Pointless and awful. Guess that makes it awful pointless.

Rating: 1/10 (22 January 2002)

I feel sorry for Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Obviously a talented director with an eye for spectacle, he has been saddled with one of the most hackneyed and downright groan-inducing scripts ever. Basically a haunted house movie set inside a spaceship (two, actually) full of the eponymous Aliens, writer Joss Whedon scraped the bottom of the cliche-barrel, bringing us not-at-all-lame scenes of people wandering down dark hallways and sticking their heads into acid-burned holes for no particularly good reason (other than to be eaten, of course). The movie liberally steals ideas and scenes from Jim Cameron's Aliens, which is okay, I guess, in an incestuous and cannibalistic kind of way. The sets, the characters and the banter are all pale, inept imitations of stuff we've already seen in the series. Too bad they couldn't have stolen a speck of intelligence from the previous three Alien movies.

This is a noisy, ugly and boring movie... but like a train wreck, it's worth seeing, if only to awe in how someone could manage to louse up a movie about shooting aliens and wearing leather pants. But my hat's off to Whedon, Jeunet & co.; they loused it up royally.