I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2012)

Well, back to it again – there's no hope for humanity, as usual only luck can save us from this foreign object. This looks like being a series of prequels to Alien, now delivered digitally so absolutely no laughs for cinema audiences at animatronic dicks being pulled across dinner tables. It's impressive on TV, I would have been bowled over at the pictures – and left doubly depressed too.
This is a tale of a multi-trillion dollar spaceship being carelessly fitted out with a disparate set of lacksadaisical opaque people to find the potential creators of the human race. They find a planet where they expected it and instantly hit on a likely looking alien structure to investigate. It's an intersection of Forbidden Planet, Silent Running, Alien, and Mission To Mars, and at this stage I'm not sure which I prefer. I had to suspend belief in that people were still smoking in 2093, bozos were blithely marching into sinister dark and damp alien spaceship interiors without any cares, and that the Isle Of Skye was not an island made entirely of spent uranium and tarmac. It's hugely impressive and superficial at the same time, so much happens and it seems to say less than Alien did. Favorite bits: the glimpses of the olde film Lawrence Of Arabia with the late great actor Harry Fowler; if it hadn't been so nail-bitingly gruesome I could have laughed at the New Ripley speed abortion, and that she could still do all the acrobatics afterwards; the 3D mapping of the alien structure, although it reminded me of the Great Pyramid I had feared a Close Encounters remix; the Grecian marble-like creators; the  nod to the original robot decapitation; the eye-cutting cgi cartoonery creating a soulless world populated by soulless people; really being quite pleased that nearly all of the characterless characters had bitten the dust.
Hardly any of us know how to make a 5 minute film up to Melies standards, nevertheless most of us are film experts. Some of us only have opinions: this was a cold film which was very enjoyable and very forgettable.