Alien review continued:

What’s interesting about the writing in alien is it manages to have all the pieces of a proper screenplay but somehow fuck it up. Here’s just one example:

There’s a plot development where the alien gets bigger and more dangerous. And that’s a great piece of escalating tension. However, the way they decide to reveal this to the audience is the characters split up, prioritizing the safety of a house cat over the safety of themselves. It’s revealed after what felt like 40 minutes of a guy walking around a dirty rusty room (even stopping for a bit to take a shower in dirty run off water) that the alien got bigger because he gets killed by it. A great piece of development executed with contrived reasoning and logic.

And before the midwits come and say, “Omg, characters don’t have to act like perfect logical beings to be interesting or well written!” That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is the characters aren’t acting realistically based off of the established threat in the film nor their established character development. Just imagine, this alien, despite being tiny has killed one of your crew mates and you’re just gonna go off by yourself, looking for a cat? And a crew of professional miners are going to allow this? And in fact, encourage this? In potentially dangerous work environments (like deep space mining) you never go anywhere alone and that’s without a hostile alien threat being around. How can I take any of his character actions seriously? The character wasn’t established to care much about the cat to begin with, so I can’t justify his behaviors that way either. It’s just bad writing.

To be fair, a lot of movies do stuff like this especially horror movies. But for an American classic that sits among the highest rated films on IMDb, I expect better.