Could I overpraise the sci-fi horror sensation Alien if I wanted to? I look through my thesaurus and see words like magnificent, brilliant, exalted, superior, remarkable, exceptional and outstanding and conclude that the English language’s strongest adjectives do no more than justice to the film. Necessity being the mother of invention, and there being no cinematic achievement whose fitting accolades would be too much for Alien, one must suppose the word that hangs too weighty an ornament on that particular tree has yet to be invented.
It has been over thirty years since it came to the silver screen. Had the studio done to it what was done to so many Orson Welles films and boxed it away in a vault, it could pull it out today and, without touching a single frame, release it to theaters and nary a soul would suspect a thing. Understand, I do not mean merely to say that it would play well to modern audiences. Though indisputably true, there are many older films that can do just that. I have sat in on a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as it positively thrilled an audience half a century after its initial release. No, I mean that few would even pause to consider that the film seemed out of its era.
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