Shabby and forumlaic IQ lowering twaddle

Rating: 2/10 (10 September 2012)

This movie is terrible. Ridley Scott has obviously looked to the other Alien films and made himself a little formula something like this: Balshy female protagonist + android + beheaded android + slime on walls + hidden agenda + stow away alien + pots of Alien goodness + suspense building pings + crew of misfits + exploring alien craft = blockbuster movie.
Unfortunately, no one part of this movie is satisfactory. Character development is so shallow that you find yourself not caring if the love interest turns into a massive wrinkly alien or not. The bog standard stereotypical characters have been lifted from the other Alien films, and you know what, it comes across as though Ridley Scott was actually bored of them.
For an alien film, the lack of actual alien on human action was a bit of a shock. Instead, masses of time is given to dreary dialogue to force facts at the audience. "OH MY GOD it's a ZX Spectrum Surgery Pod thing"... that stood out like a massive sore thumb along with a whole host of other pieces of info that those lacking a brain would need to string the series of images on the screen before them into a story. For the rest of us, it was just tedious and boring.
Holes in the plot... My colander has less holes. It really was utterly formulaic but with very little in the way of story to provide the scaffolding to hang the bits of the formula from.
And really, the sets. I mean, the alien ship was spotless! How many thousand years had it lain there? What's more the air was absolutely crystal clear. On the crew's own ship, again, everything was spotless. For a working vessel there appeared to be no wear or tear. No dirty windows, nothing that might suggest it was actually anything other than a set.
It's this lack of attention to detail that makes me think the movie is nothing more than a 'made-for-tv' type affair.
Thoroughly disappointing - if you have paint, watch it dry instead.