Alien is such a fantastic film… I was entranced by the way the sets on board the Nostromo are just as unfamiliar to the viewer as the sets aboard the alien ship, allowing the xenomorph to blend in among human technology just as easily as it blends in with the Gigeresque machinery it was born from - backgrounding the mirroring of the android and the xenomorph (the way Ash literally tries to kill Ripley by forcing something down her throat!) - until it seems to literally become part of the ship in the climax!

watching Prometheus back-to-back with its predecessor (and in the wake of Ripley’s totally bankrupt rehash of Gladiator, which to disclaim I have yet to see [though I have rewatched the original recently enough to reaffirm its quality]) only highlights how much of a poor man’s version of this that the sequel is. beyond the beat-for-beat reruns of Alien’s iconic plot elements, the heavyhanded themes of creator-meeting-creation seem to serve only to make the original film’s subtext into text - yes, the xenomorph is just like one of man’s own creations.