can anybody guess what happens to poor Dallas? He dies! What a shock! This death was a shame though. Of all the characters in this movie, Dallas seemed to be the most level-headed, and as far as I could tell, was the only one who had a shred of empathy. He was the one who insisted that they break protocol to save Kane. This turned out to be a mistake, but Dallas didn’t realize he had a turncoat on his crew, Ash.  The science officer didn’t let poor Kane onto the ship because he was concerned about the man. He had a very different set of orders that the crew of the Nostromo knew nothing about, and these special orders are not revealed until Ripley takes command.

Once Ripley is tasked with deciding what to do next, she finds herself at a loss. She decides to try Dallas’s plan again, but she also asks the crew if they have any ideas. Lambert suggests taking a shuttle and abandoning the Nostromo, but Ripley tells her that the shuttle only seats three people. But they have more than one ship, the main portion of the Nostromo! You know, the ship pulling the larger vessel?! They took the main section of the Nostromo down to the alien’s planet near the beginning of the film, but everyone suddenly gets amnesia and forgets that there’s more than one spacecraft they could use to escape! So, thanks to this convenient lapse in memory, Ripley returns to the control room to speak to Mother, hoping to gain any information that might give her and the crew a better chance at survival. She types a few questions into the computer, and after a little evasiveness on the part of Mother, discovers that the Nostromo’s mission was to uncover the alien all along. And she learns something else. Ash has been tasked with ensuring the mission’s success.

Conveniently, Ash sneaks up on her right as she’s learning all of this and does the obvious thing, which is to try and kill her.

However, Lambert and Parker kill Ash first. Since they are now down to three crewmembers, they decide now is a great time to take the shuttle, and we’ll cover what happens then in the next review.