Alien Origins Exposed in Bleak and Joyless Film

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2017)

What a slog. Opening night, and not many in the audience. The Alien franchise is getting a little long in the tooth. If you thought Prometheus was oversold and underdeveloped, well ... it gets quite a bit worse.
The once-visionary Ridley Scott tries to mash every high concept from both his Alien and Blade Runner universes, and yet nothing congeals. So concerned with promoting his "new" xenomorph, he overexposes it with poorly-filmed sequences and truly regrettable computer graphics. We never get to know a fraction of the too-large cast, and their viciously gruesome deaths leave us feeling numb and hollow. James Cameron created characters out of entire squadron of space marines; Scott can barely get us to cheer for a pair of ill-fated colonists.
Bludgeoned is really the right word here. The audience gets battered by the gore and goo, yes, but also by the uninventive idea that an android would seek vengeance on its creator. And the logic of the plan is shaky at best. David (the android from Prometheus) unleashes the black goo on the Engineers, and rather than spread their DNA as it did in Prometheus, now it burns them like volcanic ash. David clearly could have used the ship and the remaining weaponized sludge to destroy humanity on Earth, but instead he stays and tinkers with the substance, miraculously landing on the facehugger egg form (yet with no creature permutation to lay it).
In short, it's a film that asks a lot of the viewer, yet gives so little in return.