Disappointing sums it up

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2012)

First up I admit I am an Alien fan. Even so I wasn't expecting this movie to be "the next big thing", I was only hoping it would be a decent 2 hr escape to fantasy land.
For me there were two very good performances; Fassbender and Theron. Both make their characters intriguing with not much to work with from the script. This would have been a far better film if Theron's character turned out to be the heroine; at least she has presence.
As a lead, Rapace's character is uninspiring (and most certainly no Ripley). The only scene she is in that I enjoyed was the "removal" scene. This, and the scene where the first two scientists are knocked off, are really the only ones that evoke some of the wonderful suspense of Alien.
There are so many plot holes, errors of fact, continuity issues and insufficiently explained scenes that this film is painful and just plain confusing to watch. One other reviewer expressed it perfectly when saying that it's like every few pages they randomly removed a page from the script.
On the plus side the film is wonderfully beautiful; the scenery, sets and props are all fantastic. Which makes it even more tragic that the script is such a let down.
It just feels like the writers decided to slip in any philosophical/religious idea they have ever had then tried to make tenuous connections to Alien. Worse still, as a result, character development is lacking and I genuinely felt no emotional investment in what happened the crew (and I'm a gal that gets sucked in easily).
Frankly it feels as though the film was purely an intellectual exercise, not an artistic one. The sad thing is that the themes the film attempts to explore are interesting, it's just the story is not.