Alien Romolamadingdong....
Right, y'all know me - love the first two, but Alien is on rotation for my favourite film of all. So I bring goodwill but trepidation to any new entry. I'm gonna be fair but thorough, and I'll need to use the spoiler thingy.
It's a very, very mixed bag for me and comes out 60/40 - there's some of it I like a lot, and some of it I really, really don't.
The good - it looks terrific, you're right back in the 70's/80's aesthetic, the ships are miniatures and it shows, props are great, wardrobe, physical effects - all really good. Cinematography is excellent, there's some wonderful scenes and not just the sweeping space shots. I was a bit worried about the cast but they're all fine actually and do feel like a bunch of roughneck space kids. Cailee Spaeny is a sympathetic lead (and far more likeable than Rapace and Waterstone's awful turn as Ripley proxies). Archie Renuax works well as our 'Dallas' for this, a likeable skipper who gets out of his depth real quick. Isabela Merced I really liked as the terrified 'Lambert' type, thought she played it really well. However, the standout is David Johnson as Andy - if you're wavering on seeing this, his performance alone is worth the price of a ticket.
It opens really nicely and sets the film up well, does enough world building for you to buy into the gang and their plight due to the grim crushing rule of WY. It's tense and ratchets up the action for the most part really effectively.
There is a also some nifty use of zero G which is new for the franchise, and also a very effective new stage in the creature's life cycle. There's also some quite neat member berries, some of which are very subtle, however some are right on the nose and that starts to become a problem. And there we get to the bad, and the bad is really bad....
So there it is. It's not a great film, its not a terrible one either. It's a frustrating flim, and actually as I've thought about it while wrting all this tripe, I'm thinking that the starting point for this movie is simply an Alien knocking 7 bells out of a Weyland Yutani space station and its arrogant boffins and suits... and I kind of wanna see that film.
Right, y'all know me - love the first two, but Alien is on rotation for my favourite film of all. So I bring goodwill but trepidation to any new entry. I'm gonna be fair but thorough, and I'll need to use the spoiler thingy.
It's a very, very mixed bag for me and comes out 60/40 - there's some of it I like a lot, and some of it I really, really don't.
The good - it looks terrific, you're right back in the 70's/80's aesthetic, the ships are miniatures and it shows, props are great, wardrobe, physical effects - all really good. Cinematography is excellent, there's some wonderful scenes and not just the sweeping space shots. I was a bit worried about the cast but they're all fine actually and do feel like a bunch of roughneck space kids. Cailee Spaeny is a sympathetic lead (and far more likeable than Rapace and Waterstone's awful turn as Ripley proxies). Archie Renuax works well as our 'Dallas' for this, a likeable skipper who gets out of his depth real quick. Isabela Merced I really liked as the terrified 'Lambert' type, thought she played it really well. However, the standout is David Johnson as Andy - if you're wavering on seeing this, his performance alone is worth the price of a ticket.
He has to play this at two tones due to a plot device and he does both brilliantly
The facehugger chases are brill, and there's a very cool scene where they need to stealthily move through a passageway full of 'em which is excellent
Right let's deal with the xeno in the room. The ending - it's 'kin awful. It's a rubbish idea that makes no sense and is completely unnecessary. You could have achieved the same climactic battle with a slightly upgraded xeno, a queen, or just a standard bug. The engineer/human/xeno hybrid CGI looks terrible and the growth of the creature makes no sense at all, and this has become a real problem in the franchise. Implants gestate aliens in minutes now, and xenos go from birth to killer critters in similar time frames - and with the 'offspring' it makes no biological sense to have a creature go from an infant to a 10 foot tall killing machine in the time it takes to boil a kettle.
Next, the droid in the room. They've brought back Ian Holm as an Ash variant using AI and an old animatronic from his LOTR days, and it's really distracting, it looks cheap, and odd and very uncanny. And it's a shame cos there's a couple of points where it does work, maybe its a budget thing.
Now both of these things contribue to my biggest issue with this. It feels like a really missed opportunity. New crew, new setup and the chance to do a stripped down, haunted house, stalker Alien film, and for a while they almost pull it off, but by jamming in too much fan/lore service, particularly to the prequels they end up overreaching completely. There's little irritations; the theme from Prometheus cuts in at an exposition point and its so on the nose I just groaned. And a piece of recycled iconic dialogue that falls completly flat and just annoyed me, especially as its said by Andy.
And as I'm typing this, all the other non-sequiters that I probably would have forgiven are starting to creep back into my mind - I've got a feeling I'm going to dislike this film more as time goes on (as I did with Prometheus), which is a real shame as there's much to like and they almost put in a very solid entry.
Next, the droid in the room. They've brought back Ian Holm as an Ash variant using AI and an old animatronic from his LOTR days, and it's really distracting, it looks cheap, and odd and very uncanny. And it's a shame cos there's a couple of points where it does work, maybe its a budget thing.
Now both of these things contribue to my biggest issue with this. It feels like a really missed opportunity. New crew, new setup and the chance to do a stripped down, haunted house, stalker Alien film, and for a while they almost pull it off, but by jamming in too much fan/lore service, particularly to the prequels they end up overreaching completely. There's little irritations; the theme from Prometheus cuts in at an exposition point and its so on the nose I just groaned. And a piece of recycled iconic dialogue that falls completly flat and just annoyed me, especially as its said by Andy.
And as I'm typing this, all the other non-sequiters that I probably would have forgiven are starting to creep back into my mind - I've got a feeling I'm going to dislike this film more as time goes on (as I did with Prometheus), which is a real shame as there's much to like and they almost put in a very solid entry.
So there it is. It's not a great film, its not a terrible one either. It's a frustrating flim, and actually as I've thought about it while wrting all this tripe, I'm thinking that the starting point for this movie is simply an Alien knocking 7 bells out of a Weyland Yutani space station and its arrogant boffins and suits... and I kind of wanna see that film.
) CGI character was pathetic, callbacks were a waste of time, and the ending was bloody terrible.
