Written by Louie Fecou
So there’s this space ship filled with comatose Earthlings looking for a new planet to colonise and when they get a distress signal they decide, incredibly, to go check it out, in case it’a a better venue than the one they should be going to, but when they get there things are just wrong and it all goes pear shaped. Cue various alien attacks, some really gory body horror and a sub plot that tries to explain some stuff from Prometheus, in an attempt to reboot the whole franchise.
So let’s look at the positives. The movie looks good, the effects are what you would expect, and Ridley Scott is doing what he does best, world building. Unfortunately there are some real problems with this movie, and most of it comes from the script.
When you find yourself laughing at dialogue in any film, that shouldn’t be laughed at, then you have to ask questions about that dialogue. There’s a Michael Fassbender scene, playing two androids, that plays like an episode of Innuendo Bingo, and other characters are so two dimensional, you find yourself constantly trying to remember who half of them are. That means there are expendables on board that we struggle to care about when they bite the bullet.
The film also has a slow second act that really drags things down, and when we get to, let’s face, what we really want to see, the iconic Alien itself reeking havoc on the space shuttle, it seems too little too late. The Alien itself is so wonderfully CGI’d that it just looks out of sync with past representations. It moves like lightning and is not the hidden hunter picking off hapless astronauts that we loved so much, and that is odd, as the whole film seems to be trying to channel the atmosphere of the original Alien, yet it has none of the charm, creativity or originality of that first outing.
Scenes look so familiar that there are moments when the whole thing looks like a remake, even the titles and music are throwbacks. The final revelation is also so well telegraphed, I wonder if anybody at our viewing didn’t see it coming. It would seem that once again a poor script has diminished what should have been a return to greatness for this franchise.
I had high expectations for this and left the viewing deflated. Maybe I expected too much. I guess a sequel to Prometheus,and a prequel to Alien was always going to be a hard sell. Maybe i’m being a little unfair, but as someone who snuck into a cinema to watch the original Alien, and couldn’t believe what i had witnessed, this modern day re-tread just couldn’t measure up, and really shouldn’t have tried.
Rating: 5 out of 10
