visually seductive, logically inane

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2012)

it is impossible to criticize the thing without revealing key plot points, so i will spare myself the pain. the crew is strictly 2d, with no developed relationships and only one developed character, who WOULD be a robot, who vies with the lead as a better one. alien (same one as watchman's blueboy giant) visits earth in primordial times, seeds it with bits of himself (herself, whatever), and the human species eventually germinates, such as it is. it seems that at some point, same aliens decide to test a biological weapon (the same one that will eventually "evolve" into ridley's original alien) on it. why would they wait billions of years (or a few dozen million, when WAS the turn taken that would lead to thinking species worthy of the term?) to annihilate a species they have copied directly from themselves (dna "match" is posited, a scientific impossibility, even within the context of the film, apart from the puzzling disparity between ourselves and a genetically "identical" species made up of albino giants). p's crew "robot", David, harvests a mysterious bead from the surface of a cone (there are many, some standing upright and active, others stacked like artillery shells, and inert) and proceeds to infect a crew member with it. is he THAT miffed that he can't just fling him at a wall? the shipboard exobiologist, in a first contact, attempts to pet a creature resembling a cobra that emerges from a black primal ooze exuded from said cones and orients itself to him (if an actual cobra, this would be an obvious threat display; however, in deep space, who can resist stroking a slimy, eyeless thing about which nothing is known?), and gets half devoured and entirely transmogrified by it. those crew members who are not transformed into scary monsters find themselves hosting them. roughly three lines are devoted to an issue of faith, which, together with nearly everything else, is never developed. not unlike watching disjointed outtakes from the x files, there is no real story here, even allowing for the fact that this was written as a film intended for a sequel. visually masterful. and worth watching for that reason alone, but i am thinking the writer of lost, the soap opera/x files composite, is probably the reason this thing does just that. it gets lost and it stays that way.