We all crowded around the television screen last night to watch Alien because we found out Sean has never seen it. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?

A couple nights ago after dinner we were sitting around talking about all the things that were wrong with Promethus again, and after one of us compared it to Alien Sean casually mentioned that he’d never seen it. I thought at first I’d misheard him, or maybe he’d meant to say he hadn’t seen it in the last ten years or something. “You’ve never seen it?” I asked him, expecting him to correct me. “No, never,” he confirmed. My jaw dropped. I was gobsmacked.

So My Darling B checked it out from the local library and we watched it last night after dinner. You know what? It’s still a pretty good movie. I wish we had a bigger screen to watch it on, because a lot of the atmosphere that comes across from a big movie screen gets lost when the picture’s shrunk down to a nineteen-inch television screen. The scene where Kane is hanging from a rope in the egg chamber of the alien ship, for instance, made me gape and gasp when I saw it on a proper movie theater screen. I’m pretty sure it still would. When I saw it this time, I desperately wanted to shove my face right up against the television screen but was afraid the others would find that a teensy bit rude.

And I have more reservations about believability. I didn’t used to, and I don’t know where I got it. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon now, but I just don’t believe some of the really crazy stuff any more, like when the alien goes from being a little worm to a full-size monster in a couple of hours, or maybe it was as long as a day. Either way, it wasn’t enough time for him to do that, and where’d he find anything he could eat so he could grow that big? It didn’t make any sense to me.

Also, why couldn’t anybody on that ship remember to close a door behind them? Were these people brought up in a barn?

“Hey, the facehugger’s not on Kane’s face any more! Where could it be?”

“Let’s go in and look for it.”

“Shouldn’t we close the door behind us?”

“Naw, I wouldn’t worry about that. It wouldn’t go scrambling out into the hallway to get away.”

“Oh, okay.”

Then near the end of the movie when Ripley goes down to get the shuttle, she leaves the door open behind her, as if there isn’t a giant killer alien roaming the ship looking for her. That drove me nuts! But I guess that’s exactly what it was supposed to do. And the alien wouldn’t have been able to hide in the shuttle if she hadn’t.

I think Sean liked it, and we all had a good time watching it again, although I think Tim was just a little annoyed by the audience participation. Some of us couldn’t stop ourselves from yelling “Don’t go in there!” or giving Sean a poke at just the right time, which did sort of ruin the suspense, but it was family movie night and those kinds of things are more or less a given. Maybe we should have saved the MST3K stuff for when we watch Prometheus at some family movie night in the future.