Visually resplendent but messy

Rating: Null/10 (4 June 2020)

This film was an interesting attempt at a prequel to the Alien series but it fell short of the mark. The themes were too heavy handed and tried too hard to sound profound. It dwelled heavily on the idea of creation but most of this was cribbed from laughable Ancient Astronauts hypotheses from the 1970s that are now seen as insensitive ("your ancestors were too stupid to make this by themselves, aliens must have helped them"). The identity of the Space Jockey was super disappointing - wow, it's a big bald white guy. What kind of alien is that? I can see those on Earth. It was better as a mystery or at least make it look elephantine like the original Alien (1979) implies. The story was super messy and so many things were unexplained or disconnected. I won't go into every example, but one of the worst offenders is when a character has a major reaction after an unexplained and unsubtitled conversation in the extinct Proto-Indo-European language. In the entire world, perhaps ten linguistics professors can understand this language, so how is the audience supposed to know what's going on? The team is incredibly stupid and unqualified to the point of disbelief, like breathing and touching everything. There is a fan edit (the "Agent9 edit") that restores a lot of the deleted scenes and it actually makes a lot of sense this way. This shows that the messy story is more the fault of the editor than the director or writers, and I would actually give that full version eight out of ten stars, but I am reviewing the real final theatrical release of this film here and not a hypothetical version, so I have to leave this as a side note. That said, the visual style and quality of this film were amazing. The design, cinematography and effects were all incredibly stunning. Michael Fassbender's performance is perfect and I definitely admired him more as an actor after watching this film. These make up for some of the flaws and bump up my rating a bit, but overall the film is still a mess.