Disappointed

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2012)

While not a disaster, it was hard to view this ambitious attempt to expand the Alien universe as anything but a disappointment.
And maybe it was the ambition itself that this movie tripped over. Trying to juggle too many themes, too many characters (doing amaterishly stupid things in order to move the plot along), even too many monsters without clear and focused connections, it just ended up feeling muddled and disjointed. Characters that you would have liked to get to know, only get a handful of lines. Situations that should have been built up and slowly dragged out to pump up the tension, are instead rushed over. Then other scenes are flashed to that look silly and cheap. Along the way most of the menace and wonder that should have been dripping from a movie like this was just lost, and that was just brutally disappointing. Every 15 minutes or so there would be a shot, an idea, an action that by itself was cool, but more often than not it was brushed over and forgotten about, or simply misplayed if not. Even the creatures created from the ubiquitous black goo felt like they were lacking in menace and imagination. Its very disappointing that we have seen similar creature work before in far less ambitious movies over the years.
As for the big mysteries that people complain this movie raised but did not answer, that did not bother me nearly so much as the mysteries which WERE revealed. The entire Alien universe, which started out so dark and frightening, felt like it was lessened by this movie. The awe of the engineers has been stripped. The curtain was pulled back from what lurks out there in the dark of space, and what lurks behind it just isn't terribly scary after all. They say what scares you in a good horror film is the stuff you DON'T see. Well I think the same thing applied to this movie -- it was the unknown terrors of a hostile universe that tickled the imagination in Alien. Frightening questions that would make you never want to leave home or set foot on an alien planet again. Here our very stupid scientists pop their helmets off to smell the air like they're on vacation, and get to reveal far far too many of the Engineers' secrets, and with the mystery goes the fear.