So I saw this finally the other night and I needed a bit to think about the movie.
The first 25 minutes of the movie are great, maybe even trim that down to the first 10-15 because the moment the Captain of a huge important mission decides they are going to divert to some shitty signal, then they do and everyone becomes suddenly way more stupid than Prometheus's crew. The main moment when I really just hanged my hat on the proverbial hook and clocked out, is when they go on an exoplanet like that with no space suits, Prometheus's crew did this until the who scene with sensors and Shaw's Boyfriend/husband.
The smart thing to do here would be to show the fallacy of technology in a strange place, IE people taking their helmets off in a foreign atmosphere has serious consequences, like oh I don't know maybe just melting like they just opened the ark of the covenant? I mean you could kill two crew members, shoot kubrickian longshots of people gruesomely dying with practical effects, shoot a scene where everyone awkwardly deals with what just happened. That's just me though.
Here let's just stroll on a random planet, and then oh my god. I've Got To Take A Piss Trope guy shows up, along with bingo card ladies and gentlemen, being an elite military soldier who decides to leave his sole objective alone to "take a piss" smoke a cigarette, wander around like a stoned buffoon then sit on a log stepping on some gross alien egg like things that spawn something that is somewhere between what I read in the begining of David Sphaits original draft for Prometheus, insect-like nanomachine black goo that can fly into the ear and infect the individual with...something. The worst part though, is that they get to the Downed juggernaut in this, and one of the military guys just pokes the weird spores because why the fuck not.
Like why are these Delta Force dudes so dumb. Why are all these supposed super scientists so dumb, why the fuck do they stop and follow the weird lone cultist looking dude who turns out to be David the android. Why does Walter have super healing powers when none of the other Androids in the series have had that. I will say Walter has a great actor doing a cool Seegson synthetic like voice, and the bit with the flute was... like on some level I get what they were going for with highlighting the philosophical differences between the two, while highlight the dichotomy in design that is a vast sea of diference compared to David. The whole part where Walter said they didn't like his series because they were too human, too "unpredictable" which basically meant to me, prone to malfunction and free thinking. Which is kind of interesting because it hits on some of those ideas of creation and consciousness, creation and creator. Cool subtext that isn't handled in a great way, because...jesus you teach him to play a flute, I mean he could of handled that in any other way but teaching walter to play the flute as a way to illustrate that if Walter had not been shown, he would never have bothered to learn and is incapable free speech or thought. This highlights why David is kind of dangerous.
I took a lot of David experimenting as him not necessarily designing the Xenomorph because all the eggs look different. The facehugger itself looks different in design and there are discrepancies in the xenomoprh design as well. That said have some actual Giger art in the background was... cool I guess but I think if you really wanted to mine or homage old concept for a prequel, why not take design cues from the stuff that changed or didn't get added in? I mean the original facehugger design went through several changes, it wouldn't surprise me if something like the two precursors looked like these two designs:
But that is what someone smart would do.
What Ridley ends up doing is just... I don't know, and the dark ending ends up being comically stupid because no one notices that Walter's cuts suddenly don't heal.
Then it really starts to sink in for me personally how much Alien:Isolation felt like an extension of the universe, and this feels like a man who doesn't understand the aesthetics or universe or creature at all. The 20 Hour experimental interactive Alien movie you never knew you wanted is what Alien:Isolation is.
I mean, the aesthetics don't really mesh at all, I don't even feel like they fit in with Alien's world when compared to the amount of work that went into create Sevastopol.
This is a man literally just making movies he wants to make, fan wank, fan fiction with a huge budget and the IP that got away.
I honestly hope the Bladerunner sequel turns out okay, because it would be a shame for that to tarnish the legacy of the franchise.
That said I somehow find myself morbidly having enjoyed simply seeing how stupid people could be for two hours.
I was astonished.
