dwmarch August 16 Share August 16 (edited) For no reason I am aware of, Canada gets movies a day before the US release so I saw this today. I'll spoiler code my review until tomorrow. Long story short: I liked it but did not love it and I certainly have some nitpicking to do. Edit: removed spoiler tag as of Aug 16th. This was probably particular to my theater but I found the audio to be muddy and thus I think I may have missed some important dialogue. I'm not sure why these youngsters have access to their own spaceship. It's a mining ship from what I have read but what is their basis for just taking off in it? Or is it supposed to be capable of interstellar travel as soon as you put some cryo pods in it? That is like saying a bulldozer can fly to space if you just put a rocket engine on the back of it. And I guess that might technically be true but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. The movie doesn't really explain why Andy's damaged old model of synthetic (or artificial person) behaves like a human with a developmental disability. But I get that it was so we would feel sympathy for him and so it would add to the effect when he puts that upgrade chip in. So W-Y captured Big Chap, lasered him out of his cocoon (perfectly, because the laser knew exactly when to stop cutting) and then had no plan for handling him once he woke up? Also, "we thawed this thing out and it totally fucked us up" would have been nice to actually see in the movie. Also, why was Big Chap hanging from the ceiling like a monument? Because we are watching them explore the station basically in real time, we have a chestburster that gestates in about ten minutes. We could have had a line in the movie to explain this, saying that W-Y was playing with shortening their reproductive cycle because reasons. But no, these Xenos go from facehugger to chestburster to full grown in less than an hour. I also have to take issue with anyone surviving that facehugger attack. Every single character should have been grabbed in that scene and again in the later scene where they are trying to be sneaky. Not sure why the Xeno in the elevator shaft was courteous enough to catch Rain and just snarl at her until Andy could come to the rescue. Also not sure what Rain's plan was in shooting some Xenos to get the acid rain happening. It's not a great plan. We can't open the door so let's just melt things at random. Watching them dodge Xeno blood in zero-g was cool though. I'm disappointed that we got a nest but no queen. I kind of wish this franchise would stop trying to make things that are like a Xenomorph but deadlier except not. The Engineer-thing that appeared at the end was really weird but didn't really seem to be any deadlier than a Xeno of any kind would have been in the same place. Anyhow, that's a lot of criticism for a movie that I would say I actually did enjoy and am happy to have seen on opening day. The movie is gorgeous and is probably best enjoyed on the biggest screen you can find. I also appreciated that when the Romulus station crashed into the asteroid belt, it spent the next half hour or so slowly getting blown apart instead of just one big boom. It occurs to me that this movie also ties a nice bow on why W-Y was so mad at Ripley for destroying Company equipment after they found her in Aliens! Edited August 16 by dwmarch 3 Link to comment
Palimelon August 16 Share August 16 Many reviews are saying it's the best movie in the franchise since Aliens, but that isn't exactly the highest bar to clear. 1 1 1 Link to comment
peridot August 17 Share August 17 I couldn't believe the Company is basically enslaving people to work for them until they die. Silly me, I thought Rain would be free to go after filling her quota. I surprised that the humans keep treating the synthetics like shit. They really think the synthetics won't get back at them someway? I had a hard time understanding the dialogue, it may have been the accents though. I was interested in seeing what the shot would do to the pregnant lady. I was expecting to see something like the creature from Alien Resurrection, not a psuedo-Engineer from Prometheus. When they showed the "leakage" from the pregnant lady, I honestly thought the creature came back to breastfeed from her. I'm so glad it didn't go that way! 1 Link to comment
krankydoodle August 24 Share August 24 On 8/17/2024 at 3:16 PM, peridot said: When they showed the "leakage" from the pregnant lady, I honestly thought the creature came back to breastfeed from her. I'm so glad it didn't go that way! I thought that was what happened. We don't see it explicitly--thankfully--but that seemed to be the implication. I thought this was pretty soild, but agree with a lot of the issues @dwmarch listed. I wish the movie had spent a little more time with the characters on the colony at the beginning. And I didn't like some of the callbacks. The bitch line felt particularly forced, especially coming from that character. I also don't love the return of the black goo. Link to comment
millennium Tuesday at 12:07 AM Share Tuesday at 12:07 AM (edited) This movie sucked, and it sucked hard. Aliens aren't frightening anymore. The face-grabbers skittering across the floor ... yawn (actually you probably shouldn't yawn in the presence of face-grabbers). The trademark way they slowly unfold from the rafters had me looking at my watch (that's just an expression -- I don't wear a watch). The evil/not evil androids are still British and boring. The cast is entirely unknowns (which in the right hands can be a good thing) and they all lack charisma/gravitas. Could be due to their youth. There's no Sigourney Weaver here, no John Hurt, no Yaphet Kotto, no Michael Biehn, no ... well, you get the idea. A big deal has been made about the final creature, but why I don't know. There was nothing menacing or scary about it. It looked like a carnival prop. The story itself was shamelessly derivative -- humans go poking around a derelict ship, accidentally awaken the dormant aliens there, go on the run, lots of darkness, steel walkways and dripping goo. We've seen it so many times before. Speaking of which, the writers even rubbed our noses in it by having one character say, "Get away from her ... you bitch!" I shit you not, they used that line. The fact that this movie did so well attests to the fact that good movies aren't being made anymore, so people will pay in the hopes of recapturing some shred of nostalgia from the past. Seriously, this movie was BAD. Edited Tuesday at 12:11 AM by millennium Link to comment
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