Fassbending - the movie

Rating: 3/10 (25 September 2017)

I saw this movie for free on a flight recently and I had been not really excited to see it after hearing the reviews. I am actually a big fan of the Alien series, but mostly due to the art of Giger and his alien designs. For me the main issue I have with this film is the lack of focus on the Aliens and making the cyborg/ synthetic human the main character of the film, as was similar in Prometheus. Fassbender's character gets extremely pretentious and annoying quickly from the stupid introduction of the film and it gets worse from there.
The rest of the cast feels shallow and most are there as fodder / food for the aliens without much for the audience to connect to or care about. They stupidly walk into a series of increasingly bad choices and expectedly get killed without much of a ho hum from me. I would have loved to see a better character similar to Ripley or Hicks who can emerge as totally basass characters or just something relate-able. Here it feels like the only character the director cared about was Fassbender's.
The whole good robot/ bad robot dichotomy just did not work for me at all and I was perplexed they couldn't be bothered to think of a better plot. So we get lame drawn out scenes of the robot guys (both are played by Fassbender) talking to each other and musing about art and music and boring crap that doesn't really belong in a film like this.
To me the plot was trying too hard to explain that the aliens were created by David or something, which really ruined the mythos of the movies for me. From the first film, we get these mysterious clues to what the race of the 'space jockey' aliens may have been and that they encountered the dangerous xenomorphs - but now I guess the navigators were human type beings who ended up being infected by the black goop from the Prometheus movie and delivered by the cyborg David or whatever. Boring! Why did we have to explain away the origin of the Aliens? It would have been much more interesting to keep them as a force of nature, not something to be controlled and fathered and evolved from a juvenile plot twist.
Last I have to harp on the look of the aliens. Again, what happened here? Seems like they wanted to move far away from Giger's designs and we get these very stupid looking aliens with smooth human-like skin and personality traits like having a cyborg dad that can command them (wtf?). Really the only thing I thought was kind of cool was the lab Fassbender's character had setup to test on previous crew members and experiment on alien species with some good artwork and creepy settings that I feel the movie needed way more of as a horror flick.
Summary - bad plot focused on the wrong crap, they should have used an idea from the Alien comics series by Darkhorse where there is a wealth of better concepts and SOMETHING DIFFERENT, instead of trying to re-tell the same 'land on alien planet, unprepared' shtick with less likable characters.