So, what a film. Or actually two films mashed into one. One about Alien and one about something totally different. Commence the rant.
Who wrote this? I love Ridley Scott to death but he should not be the one telling how Alien movies should be written. He is a good film maker if the has a good script but my gooooood can he think of too many bloated ideas for a movie if given the chance. Or, maybe it was the fault of the other writers. *why not both girl.gif*
They should not have asked "Where do the aliens come from?" No one wants to know. Keeping the mystery is better than trying to expose it.
Someone here said it really well, "erosion of mystery"
The gods plot line "you made us, we made the thing that kills you" was not a good metaphor for aliens. It was a good story for another movie entirely. For alien it does not work because that would not be the point of the movies. Treading in horror or suspense is what it should be about, buuuut as we all know a lot about the aliens, it's difficult to make that kind of suspense again. So, they went the wrong route and tried to explain it all. That's why the previous film was called Prometheus to distance itself a bit, but, they still tried the same thing here with more aliens.
Where was the suspense? The first scene with the locked woman had some panic in it but somehow failing in everything due to that panic and blowing yourself up in the process just made me cringe. They tried to convey how a person would act but come on. Treading back and forth from the door and radio. Locking the door for plot to have a gruesome scene, then unlocking so that we can let the chibi-alien out.
What was that sloppy cut reaching for the knife with Walter and David? They did not even try to hide that twist that they had. Showed it plain and simple. "oh, he's David! don't put me in hypersleep" whoop-de-fucking-do Sherlock.
Why did Scott put a short haired Ripley into the movie? To make the audience relate to her as Ripley and assume she's going to survive?
After the Walter-knife-David switcheroo the movie lost a lot of its steam, because you knew the ending and thus stopped rooting for the characters. No matter what, they are going to have that ending where David is in charge of 2000 colonists. It was underlined all too heavily throughout the movie. If there are colonists, bad shit is going to happen to them in this movie. But that suspense was wasted at the last part with that sloppy cut.
They were not scared of the alien at all in the spaceship. Just fairly relaxed and straightforwardly killed it. What on earth was that? Before that not being shit scared of a beast and just hanging from a flying platform trying to kill it with an assault rifle. Too much badass. Less is more. Be scared a bit. Everyone acts so cool except the panicking captains wife in the beginning.
Do you remember the names of the characters besides Tennessee, David and Walter? I don't.
Why was the shower scene ruined already in the trailer. No suspense waiting for that scene when it popped up? It's my fault I saw the trailer but, still. Leave something for the audience to guess.
There were too many not so subtle references to Alien and Aliens. Does every spaceship need the ducks with the waterglasses scene? Nitpicking, I know. But come on! Don't underline nudge nudge wink wink. Let the audiences find the subtleties.
There was just simply too much of everything in this movie. Colonizing planets, human embryos, black goo, ear worms, facehuggers, alien eggs, tiny aliens from the back, old chest aliens, guns, androids going crazy, engineers killed, that simply put, there was no time to build that suspense that I would have wanted. I did not have time to feel scared.
Still, better than Star Wars episodes 1-3.
