As a huge Alien fan, I have come away from tonight’s screening actually angry. The sets and practical effects were fantastic, but you barely saw the aliens until the climax to the mid-section of the film.
Bringing back Ian Holm as Rook took some getting used to, especially as some of those shots were off. It seemed to get better as the film progressed. I already have a theory on that one. The credits listed the crew who worked on the Rook animatronic. I wonder if they were displeased with the result and used CGI to cover the face? (Maybe I’m just too angry at the moment 😆)
The visual and audio Easter eggs were annoying, especially when Andy repeated Ripley’s line. My audience laughed, and I was just facepalming by this point.
I think what finally broke the camel’s back was the third act, which links the film to Covenant and Prometheus. I didn’t like those films as hey try to explain the alien’s origins, and now we have to have a fight with a creature that was giving me Alien:Resurrection newborn vibes. Is this Ridley sticking his oar in, as it is his creation?
I’m just so disappointed. After seeing the first two trailers, I thought we were getting something that was going to be really special, a return to form.
Ugh!
I thought it did a lot of things right: it showed the ordinary lives of people struggling to get by in an already dystopian setting before they lob monsters into the mix, it looked fantastic (possibly the best looking Alien film yet and I’m glad I went to the iSense screening) and the design work was top drawer.
And yet… it feels like someone somewhere in the process lost confidence in the project. I’d be interested to know more about the development of the film as it feels like there’s a bold, innovative story lurking somewhere in the heart if this but some studio executive felt there weren’t enough Easter eggs to keep the diehard fans happy (I count myself amongst them) and gave thr script to his 14 year-old son to scribble fanboy notes into the margins. It might not have happened like that but I hate to think that an adult professional filmmaker thought it was a good idea to sprinkle in the kind of heavy-handed references to previous films that would be embarrassing if you read it in fan-fiction.
That’s not to say I hated it, I’d rank it as the fourth, possibly even third, best Alien movie although that might be damning it with faint praise - the things I liked about it, I liked a lot and they made-up the bulk of the movie. Unfortunately, it’s chance at greatness was sabotaged by some very poor decision-making when it came down to a handful of scenes. I’d definitely like to see Alvarez get another shot at something in this fictional universe as, if nothing else, they’ve scraped the barrel empty when it comes to iconic scenes and lines from the first two films. I hope.