Somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 4/10 (24 July 2018)

Each individual element of this movie is decent to great so I'm trying to figure out if there's one department/position to blame for this movie The writers also wrote for Deadpool. The producers also produced moderate-very successful films. The actors clearly did the best job they could for what they were given. The only conclusion I can come to is that the director couldn't bring it all together which is why it's such a disappointing film. I may be wrong but later on I'll be referring to that.
I binged watched all the movies in the Alien series the day before watching this, so I'm sure I'm used to a standard that isn't fair to judge other movies by. I tried to step back and be objective so that's why I went with 4 Stars. The visuals are stunning, the alien in this film looks pretty and scary at the same time. It moves in a way that seems realistic and the actors reactions to it are spot on. The cinematography, especially at the beginning, was great. The dialogue was a bit weak, and so was the plot but I get the feeling someone near the top or in a board room wanted this to be the modern day alien so they had to do things a certain way.
Anyway! On to the film's story!
I am good at suspending my disbelief, so usually I can roll with films taking artistic liberty with science. I'm also a nerd though so in the back of my mind I'm always thinking about what would have actually happened. So it really concerned me that right off the bat the movie decided to tell me that this was not going to be Sci-fi/horror, but more thriller/horror set in a typical watered down Hollywood version of space. This happened before the Title displayed when Ryan Reynolds caught the probe at the beginning. They used fuel to try to match the out of control probe, which is an issue they face later so props for continuity from the writers, but it's still coming in at an incredibly fast speed. I can overlook the fact there's no way that arm could have snagged it with no damage or it breaking off. I can't overlook the fact though they are in orbit and a force like that transferred to the station would have pushed it out of Reynolds orbit who was seemingly untethered. Even if he was the recoil probably should have killed him or made the line snap. That could have been a good way to justify the unnecessary plot of an out of control probe and have some actual consequence early on. Instead it just makes Reynolds seem awesome and makes you immediately like his character better than all the others.
So I changed my perspective and tried to look at it from a different angle. The film contradicted itself though by pushing scientific jargon, especially during the scenes where they're describing the organism and trying to reanimate it, so I was never able to reconcile that new perspective. I'm not sure why they stopped looking at samples after they found the first cell, or why after documenting it - the first "test" they did was attempting to bring it back to life to prove that life existed somewhere besides earth. They found the cell, it wasn't terrestrial, that was all the proof they needed. Anyway I attempted to suspended my disbelief yet again, and then these super qualified people are all ok with how exponentially this being grows. The cells are multiplying at an insane rate to grow the way it does when it dances and the biologist becomes friends with it. No one bats an eye...
Instead of robotic hands (on a station with what I assume are hologram capable screens/tablets) to handle the alien they're using community college grade lab equipment with rubber gloves. There is only one door into the "firewall" area which means no way to decontaminate anyone going in or out or keep out potential hazards which would easily be accomplished with a second door.. There is no way the cdc signed off on any of that. There is no action or true wonder going on because from the trailers and description this is not a feel good movie. It's not interesting to see a grown man pretend to be friends with a tiny cgi dancing alien. So those glaring mistakes are what I thought about during these pointless scenes.
The only character innately likeable and with any common sense is Reynolds' character, and in near 4th wall breaking logic (since everything up to this point has suggested the characters aren't too keen on using logic) he tells the scientists he's a glorified plumber and not qualified to be around the alien in a quarantine lab after one of the scientists misses a safety check. I thought certainly at this point more of this would follow and it might be somewhat comical. However, no other characters have this common sense except the Russian girl and jake Gyllenhaal when the plot calls for it. The only character I sort of liked was the first to die so now I don't have a horse in this race. I don't want to pull for the alien because he killed the little interest I had in the movie at that point, so now I'm just watching to see what happens with 0 emotional attachment to any of the other characters.
On another note, when things take a turn for the worse it is insane to think somehow it could know to break the mini cattle prod to puncture a hole in the gloves... that's using tools which isn't something an organism that's a small collection of cells should be capable of alien or not... but that's what we're expected to believe...
One by one the crew are all killed by the alien. I will admit the Russian girl drowning in a space suit while out in space was pretty interesting and not something I had ever seen before. Props to them for that! The deaths become less and less interesting after that though. There were so many establishing scenes of why we should care about these characters, a guy unable to walk given freedom of movement in space, a new father, a war doctor who hates earth because of all the horrible stuff he saw... and yet the only connection I felt with one of them was when Reynolds' character was frightened and said he missed his dog... It was the only one that felt like it wasn't being forced down our throats and wasn't made up for us to pity him for the sake of the plot.
The middle part of the film was, for lack of a better word, mind numbing. I felt like I was on auto pilot seeing what malfunction or mistake would happen that would let the alien have another chance to kill them. I get that's the movie but I think if all they wanted to do was have an alien kill it's victims the same way over and over they could of just had them all walk in the quarantine zone 1 by 1 toward the beginning and saved us an hour.
The ending was predictable but came about in a weird way. Like the way they came up with the idea to give the aliens in Independence Day a computer virus from the dad saying "catch a cold", Gyllenhaal reads goodnight moon, says goodnight air, then comes up with a plan to have the alien follow torches for heat into an escape pod that he plans to fly out into deep space while the girl escapes to earth. It works perfectly except you are shown one subtle hint that is quickly dismissed by the film as a small scare like the girl might die on rentry. Only to find out, no, actually the monster manually reentered the atmosphere by piloting the escape pod in such a way at the perfect angle that it didn't disentegrate, and the girl was the one somehow flying into deep space on automatic after bumping into a solar panel.
The monster gets loose on earth and sets up Life 2. Honestly, I don't know how there was a life 1 because if an alien species is smart enough to know how to sabotage communications on a ship alien to them and how to use tools and how to FLY alien ships then surely the species would have been smart enough to create civilization and have technology and be able to build a ship and not get stuck on mars in the first place...

So as I said in the header, individually the parts range from decent to fantastic, but the director somehow failed to bring them together to make them even equal their sum. Finishing this movie I felt like my intelligence had been insulted especially after all the bull**** I was expected to suspend my disbelief for. I can't even say this is one of those movies so bad it's good because it's such a phoned in typical Hollywood film they knew people would go see it. There's no heart from (I'm assuming) the director in this movie and it's pretty sad.
The visual effects were amazing, the sound/music wasn't too memorable or even that scary but it wasn't bad by any means. I'm sure they had the budget for it, but you can tell a lot of people behind the scenes worked really hard on this. I feel bad for them.