VERY Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (14 May 2017)

The only good thing I can say about this movie was that it tied the prequel(s) into the rest of the Alien universe. But I don't know if it was because I had higher expectations, but this was like, B-grade script-writing. Rushed, predictable plot & unbelievable characters. And oh dear god, the plot holes! I appreciate they had to fit everything in, but why do they still treat movie-goers as idiots? They could have skipped the opening scene, & scattered that saved time throughout the movie, & filled in all these holes, often with a single sentence. But no.
Now the spoilers: Firstly, there are the usual plot holes that you get in EVERY suspenseful movie, yet still annoy me. Nobody reports in when they get called on the radio, even though they have an open channel & JUST have to say "Gimme a sec". Even though they have found the missing guy they were looking for, horribly butchered, & their friends should probably know that something is eating people. Instead they stare around for 30 seconds, & have the gall to sound annoyed at the people trying to find out what is going on. This is about the time everyone starts splitting up, even AFTER they know something is out there killing people. And when they find out what one of their team is killing people, they try & fight/talk it out, rather than yelling into their radio "Hey guys, Bob is killing everyone, so watch out for him. You know, just is case he kills me & I don't get to warn you later". Yes this crap builds suspense, but it is still lazy writing. So anyway, we have a colony ship, crewed by a team which, you have to assume, received a basic psychological profile before leaving Earth. To make sure they were good in a crisis, & not, you know, morons. Their primary mission is to protect the colonists. So after spending a week of flight time on a side-trip to checkout a human signal on some random planet, they immediately send down 90% of their crew, in the middle of a freaking storm which they KNOW could crash the shuttle. No time for extra scans to check for people (consequently missing the ENTIRE ALIEN CITY 5 kms from where they land), no waiting for 24 hours to see if the storm dissipates (which it did). Then while you can still hear the computer doing an atmosphere reading in the background, whoosh - open the door. No spacesuits, no apparent checks for weird bacteria, viruses, or ...I don't know, flying T-Rex's. And they have a robot on board, who is (sorry robots) comparatively expendable, that they could have sent out to check for alien monsters. But no, everybody just traipses of into the uncharted mountains. In the rain. So of course 2 of the guys get infected from alien spores. 1 the guys actually poked the fungal pod, saw the weird spores fly out of it, & INHALED. Inhaled alien spores. Always a winning move. One of the people helping their sick friend back to the ship completely loses it, screaming & panicking. Doesn't help the clearly sick, struggling guy, just runs on ahead yelling at him to hurry. Their comrade locks them both in the medical bay for quarantine (even the non-sick one), even though she helped them both inside & got blood splatter all over her. But as soon as she sees a weird alien life-form in there with them, she gets a gun & opens the door. Because you know - disease dangerous, alien monster & we go in on our own, guns blazing. And in her panicky state, managed to blow up the damn ship. So then they end up in a dead alien city with the sole survivor from the first movie, & after a very basic 'Are we safe here?', even though they are clearly not, make camp. Nobody seems curious about this alien city, full of hundreds of dead aliens, who even allowing for alien decomposing, haven't been dead for long. If they were human bodies, out in the weather like that, you would think several months at most. Nobody even asks their host 'You have been here for 10 years - Do you know what happened here?' Meanwhile, the remaining crew up in the colony ship override ALL safety protocols & take the ship down into the storm, endangering 2000 colonists & the entire mission, just on the CHANCE they can find out what is going on. Even though, as we find out later, they have another shuttle they could take down, & not possibly kill everyone. Back on the planet, basically after that it ends up with everyone getting picked off one by one, because they cleverly all wondered off alone. The climactic fight is on a cargo shuttle (with the same idiot pilot who endangered the ship) swooping around & bouncing into the ground, making it really dramatic, for no apparent reason. No damage mentioned, no weather, so apparently just a really crappy pilot.
So yeah, I gathered going in that it would be very much like the original Alien plot, but heavily disappointed by the terrible script & characters. People rag on Alien3 & Alien: Resurrection, but they were better than this mess by far. If this had been a standard B- grade alien parasite movie, I wouldn't have been nearly as disappointed. But for one of the Alien movies, I expected WAY better