Forgettable

Rating: 4/10 (4 August 2017)

Hollywood seems to have pretty much given up about story telling. They are completely unable to produce anything original at this point. All we get are endless remakes, rehashes, reboots, and sequels.
This latest entry in the Alien saga proves the point: There is nothing here which you haven't seen before, it's all just a rehash of elements from the previous Alien movies plus standard horror movie jump scares and gore. It's derivative, bland, boring, forgettable.
The original Alien movie was famous for its chest-buster scene, so you put in another chest-buster scene plus you add a back-buster scene? Really? That's the most creative thing you could come up with?
There could have been a lot of interesting ideas to explore around the concept of the xenomorph as "the perfect organism". Alas, none of that happened.
Where are the memorable and likable characters? Where is the character development? Where is the slow build-up of tension? Where are the original ideas to fight the (seemingly) invincible alien? Where are the interesting and relevant dialogues?
Finally, two more points:

What made me originally interested in this movie was the end of Prometheus, where it was hinted that we would finally find out more about the Engineers. However, in this one they killed all the Engineers before the movie even started! What a disappointment and a waste of potential.

As another reviewer pointed out, it's actually a pity that movie makers these days feel they have to explain everything that was left untold in the classics. In the original Alien movie, the alien was some mysterious creature from outer space. Nobody knew exactly what it was or where it came from. That was part of its fascination. Now we had everything explained, we've seen the alien from every angle, and as a result it feels much smaller and less significant.