Don't think I can get all my thoughts down at once. Still collating. (Now watch me type way too much shit).
However, I didn't like it. I just rewatched Prometheus, and I think that's better if only because it had more characters that were somewhat memorable (if not totally stupid), it was prettier to look at, and it had that surgery scene.
Danny McBride decides to risk the entire 2000 colonists and like, 1000 embryos on the chance that his wife is alive. Got it. Then those other two on the ship with him give each other a look and a nod, then proceed to not kick Danny McBride's irresponsible ass off the damn bridge, but go along with his plan. Whew.
Neomorphs sucked. They weren't scary, they weren't cunning, they were just angry bitey scratchy scurry monsters. Might as well have been Godzilla's babies from 1998.
Then comes the xenomorph, which still isn't really the classic design, it lacks the mechanical elements, but whatever. Maybe it will act creepy and intelligent, like a xenomorph should. NOPE. Just a bigger, blacker, angry bitey scrachy scurry monster. How disappointing.
Daniels suddenly became some kind of badass, and it was totally unearned. Ripley had a strength to her in Alien and it was built upon in the sequel (although I thought Ripley taping guns together and succeeding where trained marines failed in Aliens was a little much, but it's an 80s action movie, so whatever). Daniels just grabs a gun, ties herself to the loader, and swings and fights the xenomorph like it's nothing. To make it worse, none of this action is good, and I think we'd have been better served with a creepy approach rather than a half-assed action finale. There was no tension at all when that xeno was on the ship. It was more like a callback/obligation than an actual well-planned and executed sequence.
Speaking of callbacks...Action-Daniels suddenly starts speaking in old Alien lines. "I got you, you son of a bitch." Really? Why? These kind of winks are stupid. Imagery, maybe. Easter eggs, sure. But I can't stand callbacks to classic shit that are just repeated lines. It's like an excuse to write less. This isn't Ripley. Why is she speaking Ripley's words??
I'm frankly surprised, after the neomorphs were chased off by a mere flare, that David didn't say something like, oh, I don't know, "They mostly come at night. Mostly." You know. To explain why the flare affected the neomorphs that way.
There was no subtlety. Imagine if this were the original Alien, made today, by the Ridley Scott of today. Somebody, on camera, would have actually said the words "penis/rape monster". I guarantee it.
Truth be told, I mostly expected this movie to be not good. I was just in it for the David mad scientist stuff. I think it's so stupid that David created the xenomorphs, and of course there's those big plot threads that are just waiting to become holes (in addition to the actual plot holes), but if that's what they were going to do, then let's go.
I came away disappointed. I wanted to see more of David's work. We just saw some Giger rip-off drawings, a corpse or two (yeah, Shaw too), and that's it. I don't go for the torture porn or any of that, but I was hoping to at least get some body horror out of this shit. Like, the one thing that would get me would be to know what the fuck he actually did to Shaw. Oh well. His work was already done. Here's some eggs. Off to the stupid action shit I guess.
I hope the switch wasn't supposed to be a twist. But I imagine Ridley thought so. Maybe in like 10 years he'll go on camera and say that it was actually Walter-turned-evil all along, and add hints into the Final Cut.