I was startled how early this telegraphed it was going to be a stinker. The moment Insecure Religious Man started talking about his insecurities and "following the path as it's laid out before me" oh my god. It actually made Prometheus' "because that's what I believe" scene appear subtle.
Then the crew began subdividing. Leave three on the main ship. Okay good call, makes sense. Leave one back on the drop ship. Um, okay. Now two are stopping midway during their hike. Um, not such a great idea. Now one of the two that stopped are splitting up and you gotta be shitting me. This embraces the whole don't split up cliche from horror movies and takes it to the nth degree.
Then one of the women locks up the other one with the infected guy for...I don't know. She's a horrible person. But she's also uncoordinated, landing flat on her ass and missing shooting the alien. Then she gets another gun and blows up the entire drop ship, setting herself on fire to die a horrible death. I actually started laughing when she came flailing out of the ship. The least coordinated space traveler in science fiction history here, they leave to go on a hike and she blows the place up and is on fire. Bravo! All that's needed is the returning hikers to be carrying a couple of pizza boxes and we could have a recreation of that "what the fuck happened here" .gif.
It's been a long time since I've seen a character fail so much in a film. Someone on the first page mentioned it should have had the Benny Hill theme running through it, and they were spot on. Jesus.
But everyone else is just as dumb. Let's lower the main ship into the storm. Let's go stand on top of a ship to fight the thing that tore through the entire crew. Let's stick my face in this giant egg, when people doing so with aliens on their face are literally plastered all over the wall. Let's be stalking down a dark hallway looking for monsters while the people on your radio are like, "Um, what's up? Hello?" and you don't reply for reasons. I counted four times this happened, and I only started counting midway through the film.
Unlike Prometheus, this was not a visually interesting film. There's no set piece like the alien ship launching sequence near the end that feels like it really builds from anything or has visual impact. Just clumsy one-off scenes that happen for increasingly stupid reasons, and are not well set up or filmed coherently.
Prometheus was dumb and awkward and misguided, but it didn't have the contempt for the audience that this film did. When our hero is stapling David's face back together near the end, I'm sitting there thinking, they told the audience the android self-heals. How does someone in the chain of command of the ship not know that? Holy fucking shit people. I hated the ending to this film more than I have the ability to express.
I set my expectations to "pretty but dumb", aka Prometheus. But I got "not very pretty and it hates you even before you have a chance to hate it back".
