Very Big Letdown

Rating: 4/10 (20 November 2012)

Okay, I expected more out of Ridley Scott and this latest installment of Aliens. So expectations lead to disappointments. If this was some low budget film by a second string director, I might have been slightly more charitable, but not much more. The movie could have been so much better with a better plot and characters.
For positives, it had great sets, visuals and location shots. They also had a pretty good set of actors. Michael Fassbender as David the Android was by far the best actor role set. It also had a decent but no original pansperia, life originating from another planet, plot element. It was certainly a far better film than the execrable "Mission to Mars" by the execrable Brian De Palma. It also floated out some intelligent ideas and concepts that weren't directly answered
But these are the parts that made the film bite. First two men get stranded in the dig when the rest of the crew had to high tail it back to the ship when a big storm blew in. These are supposed to be a couple of wimps who got scared when they found the dead aliens' bodies. So they end up taking refuge in the creepiest chamber they found, the temple room full of black goo and those creepy vases that are supposed to contain baby aliens. So one of them sees this ugly heinous looking creature swimming in the black goo on the floor. So they start cooing at it like it was a cute golden retriever puppy, trying to pet it. Even if looked like a cute puppy, any alien life form has to be treated with the utmost care and suspicion; if for nothing else contamination. Naturally bad things happen to them. It reminds me of a cheap horror movies where the next set of victims decide to take a stroll in some dark creepy place so the slasher or monster can have an easier time killing them off.
The worst part was when after David the android got one of the aliens implanted into our lead Scientist, Elizabeth Shaw. She gets away and gets in some auto surgery medical pod to get this terrible thing removed. So the machine gets it out of her. And she immediately gets dressed and goes to confront the mission leader, Meredith Vickers. She doesn't tell anyone about this horrible incident and horrible creature, which she left partially neutralized inside the medical pod. I mean after such a horrific event, if some one wasn't struck down by shock, they would at least tell some one, especially the mission leader and ship's captain. Okay, part of the plot was that the people involved were not unified and many had their own agenda. But Shaw was the de facto leader of the expedition. Later on, that monster, without eating anything, managed to grow in size about a 100 fold in less than a day.
I don't mind a movie recycling past elements, but from other movies, like the Fifield into the man-spider thing like from the Carpenter's "The Thing". There were just too many dumb characters, dumb moves, like trying to run from a ring shaped ship that is rolling on its side like a wheel by running down the track it is bound to roll on instead of cutting to one side or the other. We deserved better and Sir Scott let us down