Alien

Annual rewatch for Alien day. ‘You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. It’s structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.’ Ian Holm’s nefarious android Ash is of course talking about the faceless terror that is stalking his shipmates, but it’s also a very fitting description of the film itself. It all comes down to timing. The steady, dark tension introduced by the title card sequence, as disembodied shapes coalesce to form a sinister, solitary word - Alien. It’s a word with strong connotations. The outsider, unfamiliar and associated with an innate fear of the Other. Even the word xenomorph derives from the Greek xenos, meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner’. Then, the aching tick tick of the rollercoaster as the film inches towards the now infamous dinner table scene, before the sudden and violent lurch into free fall as the crew of the USCSS Nostromo are dispatched, one by one, with gruesome intent and an uncanny efficiency. The final hour hurtles past in a grisly splatter of blood, sweat, viscera, industrial grime and extraterrestrial gunk. It’s a masterclass in pacing, one in which not a single second is misspent. My favourite film of all time, and it isn’t even close.