Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver all feature, but there’s too little character development and too little dialogue for us to get much of a sense of any of them. Weaver in particular is underused, as if she only had a day available for filming and did it as a favour to the director (Pete Travis).
I was expecting a mind-bending plot twist that never arrived, and overall it’s oddly unsatisfying.
Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, a warrant officer on the cargo ship Nostromo. The ship picks up a signal from a moon, indicating unexpected life. While investigating, the crew accidentally adopt an alien creature that threatens not just all of them but humanity itself.
Weaver is great in the main role – tough but compassionate, and smart and intuitive in a way that her colleagues aren’t.
It works because it’s mostly about the suspense rather than the monsters, although what you do see of the aliens is terrifying enough.
A long line of sequels and prequels would follow as Alien developed into a franchise, but none of them came close to this original.
An academic specialist on serial killers (Sigourney Weaver) lives a life of agoraphobic terror after being attacked by a psycho 13 months previously. But she has to face her worst fears when two San Francisco cops (Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney) seek her help in tracking down a brutal “copycat” killer.
It’s tense and dramatic, and there’s a fairly major twist about two thirds in that I certainly didn’t see coming.
Weaver and Hunter are both excellent, but the latter is particularly strong and brings real depth to the role.
Sci-fi comedy.
The cast of a TV show that's very similar to Star Trek find themselves in a real-life space adventure when their episodes are intercepted by aliens who regard them as “historical documents”.
Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman are all superb as the faded celebrity actors who are required to become their fictional counterparts.
It works as both a satire and an example of a sci-fi story. It's silly and in places very funny.
The cast is superb. Kevin Kline plays Ben Hood, a father of two who’s having an affair with his friend and neighbour’s wife (Sigourney Weaver). Bored and restless, the two couples have troubled children too – perhaps unsurprisingly. Everything comes to a head on one dramatic, frozen night, as the fractures in their marriages and issues relating to the children’s insecurities seem to point towards a horrifying and inevitable conclusion.
It’s harrowing stuff – more so than I remembered from seeing it at the cinema in 1997.
Another disturbing thought: in 2021 we are as far from 1997 as 1997 was from 1973.
An American scholar named Dr. Slaughter (Sigourney Weaver) works for a pro-Arab think tank in London. To supplement her meagre pay, she takes on work as an escort. Even more improbably, she only starts doing this because someone anonymously sends her a videotape about the escort industry. Incredibly, she doesn’t even adopt a fake name. (She might not have minded people knowing about her dual career, but the sexist snobs at her institute surely would have done.) Through this new line of work she meets Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine), a diplomat brokering a peace deal in the Middle East and a man with dangerous enemies.
The disjointed, badly plotted narrative lurches from scene to scene. It hints at a complex web of interconnected threads, but the “big reveal” – when it finally arrives – turns out to be disappointingly simplistic.
Many of the scenes seem to have been invented as an excuse to get Sigourney Weaver to take her clothes off – such as her sitting in the bath and calling in the landlord to tell him that the shower doesn’t work. Yet the film tries to have its cake and eat it by giving her lines about gender equality and being “in control”. You wonder how the iconic star of Alien, Ghostbusters, Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist could possibly have been happy accepting this role.
On the plus side, there’s a certain chemistry between Weaver and Caine. Most of the acting is reasonably strong, and the script avoids cliché. But Half Moon Street falls flat because director Bob Swaim seems unable to handle basic storytelling or plot logic. Instead, he creates a muddled mess that feels both half-baked and exploitative.
Directed by Michael Apted and adapted from Fossey’s own memoir, this (sort-of) biopic is remarkable for its close-ups of the gorillas seeming to interact directly with Weaver. It’s not clear how that was achieved, and I’m not sure I want to know, but the effect of seeing her living so closely with the animals is powerful indeed.
There’s a strong empathy for these critically endangered creatures and there are heartbreaking scenes showing the impact of the poachers.
Weaver gives the performance of a lifetime, expressing great tenderness with the gorillas (and briefly with Bob Campbell, her photographer lover played by Bryan Brown) alongside her increasingly fierce determination to protect the species (going so far as to mimic a witch to scare the locals) – whatever the cost.
It’s both tragic and uplifting. Fossey paid the ultimate price for her commitment, but was able to raise enough awareness to ensure that the gorillas remain protected to this day.
