The first film that expands gradually Foreign The saga remains, at least in my opinion, the best. While Ridley Scott’s more recent entries have continued to expand the lore of the series, with varying degrees of success, for me, what’s most compelling is what he does so well in the first place. When we meet Ripley, Dallas, Brett, Parker, and the rest of the Nostromo crew, what immediately comes to the fore is the mundane reality of their lives as workers in the service of a corporation that already exploits them for very little pay and would destroy them in a heartbeat if it saw any profit from it. The alien that stalks the crew and picks them off one by one is creepy, but what really makes it resonate is the larger theme of capitalist scum, conveyed so economically and effectively in a wonderful line, “Priority one – Get the organism returned for analysis. All other considerations are secondary. The crew is expendable.”
But no matter how well the themes are handled, they are not enough to give a film its soul. No, what does? Foreign It's exceptional that the characters are brought to life so naturally by an extraordinary cast—Sigourney Weaver, of course, in a star-making performance, but also people like Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and the wonderful Yaphet Kotto—who, as we meet in the opening scenes of the film, are so well directed by Scott, interrupting each other and talking in a natural, believable way, the kind of thing you rarely see in American cinema after the 1970s. Also, Spielberg's Jaws four years ago, Foreign's strength lies in the unseen, often left to our imagination. The Nostromo feels more convincingly lived-in and worked-out than most film settings, and lends itself naturally to providing plenty of places for the xenomorph that stalks the hapless crew to hide. Subsequent films in the series have been denser, more elaborate, and more expensive, but the tightly focused humanity and terror of the series' premise remains arguably the best the series has ever been.
—Carolyn Petit