Over-reaching, ambitious and flawed....

Rating: 6/10 (2 June 2012)

Spoiler Alert -------------------------
If one is going to make a movie about exogenesis, I would suggest that more that a couple of hours needs to be dedicated to tell the story.
I left the cinema elated, but with an uneasy feeling that the movie would begin to unravel in my mind as I took time to reflect, like a bad restaurant experience which gets progressively worse as you tell your friends over time.
Let me take some time to list the great bits. It is visually stunning. The space sequences are gorgeous. The star-map is brilliant. The dream-sequence is magical. The 'Space Jockey' is excellently linked to the Alien version. The essential archetypes are all there; an android with a hidden agenda, a bunch of disposable and irritating crew members, a corporate 'droid', perhaps, a egomaniac trillionaire who does not want to die and a resilient heroine.
The lousy bits swamp the movie. The science is hocus-pocus at best. The script is diabolical; people do not behave rationally and do not seem to be motivated logically. Back-stories are started pointlessly; who cares about Shaw's father dying of ebola, by way of example? Events are left hanging as if the film needed to be cut by a blind surgeon to fit the transit time of 60oz cola through the bladder of an average viewer. Did Vickers and Janek get to consummate their brief flirtation? Do we give a damn?
The horror is there.... but somehow diluted and unreal. At one point, whilst Shaw was submitting herself to the aborting scalpel, my wife leaned over and whispered... "The Clawwwwwwww! The Claw is our master." The fake suspense was shattered by the indelible image in my mind of a green, three-eyed alien from Toy Story, popping its head out of Shaw's sliced abdomen. So much for updating the 'chest-bursting' sequence of the original.
I await the corrective action of a 'director's cut'. Nuff said.